Feedback Workshops
Build the confidence to give and receive feedback that actually helps people improve.
Good feedback is a skill, not a talent
Clear, fair feedback is one of the most powerful ways to support and develop others.
When we care about someone, we want them to grow, and regular feedback is one of the simplest ways to make that happen.
We help you build the confidence and skill to give and receive feedback that makes a difference.
Better Conversations Training – Allied Bakeries Case Study
What will I learn?
This workshop is for you if:
- You care about your people and their development.
- You want to help others improve and succeed.
- You’re looking to make your feedback more effective.
- You want to feel more confident having feedback conversations.
- You’re open to having conversations that support growth.
You will learn to:
- Receive feedback well and give challenging feedback with care.
- Deliver feedback that drives real change.
- Support and develop your people in a way that sticks.
- Build a culture where feedback is open, honest and focused on improvement.
The workshop includes:
Session 1:
What do we mean by “learning moments”?
Every task has one of two outcomes. We ‘win’ or we have a ‘learning moment’. Feedback is the best opportunity to learn from our mistakes and figure out how to do things differently going forward.
Session 2:
What stops us providing feedback right now?
Giving and receiving feedback can be nerve-wracking. This group discussion helps you to identify and overcome exactly what stops you from asking for and providing honest feedback.
Session 3:
Are you a sponge or a rock when it comes to feedback?
When you receive feedback do you have a growth (sponge) mindset or a fixed (rock) mindset? You’ll discover how to get yourself into the right frame of mind to be receptive, open, and ready to absorb.
Session 4:
The feedback triangle
You’ll discover what the feedback triangle is, and how it applies to your workplace.
Session 5:
What to say
You’ll learn two models that will enable you to provide high-quality feedback and create actionable learning moments that leave a lifelong impression.
Session 6:
How to say it
There’s little point giving feedback if it makes the recipient switch off. We’ll cover the three behaviours that ensure your feedback is a force for positive change.
Session 7: Difficult scenarios that make providing feedback challenging
Giving feedback isn’t always easy. In fact, it can be a source of serious conflict. You’ll work through scenarios to help you prepare for those difficult conversations.
Session 8:
Demonstration and practice sessions
You’ll get a chance to put what you’ve learned into practice and see what good feedback looks like in action.
Session 9:
What’s next?
Learning how to give and receive excellent feedback is good, but you need to put it into practice and make it a habit. You’ll learn all you need to do this in simple, actionable steps.
What changes will you see after the workshop?
Individual changes
- Use other people’s feedback to learn and grow.
- Provide regular useful positive feedback which builds trust.
- Feedback that is clear, kind and actionable.
Organisational changes
- Build a culture of open, everyday feedback.
- Encourage feedback in all directions, across all levels.
- Reduce politics, drama and gossip.
Feedback Workshops – FAQ’s
From giving feedback to creating everyday learning
Feedback is one of the most useful tools a manager has. Done well, it helps people understand what they’re doing well, see what they may not be able to see for themselves and make changes that help them grow.
Yet feedback often becomes something we save for when things go wrong.
Managers notice great work but don’t always say anything. They put off developmental feedback because they don’t want to demotivate someone. Employees become nervous when a manager says they have some “feedback”. And sometimes the feedback itself is so vague that the person has no idea what they should do differently afterwards.
At Juicing the Lemon, we want feedback to become a more normal part of how people work together.
That means becoming better at giving feedback and receiving it. It means noticing what people are doing, being specific about what matters and creating enough trust for people to hear things that may sometimes be uncomfortable.
Our approach is practical:
Notice → Say it → Make it specific → Explain why it matters → Listen → Learn → Do something differently → Repeat.
Because ultimately, feedback is only useful if it helps someone see something, learn something or do something differently.
Why is feedback so important for helping people learn and grow?
Because we can’t always see ourselves as other people see us.
We may not realise that something we’re doing particularly well is having a positive impact. Equally, we may be unaware that a behaviour, habit or way of communicating is making our work less effective.
Good feedback helps hold up the mirror.
It can say: “Keep doing this. It makes a difference.”
Or: “There’s something happening here that I think would be useful for you to see.”
That makes feedback an important part of development.
In our workshops, we sometimes see managers make an interesting connection between Care and Dare.
Care can mean supporting, encouraging and recognising people. But caring about someone’s development can also require us to Dare—to challenge, stretch and tell them something they may need to hear.
One manager at The Best Connection recognised this very clearly. She reflected that she was sometimes reluctant to give her people enough Dare, but that challenging them more could actually help them develop.
That’s an important shift.
Development isn’t about constantly pointing out what’s wrong. Nor is it about protecting people from every uncomfortable message.
It’s about helping people understand themselves and giving them useful information they can do something with.
If you care about someone’s development, sometimes you have to be prepared to tell them something that will help them grow.
Why do managers often avoid giving feedback — even when they know it would be helpful?
Often because giving feedback involves risk.
What if they take it badly? What if I knock their confidence? What if they disagree? What if they become defensive? What if it affects our relationship?
Managers can therefore find themselves waiting.
Perhaps they’ll mention it next time.
Perhaps it isn’t significant enough.
Perhaps the person already knows.
Sometimes those are perfectly reasonable judgements.
But there’s another question worth asking:
“Am I choosing not to give this feedback because that’s genuinely the right thing for this person—or because giving it makes me uncomfortable?”
Those aren’t the same thing.
This is where we come back to Care + Dare.
Too much Dare without enough Care can leave people feeling criticised rather than developed.
But too much Care without enough Dare can mean we avoid giving people information that would genuinely help them.
We saw managers exploring exactly this tension in our Best Connection workshop, including the difficulty of rebuilding expectations once standards have been allowed to drift.
Good feedback therefore requires judgement.
Kindness isn’t about avoiding every uncomfortable message. Sometimes kindness means caring enough to say what needs to be said.
What makes feedback genuinely useful rather than just praise or criticism?
Useful feedback helps somebody understand what you noticed and why it mattered.
Compare: “Great job.”
with: “You handled that client conversation really well because you slowed things down, listened to their concern and then gave them a really clear answer.”
Both are positive.
But the second tells me much more.
I know what you noticed. I understand why you valued it. And importantly, I know what behaviour I could repeat.
We sometimes describe the first type in our workshops as fast-food feedback.
It gives us a quick hit: Great job. Well done. Brilliant meeting.
There’s nothing wrong with that. We all appreciate hearing it.
But higher-quality feedback takes a little more effort because the manager needs to have been paying attention.
And that’s an important part of feedback that can easily be overlooked.
The quality of your feedback is limited by the quality of your observation.
If I haven’t really noticed how someone handled the customer, contributed to the meeting or approached a piece of work, it’s difficult for me to give them meaningful feedback about it.
Good feedback therefore starts before we open our mouths.
It starts with noticing.
What did they actually do? What worked? What difference did it make? What would I like them to keep doing?
One delegate at The Best Connection recognised this during the workshop. She talked about saying things like “quality, well done” and worrying that it didn’t sound as genuine as she intended. Her takeaway was to elaborate—to explain what she’d actually noticed and why it was good.
One of the simplest ways to improve feedback is therefore to add one word:
because.
“That was really effective because…”
Now you have to explain what you saw.
So rather than thinking of feedback simply as a communication skill, we also see it as an attention skill.
Managers who give great feedback tend to notice more. They pay attention to the behaviours, choices and small things people are doing that are helping—or getting in the way.
Then they make the invisible visible by talking about it.
Notice it → Name it → Explain why it mattered.
“Great job” feels good for a moment. Great feedback helps someone understand what to repeat.
Why does positive feedback matter just as much as developmental feedback?
Because people need to know what is working as well as what needs to change.
Yet positive feedback is surprisingly easy to leave unsaid.
A manager hears a great customer call and thinks: That was excellent.
Someone handles a difficult situation calmly: She dealt with that brilliantly.
A team member produces a really strong piece of work: That’s exactly what I needed.
The manager has noticed all three.
But the employee hasn’t necessarily heard any of it.
We talk about this in our workshops as not expecting people to mind-read.
Thinking something positive about someone’s performance isn’t the same as telling them.
One simple technique we sometimes use is to give managers five counters. Put them in one pocket at the beginning of the day and move one to the other pocket each time you give someone genuine positive feedback.
It isn’t a reward system for the employee.
In fact, one Best Connection delegate described a manager who had misunderstood the exercise and physically handed the counters to employees—which made the feedback feel less genuine.
The counters are simply a private reminder to the manager:
Am I actually saying the positive things I’m noticing?
And the quality still matters.
The aim isn’t to distribute five random compliments before going home. It’s to become more observant and articulate about what people are doing well.
Don’t make people mind-read. If you’ve noticed something worth recognising, say it.
How do you give positive feedback without it sounding fake or formulaic?
Make it genuine and make it specific.
People can often tell the difference between somebody giving feedback because they think they ought to and somebody who has genuinely noticed something.
This came through clearly in our Best Connection workshop.
When we explored receiving positive feedback, delegates talked about how it can sometimes feel “cringey” or disingenuous.
That’s another reason specificity matters.
Compare: “Great contribution in the meeting.”
with: “I thought your contribution in the meeting was really useful because you stayed calm, explained the issue clearly and gave us information we could actually make a decision with.”
The second feels different because there is evidence behind it.
You’ve paid attention.
This doesn’t mean every piece of feedback needs to become a five-minute speech. Sometimes one sentence is enough.
“I really appreciated what you did there because…”
“That worked particularly well because…”
“One thing I noticed you doing really effectively was…”
There’s also an important distinction between recognition and flattery.
The purpose isn’t simply to make somebody feel good by saying something nice.
It’s to help them understand something valuable about their contribution.
Specific feedback feels more genuine because it shows you were paying attention.
Why can receiving feedback be just as difficult as giving it?
Because receiving feedback can make us feel exposed.
And that applies even to positive feedback.
In one of our workshop exercises, we asked delegates what they tend to do when somebody gives them a compliment or positive feedback.
Some said they cringe. Others talked about playing it down.
“Oh, it was nothing.”
“Anyone would have done it.”
“It wasn’t really me.”
It’s almost as though somebody has handed us a small bomb and our immediate instinct is to defuse it.
But think about what that can be like for the person giving the feedback.
They noticed something. They thought about it. They made the effort to tell us.
And we’ve just handed it back.
So in the exercise, we give people one very simple instruction:
Just say thank you.
Don’t dissect it. Don’t explain it away. Don’t immediately reciprocate.
Receive it.
The same principle becomes more challenging when the feedback is developmental.
Our instinct may be to explain, justify, defend or demonstrate why the other person hasn’t understood.
Sometimes that context genuinely matters.
But if we’re busy constructing our defence while the other person is still speaking, we’re not really receiving the feedback.
We encourage people to become curious first.
What are they seeing that I may not be seeing?
You don’t ultimately have to agree with every piece of feedback you receive.
But there may still be something useful to learn from it.
Being good at feedback isn’t only about becoming better at giving it. It’s also about becoming easier to give feedback to.
How do you give developmental feedback without putting someone straight into defence mode?
Start with your intention.
Are you trying to prove that somebody did something wrong—or help them understand something that could make them more effective?
People can often feel the difference.
Then be specific.
Talk about what you’ve actually observed rather than making a judgement about the person.
There is a significant difference between: “You’re careless.”
and: “There were three errors in the figures you sent yesterday. Can we look at what happened?”
One labels the person.
The other gives you something you can discuss.
It also matters what has been happening in the relationship before this moment.
In our workshops, we talk about people sometimes being less “Teflon-coated” than managers imagine. Criticism may land harder than we realise.
That doesn’t mean avoiding developmental feedback.
It means building working relationships in which feedback isn’t only something people hear when they’ve done something wrong.
Listen too.
Ask for their perspective. Be prepared to discover something you don’t know.
And remember that understanding somebody’s explanation doesn’t automatically mean lowering the standard.
You can listen and still say: “I understand what happened. We still need this to be different next time.”
That combination of listening and clarity is important.
Good developmental feedback isn’t about making the message painless. It’s about making it useful enough for somebody to do something with it.
Should you adapt how you give feedback to different people?
Yes—but adapting your approach doesn’t mean changing the standard.
Different people may find different approaches easier to hear and work with.
One person may appreciate you getting quickly to the point. Someone else may want more context. Another may want time to reflect before responding.
Insights Discovery® can give managers a useful language for considering those differences.
But we don’t advocate a formula such as: “This is how you give feedback to someone with a Fiery Red preference.”
Everyone has access to all four colour energies, and behaviour is influenced by far more than colour preference.
Instead, Insights can help us become more curious.
How does this person prefer to communicate?
What have I learned from working with them?
What might help them hear and use this feedback?
This distinction came through clearly in our Best Connection workshop. Managers explored how they could adapt their approach to different people while keeping their standards and expectations consistent.
That’s the important part.
Fairness doesn’t always require identical conversations.
Same standard. Different human being.
Or, as we often put it at JTL:
Flex the style. Hold the standard.
How do you make feedback an everyday habit rather than something saved for reviews or when something goes wrong?
Start by making feedback smaller and more frequent.
If the only time a manager says “Can I give you some feedback?” is when there’s a problem, it isn’t surprising that people become nervous when they hear the word.
Over time the organisation teaches people:
Feedback = trouble.
We want something different.
Notice what worked and say it.
Pick up a small issue before it becomes a pattern.
Ask someone what they thought went well.
Ask what they’d do differently next time.
Invite feedback on your own management.
At the end of our Best Connection workshop, consistent positive feedback was one of the practical behaviours delegates identified as something they wanted to take back into their day-to-day management.
That’s where small habits matter.
At JTL, we often talk about the 5% Flex: rather than leaving a workshop determined to transform everything, identify one small behavioural change you can practise.
For feedback that might be:
Say one positive thing you’ve noticed rather than merely thinking it.
Add “because” to make your feedback more specific.
Ask one more question before reaching a conclusion.
Raise a small issue sooner.
Ask your team for feedback on something you’ve done.
Say “thank you” rather than deflecting positive feedback.
None is revolutionary.
That’s rather the point.
Repeated often enough, small feedback behaviours start to change what feels normal within a team.
Don’t make feedback an event. Make it part of how the team works.
When is a Feedback Workshop not the right solution?
A Feedback Workshop can help people become more confident giving and receiving feedback, make their feedback more specific, understand their own reactions and develop habits that support more open conversations.
But a feedback workshop can’t compensate for everything else happening in an organisation.
If expectations are unclear, managers aren’t dealing with poor performance, people don’t trust one another, senior leaders react badly to challenge or employees have repeatedly given feedback that is then ignored, teaching another feedback model isn’t going to solve the underlying problem.
There may also be serious performance, conduct or grievance issues that require appropriate management and HR processes rather than an informal feedback conversation.
And culture matters.
An organisation can’t credibly tell employees to become more open to feedback if its leaders become defensive whenever somebody challenges them.
That’s why we don’t see a feedback culture as simply having a model that everyone knows how to use.
It’s what happens when people become increasingly willing to notice, say, listen, learn and act.
At JTL, we therefore start by understanding what is happening now.
Are managers avoiding feedback?
Is positive feedback missing?
Is feedback too vague to be useful?
Are people defensive about receiving it?
Does feedback happen once a year rather than every day?
Or is the real problem somewhere else entirely?
Sometimes a workshop is the right intervention. Sometimes leaders need to change their own behaviour first. Sometimes feedback skills need to sit alongside wider management development.
The starting point should be the feedback problem you’re trying to solve, not the workshop you’re trying to buy.