Feedback as part of professional development

By Dr Rachel Chin, Researcher Development Project Officer (Glasgow Talent Lab)

I don’t think that I’m alone in finding the idea of feedback, whether given or received, daunting at best, terrifying at worst.

As the sole convenor of HIST4273, an Honours course on the history and legacy of the Second World War, I spent the first half of 2023 in a state of advanced worry about the prospect of receiving student feedback at the end of the term. It took me a full three weeks just to open the book reviews that I had received for my monograph, Britain, France and Discourses of Empire during the Second World War. In moments like these, I find myself thinking about how nice it would be to live in a treehouse in a secluded wood far from the thoughts and opinions of others. However, when I take the time to interrogate my experience with feedback, I have to conclude (however reluctantly) that I have benefited from it in real ways.  

Learning from feedback

Receiving feedback on my research, teaching and projects has made all my work more robust. A grant application that I recently submitted went through a dozen drafts and received feedback from nearly the same number of individuals. The Flourish career development programme for research staff, which I led last year, received feedback across its lifetime, from participants, colleagues, PIs and workshop providers. The comments and suggestions that I received in both instances forced me to think through why I had made the decisions I had made. They also brought into the frame new ideas, which I hadn’t always thought of. This feedback enriched my work in visible ways and demonstrated the value of feedback as a mode of collaboration and co-creation.

At the same time, not all feedback is good. Sometimes it’s delivered poorly, doesn’t fit with what is being asked for or is simply unhelpful. At its worst, feedback (see well-known jokes about ‘reviewer two’) can be personally offensive and patently rude. I’m sure that all of us have been at the receiving end of some very unhelpful feedback at one point or another. The experience can be hugely demoralising, and I don’t want to downplay this. Yet here too I have seen opportunities for professional growth. In 2021 I received a peer review response to a book proposal that I had submitted that asked why my text hadn’t taken the time to address a dozen different additional themes, each of which could have been, and indeed has been, an entire book on its own. This comment was unhelpful in the sense that it was not a change that I could make to the text. But it was valuable in another way. It gave me practice and confidence in defending my research decisions and the message that my book was delivering.

My experiences receiving and responding to feedback have also influenced my approach to providing feedback. Most importantly, they have made me a clearer and more empathetic communicator. I find the prospect of getting feedback on a project or a piece of work hugely stressful at times, and I therefore try to keep this in mind when I’m commenting on someone else’s work, whether it’s a student, a colleague or a stranger. Likewise, I find disorganised, unclear or irrelevant feedback frustrating, so I’ve made a point of trying to be as clear as possible in my comments, making specific and actionable suggestions rather than vague wandering propositions.

Practical approaches to feedback

In my personal and professional life, I’ve adopted two practical approaches to feedback. These have helped me to keep feedback in perspective and alleviate some of my trepidation around it.

• First, when I read through feedback for the first time, I don’t take any notes. Then I close the document and walk away for at least 24 hours. Putting space between feedback in this way gives me time to think about it from a distance and to remember that it is feedback on a piece of work, not feedback on who I am as a person. When I return to the feedback, I always find that I can view it much more objectively and better distinguish between helpful and not so helpful comments.
• Second, when I’m providing feedback, I pay extra attention to my use of adjectives. If something is good, is the language I’m using portray this sufficiently, or am I downplaying its strengths for no reason? If something can be strengthened is my feedback providing a roadmap to do this, or is it only criticising?    

Giving and receiving feedback isn’t the straightforward process that it is sometimes made out to be. It can quickly transcend the professional space that it is meant to sit in and descend into something that feels more like a personal attack. And yet, this is why I believe that feedback, both how we respond to it and how we deliver it, can be such a valuable point of learning.

Certainly, feedback has helped to make my own work more robust and more inclusive. But it has also made me a more confident leader and presented opportunities for me to stand up for the approaches and decisions I have made. Likewise, it has made me interrogate what kind of leader I want to be – that is, an empathetic leader, whose feedback supports growth and knowledge creation, rather than reproducing my own opinions Ad Infinitum.  After all, the treehouse of my dreams isn’t suspended by air. It is supported by the forest beneath it. Feedback, when done right, should also provide this support and growth.