Creating a Feedback Culture in Training Programs

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 🗣️ Ever feel like your Learning and Development (L&D) programs are missing the mark? You're not alone. One of the biggest pitfalls in L&D is the lack of mechanisms for collecting and acting on employee feedback. Without this crucial component, your initiatives may fail to address the real needs and preferences of your team, leaving them disengaged and underprepared. 📌 And here's the kicker—if you ignore this, your L&D efforts risk becoming irrelevant, wasting valuable resources, and ultimately failing to develop the skills your workforce truly needs. But don't worry—there’s a straightforward fix: integrate feedback loops into your L&D programs. Here’s a clear plan to get started: 📝 Surveys and Questionnaires: Regularly distribute surveys and questionnaires to gather insights on what’s working and what isn’t. Keep them short and focused to maximize response rates and actionable feedback. 📝 Focus Groups: Organize small focus groups to dive deeper into specific issues. This setting allows for more detailed discussions and nuanced understanding of employee needs and preferences. 📝 Real-Time Polling: Use real-time polling tools during training sessions to gauge immediate reactions and make on-the-fly adjustments. This keeps the learning experience dynamic and responsive. 📝 One-on-One Interviews: Conduct one-on-one interviews with a diverse cross-section of employees to get a more personal and detailed perspective. This can uncover insights that broader surveys might miss. 📝 Anonymous Feedback Channels: Ensure there are anonymous ways for employees to provide feedback. This encourages honesty and helps identify issues that employees might be hesitant to discuss openly. 📝 Feedback Integration: Don’t just collect feedback—act on it. Regularly review the feedback and make necessary adjustments to your L&D programs. Communicate these changes to employees to show that their input is valued and acted upon. 📝 Continuous Monitoring: Use analytics tools to continuously monitor engagement and performance metrics. This provides ongoing data to help refine and improve your L&D initiatives. Integrating these feedback mechanisms will not only enhance the effectiveness of your L&D programs but also boost employee engagement and satisfaction. When employees see that their feedback leads to tangible changes, they are more likely to be invested in the learning process. Have any innovative ways to incorporate feedback into L&D? Drop your tips in the comments! ⬇️ #LearningAndDevelopment #EmployeeEngagement #ContinuousImprovement #FeedbackLoop #ProfessionalDevelopment #TrainingInnovation

I once had a team of insecure overachiever analysts. They were introverts, brilliant at their work, and incredibly nice people. Too nice, as it turned out. They were so nice that they wouldn't tell each other what was really going on. Instead, they'd come to me: "So-and-so is doing this thing that's really annoying. Can you do something about it?" I got sick of everyone putting me in the middle instead of taking ownership of their issues with each other. So I did something about it. I brought in trainers from the Center for Creative Leadership to teach everyone the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) model (link in comments). The process was simple but powerful: 1. Describe the situation so everyone's on the same page. 2. Share the specific behavior you observed (no judgments about intent). 3. Explain the impact on you or the other people in the room. We started with positive feedback to create safety. We practiced saying things like, “When you walked into that meeting with a big smile, the impact was that it put everyone at ease." Everyone started spotlighting the good that was happening, and that encouraged more thoughtful interactions. Then, we practiced constructive feedback—harder, but even more important. The impact was almost immediate. Soon, I heard people asking each other, "Hey, can I give you an SBI?" The framework made it safe. More importantly, we came to give and receive feedback for the gift that it is. That ability to give and receive honest, thoughtful feedback is the foundation of every healthy team culture. But it's a skill we rarely train for. I’m curious: What frameworks have you used in your organizations to create a culture of feedback?

When Good Training Fails: A Neuroscience Wake-Up Call I will never forget walking into that tech company’s sleek office. Awards lined the lobby, the energy was palpable. Their HR director welcomed me with a familiar mix of enthusiasm and frustration. "We have done everything," she said. "Leadership programmes, feedback training, even brought in the high-profile consultants. Our managers nod along, take notes… and then nothing changes." I smiled. I had heard this before. This was not a training issue. It was a brilliant team stuck in the oldest trap in organisational development: assuming that knowing better automatically leads to doing better. When I spoke with their team leaders, the real story emerged: - I know I should give more feedback, but by Thursday, I am drowning - It feels awkward to bring it up. - I tried, but it felt forced. Then one engineering lead said something I will never forget: "You are teaching us to swim, then dropping us back in the desert and wondering why we are not practising." This was not about willpower. The environment was not designed to support the behaviour. So we changed that. +  We embedded 7-minute "connection checkpoints" into Monday meetings. + Placed simple "feedback cards" on desks. + Blocked out sacred time in calendars labelled "Team Investment Time". + Created peer accountability with one powerful weekly question: + "What conversation did you have that made someone stronger?" Months later, I received a video of a wall filled with anonymous notes of meaningful feedback. 😊 One note simply read: "For the first time, I feel seen here." 💙 Behaviour change is not about what we teach. It is about what people return to. Our brains need environments that make the right behaviours the easy ones. 🧠 So I will leave you with this: What behaviour are you trying to change in your organisation? And what have you done to redesign the environment to support it? Start with what matters. Use neuroscience to uncover the barriers. Then reimagine and reinforce the environment around the behaviour. Because we cannot expect people to change if everything around them stays the same. 💡

Training without culture change is why your new processes never stick. I've spent a decade training product teams, and I can tell you exactly which ones succeed: the ones where leadership built the infrastructure and culture to support what we taught. Here's what I've learned. Most organizations approach training backwards. They bring everyone together, deliver great content, get enthusiastic feedback.... and then send people back into systems that punish exactly what they just learned. A team learns to run small experiments? Their planning process still demands detailed 12-month roadmaps. They're taught to validate with customers? There's no time allocated, no research budget, no clear way to feed insights back into decisions. They embrace evidence-based prioritization? Leadership still overrides everything based on gut feel. The pattern is clear: Training + Culture = Capability. The teams that actually change their habits have three things in place: 1. Decision rights: People can actually act on what they learned without eighteen approval layers. 2. Time and resources: Customer conversations and experiments aren't "nice to haves" squeezed between meetings. They're built into how work happens. 3. Leadership alignment: Managers reinforce new behaviors in roadmap reviews, retrospectives, and how they talk about success. This is why it's great to START with the managers and senior leadership when making an organizational change. Before you invest in another training program, look hard at your organization. Are you set up to support what you're about to teach? Do your processes, metrics, and incentives actually reward the behaviors you want? If not, you're not building capability. You're just running expensive theater. What have you seen work, or not work, when rolling out new ways of working?

Everytime I talk to a team looking to get better at feedback - the first place everyone wants training is the mechanics of giving feedback. It’s like we imagine if we can be perfect at giving it, then we’ll magically create a culture of it. It is my experience that you have to create the emotional bandwidth, imagination, and motivation for feedback before you create the skills for doing it right. I generally start by helping people see the contradictions in their desire and relationship to feedback. Their own personal reactions to it. Then you train how to recieve feedback. An appetite to recieve will always go way further than the ability to give. An appetite to receive across your team will relieve the pressure of having to give feedback exactly right. So the next time you or your team want to develop a feedback culture. Find people to train you who get that. I watch so many places waste money on trainings that focus on mechanics and do nothing to change the dynamics of a team.

When manager training is just a calendar of workshops, it's confuses activity with enablement. Here's what you can do about it... Content is just content if it's not deployed at the right moment, for the right manager, against the right challenge. When an L&D content factory runs in isolation, it rarely creates the opportunities to apply the learning and actually improve skills. Development at it's worst is one-size-fits-all. Static manager academies, generic leadership tracks, and 1 program delivered to 200 managers with 200 different problems. Development at it's best is surgical. That doesn't mean complicated; it means targeted. Here's an example: At Converse, training took the form of group coaching labs that were part learning and part diagnosis. Managers didn't discuss feedback in theory, they brought their real team feedback into the room, analyzed it together, practiced responses, and left with a plan tied to their specific gaps. The experience was anchored in live data and designed to reduce individual performance friction vs. trying to address abstract manager skill gaps. Before launching your next manager training: 1️⃣ Identify the specific challenge managers are facing right now. Are they new to role, giving feedback for the first time, scaling a team quickly? 2️⃣ Bring real data into the experience, such as upward feedback, engagement scores, or attrition trends. Don't have any? Start collecting it! 3️⃣ Create a mechanism after the session to help them apply it in their own context so they can shrink the knowing-doing gap. Development works when its anchored to expectations, triggered by feedback, and tailored to the manager in front of you. When multiple cylinders of the enablement engine are running together, performance improves. The goal shouldn't be more manager training, it has to be better manager performance. #managerenablementengine

🔍 Feedback isn’t just a moment, it’s a culture. In my latest blog “The Power of Feedback: Growing Together Through Giving and Receiving” for Advanced Learning Partnerships, I explore how feedback, when grounded in trust, intentionality, and clear structure, can transform teams and learning. 💬 Here’s a quick take: - Feedback that’s timely, specific, and behavior-focused, rather than vague or personal, drives growth. - Without a foundation of psychological safety, feedback becomes tense instead of productive. - The simple framework SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) helps turn observations into meaningful dialogue. - Real practice matters: when feedback is embedded in routines, it becomes habit and culture, not just an event. 📌 If you lead or support teams in education, tech, or systems change: keep asking your people (and yourself): - Are we creating the environment where honest feedback is welcome? - Do we talk about feedback, or live it in how we lead and learn together? - Are we using structures that shift feedback from judge-and-fix to partner-and-grow? Advanced Learning Partnerships, Inc (ALP) Fayette County Public Schools (KY) Amy Johns #ProfessionalGrowth #EducationLeadership #ChangeManagement