Feedback

Level 1: Building a Toolbox for Success

Feedback – friend or foe? There are few words that are so loaded with apprehension and fear, yet so necessary for personal development, whether you are the feedback deliverer or the feedback recipient. The problem is that few of us have been taught the fundamentals of giving effective feedback. Feedback is essential for learning and professional growth, yet these conversations can be difficult to navigate. Concerns about damaging relationships, provoking defensiveness, or discouraging learners, combined with time pressures and uncertainty about what to say, can lead faculty to soften, delay, or avoid important feedback. Transforming Feedback Conversations: Building a Toolbox for Success is an interactive workshop that equips faculty with practical strategies to approach feedback with greater clarity and confidence, create psychologically safe conversations, and support meaningful reflection, learning, and change.

Level 2: Giving Challenging Feedback

Even experienced faculty can find feedback conversations challenging when concerns involve sensitive behaviours, professionalism, repeated performance difficulties, or strong learner reactions. This advanced, highly interactive workshop explores practical strategies for navigating difficult topics, responding to defensiveness and emotion, and maintaining both psychological safety and accountability. Through facilitated discussion and role-play, participants will have the opportunity to practise applying these approaches, receive feedback, and expand their toolbox for managing complex feedback conversations with greater confidence and skill.

Level 3: Building a Feedback Culture

Some feedback conversations carry more weight than others — and as a leader, how you handle them sets the tone for your entire team or division. Building a Feedback Culture is designed for those in leadership positions: division heads, program directors, and faculty leads who are responsible not just for having difficult conversations, but for shaping an environment where honest feedback is normal, safe, and expected.

This session goes beyond individual conversation skills to focus on culture-building itself — how leaders can:

• Model vulnerability — leaders who welcome feedback on their own performance give others permission to do the same
• Normalize feedback as routine — building regular, low-stakes feedback moments into everyday team interactions, not just formal reviews
• Create psychological safety — ensuring people can raise concerns or admit mistakes without fear of blame or retaliation
• Address performance and conflict directly — navigating the harder conversations that leaders can't delegate away
• Reinforce the behaviour they want to see — recognizing and rewarding good feedback-giving and feedback-receiving when it happens

Sometimes a workshop isn't enough — you need support with a specific, real conversation you're facing. The Targeted Feedback Coaching Program pairs you with a coach from our Targeted Coaching roster who specializes in feedback, offering focused, one-on-one guidance for the situation in front of you. Whether you're preparing for a challenging conversation, working through a pattern that isn't landing the way you'd like, or supporting a colleague through a difficult moment, this program is available on request — including for faculty navigating performance concerns.