Creating an Environment for Better Feedback

Scroll Top

July 8, 2020 Communication Teamwork

Creative feedback can be frustrating — here’s what you can do.

Whether you’re the one giving it or the one receiving it, feedback can be a hard pill to swallow. It’s natural to respond emotionally to insufficient work, but it’s also natural to respond negatively to your work being critiqued. This emotional clash can put a strain on creative relationships in the workplace.

Luckily, the feedback process doesn’t have to be painful. In this episode, Adam Morgan provides helpful advice on how to give constructive feedback—and how to receive it.

During this session, you’ll learn:

The best way to give feedback, especially when it’s negative
How to avoid getting defensive about receiving feedback
Whose feedback to value the mostHow to rate and rank feedback
How to diffuse tension during a feedback session

mentioned in this show:

Adam Morgan

Creative Leader and RCL Host

The Stoke Group

Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency

Transcript

Adam Morgan:

Welcome to Real Creative Leadership, a place where creative leaders can find insights and practical guidance on the day to day job of being a creative leader. We focus on real issues, topics, and insights of creativity in the business world. Join me as we explore the best strategies for developing your team, getting others to embrace your vision, and generating amazing experiences. This webinar series is produced by The Stoke Group. I’m your host, Adam Morgan, Adobe Executive Creative Director and author of Sorry Spock, Emotions Drives Business, and this is Real Creative Leadership.

Adam Morgan:

Today we’re going to talk about feedback. Giving feedback and accepting feedback, everything around feedback. This is a really important topic. It’s something that I’ve dealt with for two and a half decades of my career. And as a creative person, you create things and you have to get feedback. There’s no getting around it. You’re going to get people’s opinions. You’re going to get subjectivity. You’re going to get a lot, from everyone. And everyone has an opinion. Everyone’s a writer, everyone’s a designer. So understanding and learning how to deal with feedback and how to create an environment. That’s really the important thing for us here on Real Creative Leadership, it’s, as a leader, you need to create an environment where feedback is given and accepted in the right way. You have to set up expectations. You have to create a machine so that everyone knows what the ground rules are so that you can get good feedback. That’s really what we want to focus on today, is how do you create that environment?

Adam Morgan:

because again, feedback, it’s going to come. It’s going to come in every shape and form. And so today I want to just talk about how you guide that so it doesn’t just come off the rails. because, to be honest, most of my career, whenever things have gone south, it’s usually been around feedback or people’s opinions about the creative work and disagreements over it. So I’m going to talk to you about some good tips on how you can get through that without having to have conflict, without having to have miscommunication or not understanding each other. Some really good tips on getting through it. So creative feedback. I’m really excited about this, because it’s a big deal.

Adam Morgan:

Let’s start off talking about what usually happens with feedback. And I’ll be honest, I’ve thought about this long and hard over the years because I’ve had to deal with feedback so often. And really what I think what’s going on with most people is they’re trying to get feedback, but they really just don’t know how. That’s really the beginning of it. They see something and it’s just wrong or there’s something off, but they can’t articulate why. And so what ends up happening is the typical response is to just give really vague feedback. That’s where we hear the classic cliches in our industry of, “Oh, I don’t know, make it pop,” or, “Punch it up,” or, “I’ll let you know when I see it when it’s right.” And there’s a lot of that feedback in our industry and it’s because people don’t have the tools, like we’re never trained in giving good feedback. We understand strategy or we understand the principles of art, but we’re not trained in giving good feedback. And so that’s what we usually end up doing is just giving really bad, vague feedback, so we’re going to talk about how we fix that.

Adam Morgan:

The next thing that I also see that happens a lot is that, because people don’t really know how to articulate the right feedback, what they inevitably end up doing is just redoing it. They’ll rewrite the paragraph. They’ll offer suggestions of, “Here’s how I would redesign this or that.” And they try and fix it. Because deep down they’re feeling something’s wrong, like there’s something scratching at their emotional fabric. They’re sensing something’s wrong, but they can’t fix it, and so the knee jerk reaction is to go into fixing mode and just, “Here’s the suggestion, I’m going to be very prescriptive, do this, this or this.” Those are the two extremes of really vague feedback or overly prescriptive feedback.

Adam Morgan:

So one of the first things when we’re talking about feedback, establishing ground rules. And usually I’ll talk with stakeholders or with clients or whoever about this, because you have to train both those people who are giving feedback and those people who are accepting feedback. So your creative team and all the people you work with. And so the number one thing to understand going into it is that everyone wants good creative. And so if you start at a common framework where when we establish ground rules, it’s not so that the creative team can get out of doing things or they’re prima donnas and we want you to accept the first round and that’s it and don’t give us any feedback. That’s not good. That’s never going to fly. We know, as creative people, that iteration is where things improve. And I’m going to talk about, a little bit later, of like how we are accepting that that feedback is a gift and iterating.

Adam Morgan:

So we know we need to go back and forth. We know we need to improve it. But it’s just how. So one of the first things that I talk about is, if we all want good creative, let’s start with the basics. Step number one, if you’re giving feedback, number one, make sure that you’re reacting first for accuracy. That’s the number one thing I ask clients and stakeholders. If it’s wrong, we will fix it. If we’re using the wrong messaging, we will change the headline every day. If we’re not using the right style of the brand, we need to fix it. So, number one, as you’re giving feedback, look for accuracy, look for ways that you can be very, very concrete and say, “This button shouldn’t be yellow because we always use a blue button in our designs style”

Adam Morgan:

Or, “In this messaging, you’re talking about this topic and we’re supposed to talk about this other topic. We need to focus on the right topic.” Or, “You’re describing this thing, maybe it’s our product. And you’re actually talking about the wrong features. These are the features that we need to talk about.” So number one, when you do a pass at giving feedback, look for accuracy. Those are non-starters. As a creative person, you just need to fix all the things that are wrong and that are not accurate every time. And that’s something we don’t even need to squabble over. So accuracy first.

Adam Morgan:

And now that’s the first half, the second half is more emotional. And over the years, in trying to give good feedback, something I learned in giving good feedback came from, not from within our industry or best practices, but it really came from being in a writer’s group and writing a novel. Because there are a lot of rules of engagements that other writers in writers’ groups use. Because just like before, we don’t want you to just come in and blow up the work. We want to give good feedback that actually helps the author to improve it. And so some of the ground rules that we use is never rewrite it. Never redesign. Never redo it. And here’s why. Because if you come in and first you’ve already checked for your accuracy, and then you decide to be very prescriptive. What you’re doing is it’s almost like you’re taking away the opportunity for those people that you partner with to learn from you, to learn as to why things are going wrong. If you just rewrite the paragraph, if you just say, “Change the color to red,” we’re just guessing at what the problem was or why. We have no idea. And so we can certainly say yes and just make those changes, but then there’s no partnership there.

Adam Morgan:

That’s just a very dictatorial move. That was a totally wrong word, but I’m just going to stick with it. That was a very wrong move to just say, “Do it my way or that’s it.” so just redoing it, rewriting it, is the worst. Never do that. Never rewrite or redesign someone’s work. That doesn’t help you, it doesn’t help them. What you need to do instead is express your journey, your emotional journey. For example, as you’re reading through something or you’re viewing an ad, whatever it may be, you really just need to start by describing your emotional experience. Maybe you hit a section that was really confusing, or maybe another section you really inspired, or another section you felt lost or somewhere else it just felt like you were saying something wrong. Deep down you’re feeling those emotions, and you’re feeling that something is off. And if you can’t figure out what it is and why you’re feeling it, then just describe how you felt.

Adam Morgan:

“I was lost here. I was confused here. I really love this section. I really didn’t like this section and I don’t know why, but something feels missing.” Even if you just do that, that is great feedback for a writer or designer for a creative. Because then if you’re a professional and you know, you can go back and say, “Okay, if they were confused here, I need to add a little more detail. If they were lost in the section, I need to fix that transition.” And it’s also good feedback. “Okay, good. They were inspired. They loved that section. That was good. I’ll do more of that throughout the piece.” So that’s really one of the biggest takeaways I can give you is when you’re giving feedback, if you can’t articulate it, then describe your experience.

Adam Morgan:

If you describe your experience, then the pro, the creative, can go back and interpret that as “Okay. If they’re feeling that here’s what I can do.” And why is that? Because as creatives, we are trained to understand emotions. That’s half of what we’re doing. When we’re creating great experiences it’s because we’re trying to create a good emotional experience, we’re trying to elicit a great emotional experience with our customers. That’s it. So start with your feedback first, give accuracy, what’s logical, what can you really make sure is either right or wrong, never rewrite it, don’t try and fix it. And then three, if you can’t articulate it, then at least describe your experience. And then the creatives can take it from there and figure out how to fix that.

Adam Morgan:

Next I want to touch just briefly on, and his is a bigger argument, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it, but it’s really who should be giving feedback. And I know we get feedback from everyone. You’re going to get feedback from the CEO, the CEO’s cousin, CEO’s cousin’s friend who’s in school, who’s going through design program. You’re going to get feedback from everyone. But as a creative leader, you also want to control who and why we’re giving feedback. So it’s not just everyone can give feedback, which I’ll get to that. We can get good feedback anywhere. But if you’re able to control at least a little bit of the process, here’s something that I would keep in mind. If you’ve read the book The Originals, there was a chapter in there where they talk about a study of they were trying to find out where the best feedback comes from for creative ideas.

Adam Morgan:

And the truth is they found out that the best person, the best people who you should accept feedback from, are peers. Peers who are also creative directors, who are in the trenches working day to day, actually doing the work. If you’ve ever heard that awesome quote by Teddy Roosevelt about being in the arena, being marred with blood and sweat and tears, and just ignoring all the people in the stands or in the cheap seats who just give you feedback and they don’t really understand. That is absolutely true. Like the best feedback is going to be coming from those who have gone through the war with you, who have been in the arena and fought a good fight. So it’s not going to be someone from the bleachers who’s kind of understood and seen some things. And we have a lot of leaders who like dabble a little bit in it, or we have a lot of people in different departments who want to throw in their opinion.

Adam Morgan:

And that’s all great. Accept that and listen to it. But when it comes to if you’re trying to orchestrate the right way, really good feedback from a peer who’s in the trenches doing the work, that’s the gold. So that’s the stuff that you really need to pay attention to. And then everyone else, if you can explain that to them, I have to go back and say, “Here’s this quote, here’s this study. I want you to think about this. We don’t want just rando feedback from everyone in the world. We absolutely want accuracy from everyone. When I want feedback on accuracy, I’m going to send it to all of those groups and make sure things are true and right. But when it comes to stylistic feedback, that’s where I would trust your creative director, your peers, people who are working creative directors and others who are in the trenches with you, that’s where you’re going to get good understanding of what they’re going through.” Because they emotionally are going through creating that stuff and so they can pick apart how to recreate and fix parts that aren’t working because they’re actually doing it. That’s just a cool aside.

Adam Morgan:

Next I want to talk about accepting feedback, because this is important. There’s always all this fight about how much do you push back versus how much you accept. And I’ve seen the extremes where some people are just always holding up the stiff arm and saying, “No. No, thank you. We don’t appreciate your feedback.” And I can understand the mentality of that because they’re really going on on what I just said is, we only believe in peer feedback, we only believe that real creatives are the ones who are going to give good feedback. So when I say those things, it’s like finding the balance. Because on the other extreme, it’s like, do I just accept everything and just say yes, and become a yes person? “If you want to change it to green, I’m going to change it to green. If you want me to rewrite this thing to that, I’ll just copy and paste it.”

Adam Morgan:

So those are the extremes. And I really feel like a good creative leadership model is to find the balance in the middle of that. Listen to the peers and get the good stylistic information, listen to everyone else and get the truth and the accuracy. And then in the middle, meet and decide what is right. Now there are some things that will help with that. If you create a design system, or if you create a story framework, which are two tools that we should talk about later, but they are things that you absolutely should have, when you create a design system, then there’s not a fight over colors of buttons and how we deal with art or how we deal with photography, or how we deal with illustration.

Adam Morgan:

And then on a story framework, we know here are the messages we will focus on, and here’s how we deal with stylistic issues. So there’s a lot of … it’s almost like the building blocks. They’re not really subjective things. They are things that are part of our system. So that is also a third thing that you should use when you’re dealing with feedback. So accuracy, systems and then emotional journeys. Those are the kind of the three that I take into consideration when accepting feedback.

Adam Morgan:

But part of accepting feedback really is a mindset. There’s that awesome quote from Ratatouille, Chef Gusteau says, “Anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great.” And I think he later on also Anton Ego says something along the lines of, “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” And if we apply those quotes from a wonderful Pixar movie to giving feedback in our industry, it’s that if you’re all the way on the one end of the extreme where it’s like, “No, we don’t accept feedback. It’s our way or the highway. End of story.” You could miss out on some really good nuggets. You could miss out on some good truths. Because good feedback can come from anyone and from anywhere, because people are all having this shared experience. And your customers may have that same experience. And so ignoring the intern that says, “Well, I kind of think, blah, blah, blah,” just completely flat out ignoring it is not right. And I’m not saying you just accept that as gospel and use it, but listen. Understand and have a mindset that is, “I’m not going to stiff arm everyone at first, I’m going to at least listen to everyone at first.”

Adam Morgan:

So that takes us the next part, is seeking to understand. So if you have a mindset that it can come from anyone, the next step is seek to understand. Which is, ask questions. Matthew Rayback, he’s a creative director on my team at Adobe, and his whole entire philosophy around content creation is good content starts with asking good questions. And so really part of first trusting that people can have good feedback and they’re not all Nimrods. The second part is how do I listen and really listen to them and understand what was the experience they had. If it’s a pretty shallow thing and it’s clear that it’s just a stylistic issue that’s their own, then ignore it. But if they’re bringing up something deeper of like, “Here I was really confused because of X,” listen to that and ask questions, dig in deeper.

Adam Morgan:

“Why? Why were you stuck there? Why was that confusing? Tell me more about what you were feeling or what you were experiencing at that time.” Just digging with good questions and you’ll get a lot of good information. And then you can go back and be a professional and say, “Okay, here’s what’s really happening.” They may have been saying all these things … because I’ve had this experience all the time. One was we got this email back that said, “Oh, all this writing is trash and it’s terrible. Who wrote this? Let’s get them fired. We hate it.” And you get bad feedback like that. But when I actually sat down with him and said, “Okay, what is really going wrong here?” We isolated all of it and really found out that it wasn’t a style thing, it wasn’t a writing thing. It was a 100% a messaging thing. And the problem was we were talking about the wrong topic and they wanted to talk about a different topic. And so they were full on upset and irate that we were idiots and couldn’t figure it out.

Adam Morgan:

By sitting and listening to them and really talking it through with them, and then also reminding them in those live feedback sessions that, “Hey, listen, the thing you’re talking about is a style issue. We’ve solved that with our design system. That’s a nonstarter. That’s just what the system is, that’s the brand. Or in our brand guidelines we talk about this in this way, or it’s a style thing in our style guidelines, that’s our brand, we’re not going to touch that so that question is off the table. But if there’s something deeper, something that wasn’t sitting right with you, ask questions.”

Adam Morgan:

And then that’s a good balance of when I say pushback, it’s going to be first I’m going to absorb and listen and take it all. And then the next step is the balance of, all right, now that I see those different categories, and once you kind of break them apart you understand them, you can easily go back and say, “Great, that’s an accuracy thing? Yes, we will fix it. Oh, that’s a style thing? No, let’s trust the experts of the creative team to get at that right feeling. So if you’re feeling a wrong, give us your experience and we’ll fix that. If it’s a system thing we follow the system.” And you could easily remind them, “Here’s what the system is.”

Adam Morgan:

We’ve even had in our story frameworks or our brand standards, where we’ll go in deep on writing things. Because a lot of times we have good ones around design, but we don’t have as many around writing. But we’ll go in deeper and say, “Okay, we always do parallel construction in this way.” Or, “We always talk in first person, or third person instead of first,” or whatever it may be. So figure out what those commonalities are and then establish some systems down at the bottom so you don’t have to deal with that time and time again.

Adam Morgan:

And then the last thing I want to talk about on accepting feedback, is really it’s all about relationships. I found that if I just come in hot in a meeting and I stiff arm someone and just say, “Nope, sorry, it’s our way or the highway,” that breaks down relationships, and then it’s destroyed and then they’ll either go around you, they’ll fight you, they’ll do everything they can to ruin your work because they had an emotional bad experience with you. But if you come in and listen and accept and understand, and then explain why, why you’re doing things. Like, “Thank you for the feedback. What I really understand is this, and here’s how we’re going to address it because of either A, systems or B, accuracy or C, emotional journey. Here’s how we’re going to deal with that and why.” Almost always people accept and understand say, “Great, good, thanks for listening to my feedback.” They’ve been heard, but you’re the pro you’re going to go and take care of it and you’re going to fix it and do it in the right way. And then end up with a better product in the end.

Adam Morgan:

So that’s an important part. Just remember it’s about relationships. And when there is conflict, that’s one of the biggest refiners fires that either destroys the relationship or builds a relationship. So use it in the right way and be a little diplomatic about it. And then I think you can get the better feedback.

Adam Morgan:

One note I want to talk about here as far as a COVID and being remote. A lot of us are working remote today. We have remote teams, remote feedback, remote clients, whatever it may be. And a lot of times feedback can get garbled in email or in texts. And if you’ve ever seen the skit from Key & Peele about they’re texting back and forth and how it gets interpreted completely wrong, that happens all the time. So here’s my one word of caution. If it’s an accuracy thing, deal with it in an email or a text. Totally fine. But I think if it’s a system thing or, for sure, if it’s an emotional journey thing, like a styley thing, then you probably should just get on a call, get on a video call and have a good one-on-one with them or whatever, a group thing. Sometimes we’ll have like live reviews, we’ll get everyone on the call and then I will just go through and explain the feedback and what we’re understanding and how we’re getting there.

Adam Morgan:

And I guarantee, like 10 times out of 10, those calls have mostly ended perfectly fine and great and everyone’s happy and the relationship is there. So during COVID or during remote working, make sure, if feedback starts to get a little hot, make it live. Have a live review or have a face-to-face conversation. It’ll be so much better because then you can feel it out with someone else and talk through it rather than it seeming as if you’re just being a blocker and causing problems.

Adam Morgan:

All right. Well, that’s it for today’s session. Just some of the key takeaways to take from how to give feedback. Number one, when you’re giving feedback, first start with accuracy. Don’t deal with the systems or stylistic stuff. And then if things are still off, then describe your experience. Walk them through how you felt or what you experienced as you were reading or looking at the art. And that will give them a better clue. And I’d say, here’s where the genius comes. If someone gives you that kind of feedback and you don’t know what to do with it, then you need to go back to the craft. You need to really figure out, or have someone on your team start to learn how to deal with those things and break apart the experience so that they know how to fix it. The genius of those of us as creative people is to understand and interpret that feedback and then put it together in the right way. So that’s giving feedback.

Adam Morgan:

The next is, when you’re accepting feedback. First have a mindset that anyone can give good feedback, it’s okay. Second, ask questions. Listen, learn, try to understand them. And then three, give them the reason why and walk them through it all and make sure you keep those relationships solid. Because relationships, that’ll make or break feedback later on. It may not be this project, but it may be the next one. So make sure you’re really working hard on keeping those solid.

Adam Morgan:

And those are the key takeaways for today’s session. So thank you so much for listening in on this topic of giving good feedback. Hopefully you learned something from all that. Now we have a new format here on the show that we’re going to talk one week about a topic, and in the next week we’re going to invite someone on the show to talk about their experience. So I’m really excited to announce that next session we’re going to have Douglas Davis on. And he wrote the book Creative Strategy and the Business of Design. And what he realizes that so many times when we’re giving feedback, we’re not speaking the same language. So an account person and creative person have been trained in completely different vernacular, and we’re trying to talk to each other, but we’re talking past each other. So he studied this and wrote a whole book on how to understand and talk creative and also the other way, how creatives can talk business. And so we can start to understand each other and get better feedback. So that’s a big, big part of it is learning to speak the language of your cohorts.

Adam Morgan:

So I’m excited to have Douglas Davis on the show. So stay tuned for that. We’ll be bringing him on our next episode. And beyond that, thank you so much for being here with me. Thanks for listening. If you’re on a podcast, thank you for tuning in. Please subscribe. If you’re listening to this through webinar, please go to Real Creative Leadership and sign up for our newsletter so we can let you know when the next webinar is live. But so grateful for all the support. So excited to be building real creative leadership with you. I really think it’s a missing element out there. We have so much on craft but so little on leadership and how to guide a team and a company to be more creative and have bigger and better creative ideas. So thank you for joining me on this journey, and we’re so excited to have you with us.

Adam Morgan:

I’m your host, Adam Morgan, Executive Creative Director at Adobe. And we also want to put a big shout out for Stoke who is producing this podcast. I couldn’t do it without them so I’m super grateful. I’ll be listing a little bit more information on Stoke so you can get connected with them as well. But thanks for listening, I’ll see you next time.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Transcript