Coaching Versus Feedback
Photo by Nadya Spetnitskaya on Unsplash
Picture this: you’re a brand-new design manager meeting with your direct reports for the first time.
Lucy, a senior designer reporting to you, says she’s having a hard time with an engineer on her product team. Eager to prove your ability to solve problems, you tell her exactly what to do and send her on her way. During your next one-on-one, Lucy comes back to you and complains about the engineer again. You’re confused about why your advice didn’t seem to work.
In your one-on-one with Charlie, a designer fresh out of university, he shares with you a set of mobile app designs he’s completed. You see a major usability issue with the designs but you don’t want to hurt his feelings—he’s so eager and nervous about doing the right thing—so you ask him questions to try and get him to figure out the answer on his own. He doesn’t see the problem though, and you end the meeting feeling like an ineffective manager because you couldn’t help him with his work.
What’s wrong here?
The main problem is that in both of these encounters, a well-meaning manager is trying to do the right thing but is mixing up coaching and feedback techniques. This is a common problem that happens either because we don’t know the difference between coaching and feedback, or we don’t know how to evaluate a situation and figure out when to use each. In this article I hope to show how coaching and feedback differ and what they have in common, as well as to help you know when to intentionally choose one or the other.
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What is feedback?
Feedback, in its general form, is anything that results when we take an action. As Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen explain in their wonderful book Thanks for the Feedback:
“…[feedback is] how we learn about ourselves from our experiences and from other people—how we learn from life. It’s your annual performance review, the firm’s climate survey, the local critic’s review of your restaurant.”
When I talk about feedback in this post I’ll focus on a manager giving feedback to a direct report (although of course anyone can give feedback to anyone else at work).
Feedback can be positive or critical, and it happens whether the recipient asks for it or not (usually, it’s unasked for!). Feedback happens as a result of something one person does or says that another person hears, sees, or experiences. Because of this, it’s based on a past action, which is an important distinction from coaching. In addition, feedback is given from the feedback-giver’s perspective; it’s a story or statement about what they observed and the result that it had.
Photo by Holly Stratton on Unsplash
As an example, let’s imagine there’s a bakery called Delectable Desserts. On Saturday, the busiest day at the bakery, one of the bakers named Sally doesn’t show up to work. This means that the owner and other bakers need to stay late to finish all of the baking for the next day. Feedback from the owner to the baker might sound like this:
“Hey Sally, yesterday when you didn’t show up to work and didn’t call to let us know, we weren’t able to find a replacement for you. That meant that the rest of the bakers had to work late which was frustrating for all of us.”
Of course, the owner will probably want to check in on what happened with Sally after giving this feedback and see if it was a one-time emergency or something else, as well as making sure Sally understands the need to call and find a replacement for her shift next time.
What’s coaching?
Coaching, compared with feedback, is focused on the future. It happens within a relationship where one person (the learner) is communicating with another person (the coach) who has more expertise in an area. It’s centered on helping the learner to improve and achieve their goals.
While feedback is about statements or stories, coaching is characterized by questions. A good coach doesn’t tell the learner what to do; she asks open-ended questions to help the learner discover the answer or explore alternative solutions. For example, at the Delectable Desserts bakery, coaching might sound like this:
“Linus, I know you’re working on improving your fondant pastry-making skills. Let’s see if we can brainstorm together. What techniques have you tried so far, and how did they work out for you?”
When Linus talks about the techniques and issues, the bakery owner could ask follow up questions such as “What do you think you could do differently next time?”
When to use coaching and feedback
Feedback can and should be given often, and should be done as soon as possible after a behavior has occurred (and remember, this goes for both critical and positive feedback!). Positive feedback can be given in front of others if it feels appropriate, while critical feedback should always be delivered privately.
Coaching on the other hand is not as time-sensitive and requires a bit more time to get into an in-depth conversation between the coach and the learner. I like to make sure the person I’m coaching knows that we’ll focus on coaching, rather than springing it on them. One-on-ones are a great place for managers to use coaching techniques.
Coaching also works best when the learner has some experience with the skills they’re being coached on. If a task is completely new to someone, that person needs feedback, as well as specific direction and instruction in how to do the task.
In the example of the design manager at the beginning of this post, the manager probably would have been more successful in giving Charlie specific feedback on how to fix the usability issue, because as a new designer he didn’t have the answer. With Lucy, however, the manager could have coached her to help her come up with multiple solutions to the conflict with the engineer, making it more likely that she’d hone in on the real problem and a good solution. For more detail on when coaching works and doesn’t work, I’d recommend this helpful webinar summary from HBR by Ed Batista.
What makes feedback and coaching especially rich is that they can be used together within the same conversation. Feedback can be used during coaching, and coaching can be given after feedback. For example, because Linus is trying to reach his goal of becoming an amazing pastry chef, the bakery owner might want to give him some feedback about how his last batch of lemon tarts turned out. In the same way, open-ended questions can be used after giving someone critical feedback to help them brainstorm better ways to approach a task next time.
Both coaching and feedback require mutual trust and vulnerability between the giver and receiver. They should be done with empathy for the receiver. And they work best when the learner or feedback-receiver has a growth mindset. As Winston Churchill says,
“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”
In summary, here are the major differences between coaching and feedback as I see them:
Feedback
A story or statement
Can be from anyone to anyone
About a specific past situation
Focuses on recipient’s behavior and results
Should be done clearly and concisely soon after the behavior occurs
Coaching
Open-ended questions
Usually done in an established relationship where someone is learning from someone who knows more about a particular skill or subject
About the future
Focuses on the learner’s goals
Needs time to be done well, and is often scheduled
A good manager will use both feedback and coaching as tools in order to help his team improve and grow, while being mindful of when the situation calls for which method.
There’s so much more to learn about coaching and feedback. I encourage you to learn more about each—for example, if you’re a new manager, I’d highly recommend The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhou. In addition, you can check out my posts on giving constructive feedback to designers, and a step-by-step guide for coaching your designers.
If you’re interested in how individual coaching can help you grow in your career, you can find out more here!
