One of the most important roles of a leader is to provide feedback to the individuals in the group.  Upcraft (1982) cited in Effective Leadership in Adventure Programming (1997) defined feedback as; “exchange of verbal and non-verbal responses among group members based on commonly observed behaviour”. By providing feedback, the group members can develop the skills that they have learnt and work on improving weaker areas. The need to provide feedback and the style in which it is given will depend entirely on the group and what they are aiming to achieve. On a recent trip to the Lake District I found myself leading a group of four young adults who hoped to go for their ML training in the near future. It was essential that I provided thorough feedback on all aspects of their leadership at the appropriate time so that they could take the most from it.

Crinkle Crags

Priest and Gass (1997) highlighted 8 points to make feedback most effective. Whilst on the top of Crinkle Crags I tried to follow some of these points when providing feedback to one group member who seemed to be struggling slightly with taking the best route down to the saddle at the top of The Band, our descent route back to the valley.

Firstly, Priest and Gass (1997) suggested that feedback should be descriptive and not evaluative. Whilst on the top of Crinkle Crags I was able to say ‘you keep taking us away from the path but you’re following a bearing. Do you have a route in mind?’ This gave the group member time to think about why they were taking us away from the path and whether or not it was the best decision. We continued along the path a little further before leaving it again and heading across a large area of scree. As we came off the scree, I stopped the group and asked the leader whether or not he thought it was the best route to have taken a group across. This provided very specific feedback as well as it being immediate. By providing feedback straight away and making it specific it gives the leader time to analyse the decision they just took and think about a possible better option.  This was also a useful time to involve the group and see what they would have done at that point. It was important however, to make sure that the feedback that they were providing was useful to the leader and it didn’t come across as though the group were ganging up on him.

Whilst I provided regular feedback throughout the day to the whole group, I think that one of the mistakes I made was stopping to provide it every time. This meant that the day took a lot longer than planned and we were unable to climb Bow Fell. I felt that most of what I was saying was being taken in, however, there were times later in the week when I felt that some of the points I had brought up had been forgotten. This may have been due to the group becoming tired and the deteriorating weather. Overall I think that everyone learnt something, myself included.

 References

Priest, S, Gass, M, Effective Leadership in Adventure Programming,  Human Kinetics, 1997