Level One - Lesson 18
Giving and Receiving Feedback
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Hello there and welcome back to the Judge Program for Star Wars™: Unlimited - Level One certification track lessons.
As always, I’m your host Jonah, and in this lesson, we’re going to be talking about one of the most important things in your judging career - giving and receiving feedback. Wanting to see the game and the community improve is a trait that’s common among most judges. There also aren’t formal structures of authority - a judge who is the head judge at one event may be a member of your team at the next.
This means that there aren’t formal channels of feedback, which means that for us to improve, we need to deliver feedback to each other. Of course, delivering feedback, especially critical feedback, can be a tricky proposition. Telling someone that they’re not good enough, even as diplomatically as possible, can still make someone’s day worse.
We’re going to start this lesson about receiving feedback before we talk about delivering it. When receiving feedback, it is all about the mindset you are receiving the feedback with. Receiving feedback is not easy, and I still get nervous when someone wants to give me some, even if they tell me it’s going to be good feedback.
Of course, we’re also going to talk about how to give effective feedback - feedback can be emotionally impactful, and if you aren’t careful when and how you deliver feedback, your subject may not be able to accept or process it, or even reject it entirely, which can limit the effectiveness of other feedback in the future.
We’re mostly going to be talking about explicit feedback in this lesson, as opposed to implicit feedback. Explicit feedback is when the giver intends to give feedback and to change or reinforce the way that the subject behaves. Implicit feedback is, well, everything else. When a player says “Really?!” when you give a ruling, that’s some feedback that indicates that maybe your ruling or explanation wasn’t clear. “I’d like to speak to your boss.” is another form of feedback, and it’s probably not positive. The tone of voice, even a look can be feedback - but we’re not going to talk about that today.
Categories of Feedback
Before you seek out feedback, figure out what kind of feedback you want. While you may think that you’re open to any feedback, you’re probably looking for something a bit more specific than “any feedback” in general.
In Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, they break feedback down into three categories: Appreciation, Evaluation and Coaching.
Appreciation is acknowledging and motivating - “The way you explained that interaction to that player was really clever. I’m going to use that!”
Coaching is improving understanding - “Here’s how you can check a deck a little bit faster.”
Evaluation is comparing to standards - “I don’t think you’re quite ready to head judge a planetary qualifier because...”
Getting the right feedback at the wrong time can be frustrating. If you floor judge a qualifier and then ask your Head Judge “What can I do to get ready to Head Judge a planetary qualifier myself?” and they respond with “You did a fantastic job today - I was really impressed with how quickly you did your deck checks and explained the penalties for players, but I don’t think you’re quite ready to Head Judge a PQ yet.” you’re going to be frustrated, even though that could be very useful feedback for someone else.
Coaching and Evaluation can feel cold or distant, when sometimes what you need is acknowledgment or a pick-me-up (which is totally valid!). Appreciation and evaluation can leave you not knowing what to do to improve. Finally, coaching and appreciation can sometimes not provide enough context, to let you know where you stand, and what expectations you should have for yourself.
Sometimes, you’re not going to know what you need or what you’re looking for. Not knowing what you should do next to improve can indicate that you need coaching. Not knowing what you can do indicates that evaluation would probably be good for you. You may sometimes think that you want evaluation - you want someone you trust and respect to tell you where you stand in the program... but you might just be seeking appreciation - you want their approval and respect. It can be difficult to discern the two at times.
Receiving Feedback
Acknowledge The Feedback
Whenever someone gives you feedback, the first thing you should do is acknowledge it and appreciate it. When someone is explicitly giving you feedback, they’re doing it because they want you to improve - feedback is a gift - they didn’t have to tell you their observation. They didn’t have to open themselves up to a potential interpersonal conflict. Thanking them for their time and effort is important. Even if you later go on to disagree with that feedback, taking the time to make your evaluator feel appreciated is very helpful.
Second, explain your understanding of the feedback “It sounds like you think I’d be ready to Head Judge a Planetary Qualifier after I act as Floor Judge on a couple more, and maybe get some experience running a $1k?”
These two things buy you time to start processing the feedback so you can begin to get past an emotional response and can help clear up misconceptions.
Perception is Reality
When you observe something, until you get external information, that perception is your reality. The same is true for the feedback that is delivered to you. Someone might say something like “You didn’t mention that players shouldn’t ask for concessions - including that in your announcements could help prevent situations like that coming up in the future.”
Maybe you did announce them - so this feedback means that you weren’t loud enough or your language wasn’t clear. Maybe they were in the restroom when you made the announcement... There’s something you can learn from this, maybe not what they told you.
Something looking bad, even if it had good motivations, or you were instructed to take that action by someone else, still looked bad and it’s important to accept that as true. You won’t be able to fix everything, but accepting feedback and thinking about it, even if you think it doesn’t have an accurate base is important.
Types of Tilt
Sometimes you’ll react poorly to feedback - everyone will at some point get feedback that doesn’t sit well with them. Again, pulling from Thanks For the Feedback, we have a few different categories of tilt and reactions: Truth Triggers, Relationship Triggers, and Identity Triggers.
A truth trigger is when the feedback is factually incorrect. If your head judge comes up to you and says “Hey, you didn’t post the pairings last round. You need to be more on top of that.” but they had asked someone else to post the pairings, you might not react well.
Relationship triggers are when it’s hard to hear the feedback from that evaluator. If your mentor says “I don’t think you’re ready for L1 just yet.” it may be harder to hear from them than it would be to hear the exact same feedback from a player in one of your events. This may be because you expect a certain level of support or guidance from the evaluator or it could be that the evaluator holds a position of authority that amplifies your concern.
Identity triggers come from feedback that makes you question yourself on a fundamental level. You may see yourself as weak on rules and policy, but exceptional with your interactions with newer players - and then you get declined for a Demo role.
There’s not a lot you can do about these reactions before they occur. They’re not conscious responses - they’re triggers, not actions, to put it in game terms. However, knowing about them helps you understand your response - if you react negatively to feedback, these three ideas may be able to help you understand that reaction and where it came from.
Feedbacklash
When you’re not accepting feedback, there are a lot of ways that you might respond. If you’re able to take a second to evaluate yourself while receiving feedback, you may be able to more proactively stop yourself from deflecting feedback.
If your response to feedback is to point out what you did right or shift responsibility for your actions to someone else. If you attack parts of their feedback by saying something like “I gave a three-minute time extension not two” when the feedback was “your ruling was incorrect”. If you find faults in your evaluator's performance “you didn’t take down the pairings last round!”. If you change your tone and volume, if you start to avoid eye contact, or your body language changes...
These are all potential indicators that you’re not accepting the feedback. Like with the triggers, it’s hard to stop these, but once you notice that you’re not actually engaging with and accepting the feedback, you can break the cycle by saying something along the lines of “Hey, I’m having difficulty accepting this feedback right now. Thanks for sharing it with me, but I need some time to process it on my own.” That response still demonstrates that you’re taking the feedback seriously but that you’re moving forward with it and gives you time to breathe and process.
Delivering Critical Feedback
Now we turn to the other side of the equation. We’re focusing on critical feedback because positive feedback is generally much less fraught, and it’s easier to both give and receive - we like celebrating our friends and our peers, and we like being told about our successes. It’s the failures that are harder to deal with.
The best time to give feedback is before the subject will use that knowledge, so they can implement it and see how your recommendations work for them. It’s important to not immediately jump on someone when they make an error, as they may already be aware, and your feedback could compound it. You also do want to take into consideration if you’re the best person to deliver this feedback. If it’s feedback on how they can be doing their task better, and you’re not assigned to that task, maybe someone on their team, or their team lead would be a better fit. On the other hand, if you’re the only person who saw this, or maybe you worked with them and made the decision with them, you’re in a great place, because you’re coming from a similar perspective.
However, failure is how we grow - we can’t do better if we don’t know where we made our mistakes. When delivering critical feedback, there are three key elements that I recommend following, paraphrased from How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie: be honest and open, respect them and their perspective, and give them a path forward.
Be Honest and Open
I said at the beginning that feedback is a gift, and it’s given because your evaluator wants to see you succeed. When you’re giving feedback, make sure that it’s true. Sometimes, we’ll see someone make a mistake and want them to change their behavior, but we want them to do it because we care about the community or whatever thing they’re doing wrong, not because we care about them as a person.
Before you deliver feedback, make sure that you care about that person and that person’s success. This means that you might not be the right person to give feedback to everyone. If a judge at your local store makes an error, but you’re not close with them, find a mentor or a friend of theirs who has that relationship - someone who is invested in the judges personal success. If you’re not invested, your subject will be able to pick up on it. People are very good at sussing out when other people are being genuine or not. And while some people can accept critical feedback for the betterment of all, a lot need that personal motivation.
Show Respect
If you’re unsure how to do this, take a moment to provide praise and appreciation - don’t say meaningless nothings to soften the blow, but point out their strengths in the context of the feedback. Reinforce that you’re delivering this feedback because you want to see them succeed and because you believe in them. Don’t highlight their mistakes - work with them, lead them to the conclusion without telling them directly so they can see that they understand where the feedback is coming from.
You don’t need to call out defensive behavior if they start to react poorly - let them have that reaction, and let them take control of the process. Give them an opportunity to step back and away from the feedback, or let them explain their perspective, which may change how you frame your feedback.
If they disagree, work with them to find a foundation you agree upon, and build up from there, until you find the point where you disagree - and maybe you find that you don’t disagree, but are just using different terms, or maybe you recognize that you have different priorities, but you can respect their position.
By listening to them and engaging with them - by going back and forth, you’re demonstrating that you trust them and that your goal is to help them grow. Just dropping feedback on them and then vanishing doesn’t show that teamwork or community-minded mentality.
Show A Path Forward
Once you’ve delivered the feedback about their past actions, the next step is to look to the future. Actionable feedback is great - saying “hey, you seem to be struggling with triggered abilities. I recommend reading over this section in rules, and seeing if you can explain these questions and interactions to test your ability.” Ideally, you always have some guidance to give to the subject of your feedback.
However, sometimes we can identify that something needs to improve, but not how exactly. You might say, “the way you deliver rulings feels a little bit... awkward, but I don’t know what you can do to change it.” Ideally you’d give some feedback on posture or word usage or pacing with the ruling, but you might not have the experience to give that level of detailed feedback - this is frequently the case when you’re providing experience to a more experienced judge - something feels off, but you aren’t sure exactly what they can do to improve.
However, there are always tools and avenues to improvement. If you know of resources available, you can point them out - there are always the lessons here, but maybe you feel like a judge just doesn’t really understand what is impactful to a board state, so you can recommend some content creators who play games and break down their strategy. You can point them to a judge that you know is better than both of you at this and see if they might have some advice. You can issue a challenge to have them compete against their current self.
Furthermore, you can highlight their strengths that can help them in this area. If someone is really good with orderly systems, but their announcements are a mess, maybe they can apply an set of rules to making their announcements. Maybe somebody is really personable, but gets nervous during rulings - if they can focus on the human interaction and step away from the pressure of the judge call, they may be able to perform better.
Not everyone is going to work in the same way - we’re all different. One of the best ways to find success is to take your strengths and figure out how you can use them to support you in areas where you could some improvement. It might not be enough to make you a master, but it could make you more comfortable.
Finally, encourage them to come back to you for more feedback - after receiving evaluation or coaching, being able to come back a week or a month or a year later to the same person, and get that evaluation again to see where you’ve improved is deeply significant.
Wrapping Up
This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to feedback and evaluation. There’s a lot to be understood about how and when to deliver feedback, what formats work for people, and how to evaluate yourself effectively. We’ll talk about those in future lessons, in articles, or in broadcasts, but we wanted to make sure you had these basics as you start to judge at events.
Not only because receiving feedback and learning from your mistakes is crucial for your growth and development in the program, but because every time you give a ruling, especially when you’re issuing an infraction, you’re giving implicit feedback to the player. Understanding how people react to feedback, and understanding how you can help people in your community grow is a great way to improve this game.
We also didn’t talk much about positive feedback, which is equally important. While preventing errors and mishaps from occurring is crucial, it’s also very important to celebrate your friends and peers with their successes. Some people may not realize that they’re particularly proficient at something, and so if you learn a trick or a way to improve just by watching them, let them know that you picked up something from them! If they weren’t aware, they may be able to now refine whatever it was and improve!
Furthermore, if all we give to each other is critical feedback, it will quickly become a much sharper atmosphere - when someone comes to you to let know how you did, you’ll begin to dread being cut down to size. Having a mentor celebrate your accomplishments on the other hand, is a great feeling. Just make sure to not forget about critical feedback, even with your friends. Creating an echo-chamber of positivity can make it harder to receive critical feedback from people, especially outside your close network.
And with that - we’ve reached the end of the Level One lessons. The Level One Exam is next up on the schedule and is ready when you are. If you have any concerns, please take time to review the lessons. Everything on the exam will have been covered by these lessons, so there shouldn’t be any surprises. Also, don’t rush into testing - I know it’s exciting - that you’ve been waiting for so long, but if it’s late, take the time to rest up - you’ll be kicking yourself if you misread a question because you were tired.
As always, if you have any questions, comments, or insights, be sure to join the Judge Community Discord and make your voice heard. Until next time, good luck and have fun!