Giving and receiving feedback in teams

Tash Willcocks
3 min readMar 9, 2021

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A helping hand to get those feedback muscles working with your teammates.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou

simple illustrations of 2 hands holding a heart

According to research, giving feedback in the correct way can improve team work, personal relationships and boost individuals’ confidence. It can improve trust and transparency and help create engagement. It can help a company and its packed-with-potential-people thrive.

Done badly — well, most of us have suffered due to badly handled feedback…

I want to share my work-in-progress learnings about doing feedback well to help create healthy work environments. I have travelled the path from being feedback averse to actively seeking it. I will not lie it was not always smooth or comfortable, but it was worth the effort and I feel I have come through stronger and I like to think a little more rounded as a person.

The following (hopefully) easy to digest cards are designed to help you and your team give and receive feedback well.

I hope they help you to create or grow your feedback culture.

There are 3 sections:

  • Giving Feedback
  • Receiving Feedback
  • A few feedback models to help

Below are a few sample of the cards, but the full set of cards are available in this link

Feedback is a Muscle, Train it! Giving and receiving feedback is like exercise, do it regularly, you start to build the feedback muscle and may start to crave more. A healthy team feeds back with ease, building trust, transparency and each other. Give feedback broadly, give it often. Be open to receiving it broadly & receiving it often.
Example card “Feedback is a muscle, train it!: from the deck of cards linked above
Giving feedback example cards, “fresh feedback and concrete examples” and “Ask for feedback often and broadly”
Receiving Feedback example cards, “Active Listening” & “Think about how you feel when giving feedback”
Quote from the example pages “receiving feedback does not mean I am the worst person that ever lived, it only means someone cares enough to tell me how to improve” The Power of feedback — Joseph Folkman
Receiving Feedback Example Page from the deck of cards

These cards have been designed for the Snook team and you! They are based on my experience at Hyper Island whilst I was the Director of the Masters courses, plus my personal journey learning to give and receive feedback and reading research into incredible leaders in the field such as Marshall Rosenberg (NVC), Humble Inquiry Edgar H Schein, Susan Wheelan, Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better, David Rock and Ed Batista… Inspired by the team feedback GDS Cards there are many more but these are great starters…

Illustrations by friendhood.co.uk/

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Tash Willcocks

Head of Learning Design at Snook, Honorary Fellow & Academic Board member Hyper Island, Letter Lover & Typostrator — Insta & Twitter @tashwillcocks