I love negative feedback. Well, not really. I love constructive feedback. I love the feedback that gives me things to think about. Am I presenting the right material? Am I presenting it in the right way? Can I improve? But, in order to get constructive feedback, people have to tell you that something you’re doing, or not doing, isn’t working. That’s frequently taken as negative feedback, but it isn’t. Let’s explore this.

If there’s a feedback form for a session. It says that 1 is bad, 5 is great and you put a 1, or 2, you didn’t like the session. But, if you don’t leave a comment, that’s just negative feedback. If the comment is something along the lines of “You suck.” That again is negative feedback. But, if you say something like “You suck because I don’t like the way you were trying to teach/you had too much humor/your delivery was too dry/your slides were uninformative/all your demos failed” Something. A reason. Then, that’s constructive feedback. The speaker can then evaluate if there is room for improvement in their craft in order to address the needs expressed.

I recently received some feedback from someone who was quite unhappy with my teaching style. Seems I asked the audience too many questions, trying to prompt them to guide me down the path that I was going to take anyway. This person felt that was taking up too much time and assumed a level of knowledge that the audience didn’t have. That’s great feedback. It is something that I do. Instead of just telling you each step I’m going to take, especially in a pre-con, I’ll ask the audience to supply information, but, it’s based on all the things I’ve already taught, so I’m not exactly springing it on people out of the blue. However, I can see where too much of that, too often, or too early, could cause people to not like it. Also, since people will suggest solutions that might not be accurate, they could feel embarrassment from that. Got it.

Thank you anonymous individual who took the time and trouble to tell me why they didn’t like the presentation. I will try to adjust what I do and how I do it based on this good constructive feedback.

Please, take this into consideration when you fill out these eval forms. Heck, if you loved a session, tell the presenter why so they can continue doing the good things.

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