I've been reading a great leadership book for new leaders and, in addition to learning some great tips on communication and coaching, I'm also realizing (again) how unique a place HubSpot is.
One of the key tips in the Giving Feedback section of the book is to provide a balanced combination of feedback and feedforward. Feedback is all about looking at the past, while feedforward refers to the past as context for giving advice for the future. In my view, feedforward is much more constructive and productive.
When I consider what we do at HubSpot, I find it difficult to find examples of simple feedback. Rather, every example I can think of, I've always received or given feedforward. Why is that? I believe it's because of our emphasis on GSD: Getting Stuff Done.
With an emphasis on GSD, you focus on efforts that lead to real results. Feedback focuses on the past, which cannot be changed, while feedforward is about looking at what you can do to constantly improve and continue to GSD. That means when something goes wrong, you look back at what happened, why it happened, and develop plans for making sure you don't make the same mistakes in the future. This manifests itself in the form of (a lot of what we've learned from our development team): Five Whys Exercises, Sprint Retrospectives, and Monthly One-on-Ones. The latter two also apply in positive scenarios, when something goes right. Generally this positive feedforward comes less naturally to the team (we're always looking to improve and don't always celebrate our successes) but we're getting better at it.
The presence of feedback is pretty rare at HubSpot in my experience. Because of our focus on GSD we're constantly trying to learn from our experiences and apply this to future projects in the form of feedforward. It's turned us into a uniquely excited, productive, and fast-paced team that thrives on learning from our experiences.
Flickr photo by grahamhisskoul
