Five Praises Before One Critique

One of the best lessons I ever learned about feedback was simple: find five genuine things to praise before offering one criticism. It changes how you look at someone’s work and makes it easier to preserve what is already good. With designers, I also try to explain the problem before prescribing the solution, so the answer still belongs to them.

One of the best lessons I ever learned about feedback was simple: find five genuine things to praise before offering one criticism. It changes how you look at someone’s work and makes it easier to preserve what is already good. With designers, I also try to explain the problem before prescribing the solution, so the answer still belongs to them.

Years ago, I worked with a brilliant project manager who taught me quite a bit about giving feedback. She had been a teacher before moving into instructional design, and you could see that background in the way she worked with people, especially junior members of the team.

One thing she told me has stuck with me ever since: before giving someone one piece of criticism, try to find five things you can genuinely praise.

Five to one. Sounds easy until you actually try it.

Criticising is, unfortunately, quite fun. Give any of us a piece of work and we can probably find ten things wrong with it in a few minutes. When you are the more experienced person in the room, it is even easier to start unloading everything you know onto someone. Whether that actually helps them is another question.

There is a way of thinking in Japan that people tend to fall somewhere between shikatte sodatsu hito (叱って育つ人), people who grow when they are pushed or corrected, and homete sodatsu hito (褒めて育つ人), people who grow more through praise and encouragement. Obviously we are not that binary, but I have found it a useful measuring stick. Some people genuinely thrive on blunt criticism. I am definitely not one of them.

The 5:1 idea forces me to look at the work differently. Instead of immediately hunting for what is wrong, I have to understand what the person was trying to do, what worked, and what is worth preserving before I open my mouth about what did not.

With designers, there is another thing I try very hard not to do: design the work for them.

“Move this three pixels left.”
“Make this bigger.”

There are times when that level of direction is necessary, but if it becomes your default, at some point you are no longer mentoring a designer. You are using them as your mouse.

If I give you the answer, it will be my answer. You might get there faster, but I have also taken away your chance to discover your own. There is not much growth in that.

So these days, I try to give feedback on the problem before prescribing the solution. Explain what is not working, give enough context, then let the designer decide what to do with that information. Ideally, they come back with something I would not have thought of myself.

I am not always good at this. When three deadlines collide and something needs to go out today, my feedback can become very specific, very quickly. Reality is reality.

Right now, I have another chance to practise all of this while working alongside a designer with less experience than me. Funny how something a colleague told me years ago is still sitting somewhere in the back of my head every time I open a design file and start typing a comment.

*Illustration by Masantocreative on Unsplash

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