Feedback culture – why we need it and how to get it

Shifting sands

VUCA (standing for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) is a terrible acronym but it does a good job of capturing the defining characteristics of the operating environment that almost every leader is grappling with. The challenges we’re facing – climate change, cost of living, ageing population, health inequalities to name but a few – are all complex in nature with multiple interconnected elements.

VUCA is not a new acronym. It was first coined in the mid 1980s by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus. two economists working in the US military. We’d argue that the characteristics it points to have certainly been true in the business context since the start of the 21st century. What we think has shifted, certainly in the past 10 years, is the pace at which things are changing.

What’s also shifted is the recognition that the success of any team, organisation or system is directly related to its ability to learn and adapt to its changing environment. Yet what we notice time and again in our work, is the mismatch between the culture organisations one – agile, inclusive, collaborative, innovative – and their capacity to create it.

In this article we explore the value of a healthy feedback culture – what we mean by this, why it matters and how to create it.

What is a feedback culture?

A healthy feedback culture is an environment where the people working in it actively give, receive, and seek out constructive feedback in a way in which fosters learning, mutual support and improvement.

It’s an environment where:

• Feedback is a continuous process, integrated into the daily workflows, rather than being limited to periodic performance reviews or annual appraisals.
• Employees at all levels of the hierarchy are encouraged – and importantly feel able – to offer thoughts and views without fear of retribution (see our long form article on psychological safety which speaks to this). Transparency is valued and issues are addressed promptly.
• The feedback given is balanced, constructive and action-oriented – strengths are acknowledged alongside areas for growth, and it’s given in a way that leads to change.
• Feedback is flowing throughout the system – top-down (leaders and managers to employees), bottom-up (employees to managers), peer to peer (connecting the different parts of the system) and externally with key partners.

So much of our work is in the system space, recognising the reality that whatever sector you’re working in, whatever challenges you’re facing, it’s critical that you operate effectively within an ecosystem. Healthy feedback flows should be considered right across your ecosystem, not just within your four walls.

Benefits of feedback culture

The book Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, provides the very best evidence of the benefits of a healthy feedback culture. Pixar is widely regarded as a highly successful company, both creatively and commercially, and has consistently produced critically acclaimed films, winning 27 Academy Awards over a 25 year period. Many of its movies have achieved near-universal praise for their storytelling, emotional depth, and groundbreaking animation.

The book provides deep insight into Pixar’s unique and effective feedback culture and its role in fostering creativity and excellence. This culture is built on principles that promote openness, collaboration, and continuous improvement. As well as reading Creativity Inc. we also recommend watching Linda Hill’s Ted Talk ‘How to Manage for Collective Creativity’. Linda is a renowned Harvard Professor, author, and expert in leadership and innovation who has studied the culture within successful organisations like Pixar and Google. Core ideas throughout her writing include:

• Collective Genius: Innovation comes from a collaborative process where diverse voices contribute to problem-solving and idea generation.
• Leadership for Innovation: Leaders should not see themselves as the source of ideas but as facilitators who build environments that allow creativity to thrive – as she so elegantly puts it, “set the stage for others to perform on”.
• Psychological Safety: A cornerstone of innovative organisations is creating a culture where people feel safe to speak up, experiment, and even fail.
• Adaptive Leadership: Leaders must be flexible and open to learning, as innovation often requires navigating uncertainty and complexity.

Based on our own experience, what we’d add to this is that a healthy feedback culture creates:

• Better relationships: Honest and respectful feedback build trust and strengthen interpersonal connections.
• Improved performance: Regular, clear feedback helps individuals quickly understand expectations and areas for improvement.
• Increased agility: Linked to the above, continuous and regular feedback flows allows people, teams and organisations to learn quickly and adapt accordingly.
• Talent Retention: The ability to grow and develop is a core motivating factor for almost every employee. Employees who feel supported in their development are more likely to feel valued and stay.

How to create a feedback culture in the workplace

1) Bake it into the DNA

The importance of feedback, openness and the free flowing of ideas have to be a defining characteristic of the culture you’re trying to create. For example, the first 2 (out of 3) operating principles at Pixar are ‘everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone’; and ‘it must be safe for everyone to offer ideas’. For employees, this sends a very clear signal about what is valued at Pixar and the role of feedback in the organisation’s success. For this reason linking organisational values or team principles to giving open, timely and considered feedback quickly transmits to people the type of feedback culture you are looking to create.

2) Recognise and reward the right behaviours

In our experience organisational cultures form around the behaviours that get appreciated. Because what gets appreciated quickly gets replicated. If you have a culture where self-promoting behaviours receive recognition (from leaders or through financial incentives), then watch as these behaviours proliferate.

Shifting culture requires an intentional focus on regularly appreciating different types of behaviour. To promote a feedback culture, this means saying thank you in public to the person who delivers appropriately challenging feedback to you, or thanking someone for having the courage to offer constructive feedback to a project that sits outside of their functional expertise.

It will take time, but the more you spotlight and appreciate the right kind of behaviours, the quicker they will spread.

3) Role model seeking and offering feedback

In hierarchical organisations, the higher up you go in any organisation, the less feedback you’re likely to receive and the more distant you’re likely to be from the frontline, the shop floor, the customer or client. This lack of feedback is designed in as a way of protecting hierarchy. Yet as we’ve seen, this is problematic and will restrain an organisation’s ability to be agile and innovative. And it’s not just a case of leaders simply asking colleagues to speak up more frequently – to give more feedback.

In his brilliant book ‘Think Again’ Organisational Psychologist Adam Grant references a study which showed that where managers did this, it had limited and short term impact. Yet when managers role modelled candour, learning and admitted mistakes themselves, this led to a far more significant and long term impact in the employees’ willingness to do the same. Giving and receiving feedback requires taking interpersonal risks (hence the strong link to psychological safety) and what leaders (or managers) need to realise is that you can’t expect other people to take risks if you’re unwilling to take them yourself. You set the tone for the behaviours that are valued.

4) Try ‘feeding forward’

For many of us, the very mention of feedback brings us out in cold sweats. That’s because most of us have experienced criticism and blame disguised as feedback, which can feel like a personal attack on our value. Whilst you can’t prevent people from reacting defensively to feedback, you can deliver the message skilfully in order to minimise the chance of a negative reaction.

How? Firstly remember that feedback is not a value judgement on the worth of the other person. It is based on both facts (the behaviour you observed) and your interpretation of these (how this impacted you), and is delivered with the intention of supporting the receiver to learn, develop and improve.

However, if you focus your feedback solely on what happened, you also increase the risk of getting into a reductive debate about what happened in the past. To prevent this situation it can be wise to ‘feed forward’, by focusing on the behaviour that would make for a better outcome next time around. To ‘feed forward’ simply shift from past tense (what happened and how you felt), to future tense (how they can apply the feedback to a similar future situation, and the difference this will make).

Using this approach can often enable the other person to step from a defensive posture where they feel compelled to justify past behaviour, and into a growth mindset where they feel empowered to explore alternative ways of acting in the future.

5) Embed ways of working that support feedback

What we’ve learnt from our work with clients is that it’s not enough to define the leadership behaviours that you want. You need to make it as easy as possible for people to use them through the regular, everyday ways that people come together in their work.

Daily Stand Ups are brilliant examples of this – 15 minute, daily meeting, same time, same place, everyone answers the same three questions. We’ve seen time and again how stand ups can very quickly increase the quality of communication and feedback between people in a way that enhances performance.

With another client, teams introduced a ‘hot seat feedback’ ritual whereby as part of their regular Friday meetings, they took it in turns to be in the hot seat and receive feedback. Each team member gives that person 1 thing they really appreciate about them and 1 thing that they would like that person to do more / less of. The team found it a bit daunting at first however, like with any ritual, it takes a little time for it to become a really useful team practice.

If you want to learn more about how CoCreate can help you to build a feedback culture that will promote learning, increase ownership and fuel innovation then please get in touch today. And of course, we are also open to any feedback you have on how we can improve this article.