If you are thinking that asking for feedback is a formality and not a valuable exercise, then you are just the way I was a few months ago. At that time, I was reading a lot about the effects of positive conflict and delta feedback on personal growth. It sounded all so convincing in theory, however, I remained skeptical. Up until that point, my experience with feedback was limited. I would ask my manager or a colleague to review my work, give me pointers, implement their suggestions, and get on with it.

What’s wrong with being “Great”?

More often than ever, when you ask someone to give you feedback— they’d say “Looks great!” or “Sounds great!” You almost expect to hear those words in response. They do make you feel satisfied. Not 100% happy, though, as if there is something is missing. And then, sure enough, moments later, the same person starts to send one follow-up after another: this needs to change, then maybe that should have a different color… And you quickly realize that it was not “great” at all in the first place.

That’s how I saw feedback a few months ago: nice words that cannot be translated into action.

Then I read this article for school (insert link). I highly recommend reading it, if you are not familiar with it yet.

Its main idea is that feedback is all about being specific and actionable.

My mind starting traveling to the moments when I used “Looks great” in response to give feedback. I went through a few cases. In some, it was a justifiable “Looks great” - simple flyer, quick design, initial mock of a feature that had been by then ironed out.

However, in most cases, this phrase was clearly a piece of failed feedback triggered by two main situations:

1. I did not give a thorough review and was passing the feedback task to someone else.

2. I felt that I was being supportive by avoiding negative comments.

Sucks, I know.

Knowing my own reasons for defaulting to “Great!”, made me wonder if people around me had similar reservations.

Doing some digging around

So I did a little survey among professionals around me. I passed a simple question with three choices:

Imagine you are approached by someone who asks you to review some project or a presentation, and, after reviewing it all you respond with is a one-word comment. That's not related to cases when you are just supporting other comments, but are actually responsible for that review process.
Now, here is a question.
“Most commonly, when you respond after reviewing something with a single phrase similar to “Looks great!”, it’s because:”

a. you want to avoid hurting other people’s feelings

b. you just want to get it over with

c. you don’t believe what you really think is important

What I found is that the most common reason for defaulting to a one-phrase review was b. you just want to get it over with. Closely followed by a. you want to avoid hurting other people’s feelings.

It is worth noting that none of the respondents saw it as a simple choice. Everyone reasoned with the situation and the environment before selecting an option.

It was also curious that no one picked c. you don’t believe what you really think is important. That was a find in itself indicating the high level of psychological safety within the organization they work at where they know their opinions matter.

I would not call this survey scientific, but it gave me enough qualitative and quantitative data to understand how others rationalize single-phrase feedback and support the initial hypothesis that one-worded comments fail to provide enough information to the reviewee to act upon.

Consider a situation when a marketing manager reaches out to a product person to review a promo draft of the new feature. The product manager looks it over briefly (on the run, as always) and responds with: “Awesome job! Looks great!” What should the marketing manager do now? Should she go ahead and send it out to a thousand users? Should she ask the product manager to review not only the way it looks but also the copy? Should she wait for more comments that might come through from the busy PM an hour later?

As you can see, the two key elements are missing from this feedback:
a. specificity

b. action

It is hard to tell with any amount of certainty whether the PM truly reviewed the promo because she gave no arguments supporting her approval. Therefore, the marketing manager will feel stuck, unable to act anticipating more feedback heading her way. Sometimes, that uncertainty results in prolonged periods of inaction leading to project delays. Other times, rushed actions of sending the promo straight ahead, and the reviewer coming back with more to say. In both scenarios, the person asking for feedback is now feeling guilty and more hesitant to ask for feedback again.

And according to famous Gallup’s research organizations without internal employees’ feedback loops are at a high risk of losing customers.

So, both asking for feedback and giving it cannot be underestimated.

After this realization, I started to pay much more attention to the times I am asked or am asking for feedback.

When asked, I counted multiple times almost defaulting to a “Great!” comment.

When asking, I made sure to follow up with more questions explaining what the reviewer liked/did not like and recommendations to improve.

Conclusion:

Next time you hear “Looks great!” try expanding on it:

“Thank you! So what did you like the most about it? What do you think could be better?”

You will be surprised at how many ideas, self-discoveries, eye-openers you will get. Now you can act!