Kindly Review: The Secret to Giving and Receiving Feedback to Make Your Ideas Great

By Dawn Crawford

Unlock the creative and innovative potential of your team members with a new approach to feedback and review

In Kindly Review: The Secret to Giving and Receiving Feedback to Make Your Ideas Great is a transformative new approach to taking the sting out of the review process and unlocking the innovative and creative power of your teams. You’ll learn to regain control over your work processes, from project start to completion, and get products to the finish line quickly and efficiently.

The author identifies eight “classic” styles of giving feedback and contrasts them with the effective Kind Review process, a system for creating respectful, collaborative, and innovative working environments. You’ll find:

• Strategies for gathering, receiving, and giving feedback respectfully, productively, and kindly
• The reasons why receiving feedback can be so painful in the first place, and ways to reduce the emotional impact of critical and negative responses
• A comprehensive model for respectful workplace collaboration with team review and feedback at its foundation

A can’t-miss roadmap to unlocking freedom, creativity, and innovation amongst your team members, Kindly Review belongs on the bookshelves of leader at for-profit firms, nonprofit agencies, and government departments looking for new ways to approach team leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781394182886

Book preview

1

Why Feedback Hurts

Sharing your ideas in a professional environment can be terrifying. Lots of people are not brave enough to try. First, congratulations for wanting to put your ideas into the world and see if they take flight.

We've all received feedback and input our entire lives: that first smile as an infant when we finally pooped for the first time. High fives and raises for a job well done. But also frowns and disapproving tones when we've missed the mark.

In this book, we're talking about feedback on your creative work – in essence, your ideas. A creative idea can span a wide range of work. It can be writing, graphic design, presentation, or new product pitches. I am a writer with a BA in journalism who now produces communications products for a living, so I'm mainly writing this book from the perspective of communications and marketing. Still, it can be applied to any creative work or ideas. It's the process, not the purpose, that is important.

Beyond my time as a consultant, I've been brave enough to share my creative work since I was a child. I've also been giving feedback and critique to teams on their creative work since high school. I've received critiques and given feedback on creative work since age 16. That's a lot of time to process my reactions to feedback and give thought to how it can be better.

But for me, it all starts with a red pen.

My first memory of hurtful feedback was in third grade. I remember giving my mother a story I had written. I was so proud of the work I had created. It was a story about a cat who went to Paris. After 15 minutes, she gave it back to me. Red, marked up, and bloody. Slashes through words. I don't know what this means scribbled in the margin.

What did you think of it? I asked.

It needs work, she said.

I crumbled. I cried.

You need to get a thicker skin, she said.

I was crushed.

I also remember giving my first feedback.

Named high school yearbook editor at 16, I helped writers craft better ledes and less awkward sentences. I remember sitting down with a writer and telling her, You can do better. Write less. Don't make it so hard. It felt good in the moment to have the power to direct the outcome of an article, but was it enough to help her succeed?

From there, it's been a career of giving and receiving feedback. I thrived, completing a college journalism degree – which is essentially four years of feedback – and then went directly into a nonprofit communications career at age 22. I started giving feedback to communications interns by the age of 25. As a communications director, I had my first employee added to my team at age 28. I started my communications agency at age 30, where I juggle feedback daily from our clients and give direction to my team.

Getting feedback is a deeply personal experience for many people. It still is for me. It's hard to create. It is easy to write. Sit in front of your typewriter and bleed, Hemingway said. Creating in any form is putting your mind on paper or screen or stage. It's much easier to edit and give feedback.

Critiques can be empowering and transformative when delivered in a kind and respectful way. But our brains override many positive experiences to focus on the bad.

How the Human Brain Processes Feedback

Most humans have a negativity bias. According to psychology, a negative bias is our tendency to remember negative situations or feedback more often and then obsess about them more often than not. This thought process is also known as positive‐negative asymmetry. Negativity bias means we tend to focus on the bad comments and forget the positive ones.

As humans, we tend to:

Remember traumatic experiences better than positive ones.

Recall insults better than praise.

React more strongly to negative stimuli.

Think about negative things more frequently than positive ones.

Respond more strongly to negative events than to equally positive ones.¹

This obsession with the negative helped our ancestors survive. Avoiding risk and dangerous situations allows us to pass on our genes. When a Homo habilis grunted negatively at her clan mates about not eating poisonous red berries, it saved their lives. On the flipside, that toxic‐positivity Homo habilis was probably killed by thinking he could love a poisonous snake into submission.

Risk avoidance also happens when your coworkers find flaws in creative work. We focus on what needs to change instead of saying what we love about the idea. We point out the danger of typos and grammatical errors. We grunt to our clan mates that the threat of being misunderstood or ridiculed is in our future.

This focus on remembering negative experiences can manifest as mental health challenges from anxiety to narcissism. It can stymie us enough that we're not brave enough to share our ideas or voice. It can freeze our brains. I've struggled with managing my ability to receive criticism. It's comforting to know that the struggle is only human.

What happens inside our brains when we receive feedback and critiques? Our brains are simple sometimes – they want to reduce risk and maximize reward. However, when we feel threatened, our brains have two options: fight or flight. We either rise to the challenge of fixing the problem or flee that painful experience.

According to science, our brains are working against us when we receive too much negative feedback. The brain's amygdala receives information through our senses and translates them into emotions. The amygdala is also the part of the brain that triggers our fight‐or‐flight response. Situations and emotions trigger our danger response, telling the brain to avoid a threat. When the brain perceives a threat, the amygdala is hijacked to prevent that threat – leading to reduced analytical thinking, creative insight, and problem‐solving.²

This trigger in the brain is precisely what happens when we receive only negative feedback on our work and ideas. We lose our ability to find a path to fix the problems. Our brains get tired. We start looking for the easy way out or completely flee the situation.

Receiving only negative feedback is exhausting and draining. We've experienced the tendency of virtual teams to fall into the trap of telling people only what needs to be fixed. When teams see each other in the office every day there is lots of opportunity for tiny positive feedback comments in meetings and personal interactions: complimenting outfits, giving people a smile for a good idea, and asking about what people did on the weekend. Without these tiny human interactions, we drain our positive feedback banks. We see interacting with people on our team only as the way to get things done correctly and with as little effort as possible. This is not the way.

It's time to take control of your feedback styles so you can fight back and rise to the challenge of fixing the problems to make a better product. If someone's feedback makes you feel like your only option is to flee, it's time to have a tough conversation with that person. There is a kind method of confronting unkind feedback, but it takes building both a process and trust with the team.

Better Feedback Can Be Learned

I have had the rare opportunity to work with the same client for over eight years. In consultant time, we're an old couple. Heck, we're a rarity in a modern boss‐employee expectancy. Pam Miller is the founder and CEO of SAFE Haven for Cats. My team at BC/DC Ideas has been her outsourced communications department, with responsibility for managing her strategy and serving as the voice of her organization though all her communication channels. I've hired many folks to create content on this account, but I've been Pam's primary point of contact through weekly phone calls.

Our feedback relationship is amazing. I can confide in Pam; she's my role model as a strong woman leader, and we've tackled some big challenges over the years. I've learned a lot from Pam's leadership.

A few years back, we got to a point where we almost didn't make it due to poorly delivered feedback. I felt hurt that our trust was eroding. I felt that my work and my team's work was getting nitpicked without a clear improvement path. I thought we could not live up to an unrealistic standard.

This negative feedback was usually due to poor processes. For example, not enough information was delivered at the start of the project. There were midway changes or vastly different editing expectations from our established brand voice. My team lost our ability to bounce back from criticism and felt we couldn't do anything right. We were making more stupid errors and passing through too many typos. We were shutting down creatively. I was sending smoke signals that this wasn't working for us, but Pam responded kindly.

She recognized that we were getting too much input from too many people. We narrowed our input process to filter through her. She realized the overly critical feedback was coming from one of her team members and had the opportunity to address it. At BC/DC Ideas, we retooled our internal review process, giving me more time to review content before we sent it to her for review. We fixed the process and kept the people.

We changed how we managed our feedback process to make it kinder and more productive. From our work over the years, I can now recognize seasons when Pam is stressed and her feedback can be more direct. I also see times when she's excited and new ideas flow, which usually means more or new communications. She recognizes when I'm stressed or spread too thin and addresses it with kindness on our weekly calls. We are two people trying to save the most cats and produce excellent communications.

Completion with Kindness

Giving and receiving feedback can be less painful and more constructive. Every great writer has a good editor. Feedback and revision are critical components in the process of making powerful products. It takes respect and a shared process to make the collaboration work.

Lean into your collaboration process and find the joy in working with a team to make great things happen for your organization. Hold true to respecting yourself and your ideas. The Kind Review process will help you polish your ideas. It will take effort to identify the pain points and address them, but it's worth the effort.

Remember: feedback doesn't have to hurt.

Notes

1 Kendra Cherry, What Is the Negativity Bias? Verywell Mind, September 14, 2022, https://www.verywellmind.com/negative-bias-4589618

2 Blue Beyond Consulting, This Is Your Brain On Feedback: How Understanding a Little Brain Science Can Make a Big Difference in Your Next Feedback Conversation, no date, https://www.bluebeyondconsulting.com/thought-leadership/this-is-your-brain-on-feedback-how-understanding-a-little-brain-science-can-make-a-big-difference-in-your-next-feedback-conversation/

2

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Review

Here's a revolutionary thought: You can control the feedback you receive on your ideas. Receiving feedback is not open season on your ideas. Instead, you have the opportunity to control the level of input and how you feel about that feedback.

The key is pairing an understanding of the feedback styles in your team with an established review process. By identifying your team's feedback styles and carrying out a review process, you can guide any idea or project to completion.

The perfect recipe for Kind Review features three things:

Positive feedback: The energy people give to feedback can be helpful and motivating, or it can be hurtful and demotivating. This transfer of energy in the review process is powerful. It can either help a team be great or lead a team to burnout.

Streamlined review: With a collaborative review process, teams can move ideas to great with speed and kindness. It's the full effort of a team to get ideas to completion.

Perfection is impossible: Humans are not machines. The process of creation is messy. Let the team make a product great together.

A representation exhibits the three things which feature the kind review. 1. Positive feedback. 2. Streamlined review. 3. Perfection is impossible.

We're trying to build more helpful feedback and reduce unhelpful feedback. Unhelpful feedback is destructive feedback. It rots the souls of creatives. It eats at great ideas. Destructive feedback leads to higher employee turnover and less effective products, guaranteed.

Defining the Creator‐Reviewer Relationship

Getting ideas to greatness is a partnership. It takes two equal forces to get any project to completion. Think about all the classic partnerships: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson balanced analytics with action. Han Solo and Chewbacca balanced taking an extraordinary risk with WWWWWWWGGGGHHHRRRRW (Wookie for That's a bad idea). It takes two to find the path to a solution.

The Creator

The creator holds the power of generation. They are the powerhouse doing the work – putting pen to paper or stylus to computer screen. They are the holder of the dream of what an idea could