Feedback is the fuel of a thriving development and performance culture. We grow when we get specific, actionable insights about how to build our capabilities. Feedback takes courage, commitment, and time—but it matters, especially in a culture like McKinsey, where accelerated growth is the norm.
Sustaining the habit of frequent feedback takes work. It is hard to deliver—and hard to hear—difficult messages, which is why people tend to shy away from these conversations altogether. With many generations of colleagues, we had relied on informal apprenticeship to reinforce the skill of exchanging feedback. But as we looked more closely at our learning approach, we felt we could do more to teach and reinforce the skills of giving and receiving feedback in the flow of colleagues’ day-to-day experience.
Our hypothesis was that if we could develop our colleagues’ receiving feedback skills, we could tap into confidence and motivation which could have outsize impact on our feedback goals. The core of the idea was to build our colleagues’ confidence bit by bit. Rather than trying to bring them through a masterclass in tough feedback, we encouraged them to start small and try one step in the process at a time. Get comfortable asking, get used to reflecting and digesting, then do something with it. And by the end of the process, we found that many more people had the scaffolding in place to continue building this muscle over time.
On the foundation of learning science and academic insights about receiving feedback, we built the “Receive to Grow” pilot. Here’s how it worked:
- A four-week email campaign delivered one “challenge assignment” per week (an example of a goal-based, action-learning strategy).
- Each challenge assignment reinforced a core receiving-feedback skill by using insightful questions, challenging emotional reactions, deciding what input to act on and how, and reflection.
- Emails were from leaders known to our pilot audience—a signal that this was an important initiative—and were delivered through a new technology that gave us deep insight into engagement.
Why didn’t we build a classroom offering? Had we opted for a traditional offering, we could have gone deeper into the content, giving participants an in-depth understanding of each feedback practice. But that is often a classic misstep of L&D functions—focusing on what you want to tell a learner, instead of what they need to do; building their understanding, instead of their capabilities. The objective wasn’t to build knowledge—it was to practice. Our colleagues needed to practice having feedback conversations, ideally in the flow of their work. They needed not one or two, but as many feedback conversations as we could create, and that feedback had to matter. It needed to be about their real work, from their actual teammates.
We thought the campaign would help, but even we were surprised by the inspiring results: more than 88 percent of participants engaged in the pilot. We heard many positive comments, including:
“My conversation went well, and I would 100 percent do it again. Being reactive in nature is always going to happen, so taking the time to step back and separate feeling from fact is useful.”
“I appreciate the distinction of nice versus kind . . . [I’ve] realized how often I fear being viewed as not nice, which has prevented me from being clear in my feedback to others.”
“That one question opened up an entire conversation that might not have occurred otherwise."
In fact, it wasn’t just a few conversations that happened: our pilot spurred 250 feedback conversations that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Today we are rolling out the campaign globally. We’re building skills without taking people out of their work or away from their teams. Through repeated practice, we’re helping colleagues internalize scripts for productive feedback dialogues. We’re building their tolerance for tough conversations and, importantly, reinforcing our feedback culture. We’re reminding our colleagues that they don’t have to be reactive—or afraid—and we’re helping them reframe their assumptions about feedback. It is not something that happens to you; rather, it is an important input that can shine a light on your blind spots and help you to find ways to address them.
Successful people initiatives are equal parts culture and capability building. Learning, when based on robust learning science, can be a powerful bridge.