[Alicia Davis] As a leader, have you ever found yourself using the words constructive criticism in the same sentence? If you have, we would like to offer a little bit of a different reframe on that today, wouldn’t we, Stacie?

[Stacie Watson] Yes, you know, we’re doing this little series on some of the topics that came out of our recent survey around effective communication. And the whole idea of giving feedback, I think, first of all, that was a really big theme that came out of the survey. And I think it’s something that we all really struggle with, from time to time, you know, how to do it, how not to do it. And sometimes I think we get confused about the different types of feedback and how we might utilize those different types or not. Right?

[Alicia Davis] That’s right. And there’s really three, I think so… Positive feedback is when you are sharing something with someone because you really want them to, you want them to feel appreciated. You want to acknowledge them for something that they’ve done really well. It’s just it’s the feel-good feedback, right?

[Stacie Watson] Correct.

[Alicia Davis] And then we have the negative feedback. And what is negative feedback, Stacie?

[Stacie Watson]  Well, another word for it is criticism, right? And negative feedback, often is where we’re really focusing on what isn’t working. And we’re kind of stopping with that. Right? It makes me think of a leader who was in a session that I was facilitating a few months ago and we were talking about sort of styles of leadership and giving feedback, and she said, “Well, you know, I just tell it like it is, and that’s my style. And everyone knows that it’s my style.” And the truth of the matter is that style of just sort of focusing on what wasn’t working, which was very much what she did, wasn’t working for her team. It was not sort of inspiring anyone to do anything different.

[Alicia Davis] That’s right. So it’s, it’s really negative feedback is critical. It’s judgmental. It’s really like, you know, anytime you know, if you’ve ever received criticism from someone, whether it’s your leader, a friend or family member, it’s like, it just feels horrible. And so, the third type of feedback is constructive feedback. And a lot of times people put constructive criticism, and that sentence, and criticism is never constructive. Right? We just really want to emphasize that. And so what we’re going to do in our next video, is really talk about why is it so hard to give and receive constructive feedback. And then really, specifically, how do we actually do constructive feedback? So thanks so much for listening. We hope this was helpful. If you’d like to learn more, you can reach out to us at info@tltransforms.com. Direct Message us. We have a whole learning series session on communication that includes this so thank you so much. I’m Alicia Davis.

[Stacie Watson] Thank you. I’m Stacy Watson.

[Alicia Davis] Transformative Leadership strategies. Thanks so much.