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Feedback: Your Most Powerful Tool as a Trainer (and How to Make it Work)
For trainers and facilitators who want help their participants grow faster by designing powerful moments of feedback in their workshops
What is the single most powerful thing you can do to grow as a learner (being it in your skills as a trainer, or you learners in any of the skills you are supporting them with)?
It’s for sure not reading more books (although we all do love our books). It’s not attending more conferences. It’s not watching more videos about facilitation techniques.
It is getting real, honest, structured feedback on your work – ideally from people who know what they are looking at.
I’ve been running Train the Trainer, Advanced Facilitation Trainings and diverse other trainings for trainers and facilitators since 2011. And across all those groups, here is one thing I see over and over again:
Feedback is where the biggest leaps happen.
Not the theory. Not the frameworks. Not the sparkly new ideas, nor shiny tools.
Instead, it’s that moment when someone holds up a mirror and shows you what you can’t see alone.
But not all feedback is equally useful!
Here are the most useful things I’ve learned over the years about what makes feedback actually work, and what makes it fall flat.
1. Feedback on what, exactly?
This might sound basic… but, in practice, it's where things go wrong most often.
Imagine you just delivered a session. And you ask your colleague or your participants: "How did you like it?"
You'll get polite answers. General impressions. "It was great, I really enjoyed it."
That's nice feedback. Nice… and fairly useless.
Richer feedback starts with a clear angle, and that angle comes from your goals. Both the learning goals for your session, AND your own personal growth goals as a trainer.
Better questions to ask might be:
- What were you actually trying to achieve, and how well did it land? (That is, what did participants actually learn?)
- What parts were most clear and memorable, and what parts slipped away?
- Which moments got them thinking actively or pulled them in, and when did the energy drop?
- What moment shifted their thinking, and what one didn’t land?
Questions like this reframe feedback from a general, vague feedback into a powerful learning mirror.
They show you how successfully you hit your goal in building insights or learnings for your participants. But they also give you a clear idea of what specific actions, tools, and moments led to those insights.
And it means you don't try to get feedback on everything at once: instead, you pick the angle that matters most for this specific session.
(That gap between what you covered and what participants actually learned? It is the whole subject of another article: Brain-Based Learning: 6 Tips to Make Your Training More Memorable
2. Keep feedback timely, and not overwhelming
Feedback works best when it comes right after the experience, while the details are still fresh & the memories still clear in everyone's mind.
But quantity matters just as much as timing.
There is a place for abundance, when you want many angles and perspectives, as long as everyone knows not all of it will stick. More often, though, piling it on backfires: people leave with plenty of ideas and no clarity on which one to act on.
So, if feedback gets abundant, make sure to give people space to pull out the main insight for themselves, with a little time to let it settle, asking a question like:
From everything that's been said, what's the one thing they want to take forward?
(As with everything in training, the answer to how abundant feedback should be is "it depends." But the important thing is to make intentional decisions… not autopilot habits.)
3. The dilemma between structure and depth
This is a real dilemma for any facilitator. And one I still struggle to navigate every single time.
If you structure feedback too tightly ("you have 1 minute each, stick to these 3 questions"), you lose the surprising insights that emerge organically. That unexpected observation from a peer that sometimes reframes everything.
But if you leave it fully open, the conversation never ends… and it can overwhelm the receiver and drain the energy. Especially when you do courses with a group of trainers (as I do), they can discuss feedback forever. And I mean that as a compliment, because it shows how much they care and how much they notice.
The sweet spot?
Enough structure to keep it focused, yet with enough space for depth to emerge.
It is a fluid balance that shifts depending on the group, the moment, and what just happened in the training room.
4. The order of who shares feedback when matters
In most of Trainers Toolbox courses, the person who delivered (and is not receiving feedback) reflects first on what they would do differently if they were to facilitate this mini-session again. Then the group shares. I go last.
There's intentionality behind this order:
- The person who delivered gets a moment of active self-reflection before hearing from others, which builds self-awareness.
- The group shares genuine, uninfluenced perspectives because the trainer (=me) hasn't shaped their thinking yet.
- I go last, so I don't accidentally influence what everyone else says.
This isn't the one and only right order. The point is, yet again, that the order you plan for feedback rounds should be intentional, not accidental.
5. Feedback without practice doesn't stick
(This one took me a while to fully appreciate and to implement strongly in Train the Trainer and other courses I run.)
But if they don’t get a chance to try again and feedback is not put into practice soon), and to actually put that insight into action, it stays an idea or an insight. When it’s put in action soon, it becomes a skill upgrade.
That's why the programs I design always build in repeated cycles of practice and feedback. Not one big delivery at the end, but many smaller ones throughout, so every round of feedback gets tested in the next round of practice.
It's slower. It takes more time. It means attendees often step into action before they are truly ready.
But it's how skills actually develop.
.
A moment to reflect
- How are you currently using feedback in your workshops, both as something you give to participants, and as something you receive on your own facilitation? Which of the five guidelines shared in this article would you experiment with next?
- What could you use more feedback on as a trainer?
- If your answer to that previous question is "quite a lot, actually", what would be your first next step to make that happen?
(Good feedback starts with good questions. If you want to sharpen that skill more broadly, see 5 Ways to Sharpen Questions in Your Facilitation
Want to go grow your skills as a trainer? Get abundant feedback, and immediately practice those new skills & insights?
Two paths inside Trainers Toolbox put feedback at the heart of the learning:
Train the Trainer is the full foundational journey: a comprehensive, science-based course where you build rock-solid foundations in workshop design and delivery, with feedback woven into every single module.
[TRAIN THE TRAINER: https://www.trainers-toolbox.com/train-the-trainer-course/]
Advanced Facilitation Training is a fast level-up for experienced trainers and facilitators: two intensive days packed with new tools, diverse perspectives, and the kind of rich peer feedback that sparks fireworks of new ideas.
[ ADVANCED FACILITATION: https://trainers-toolbox.com/advanced-facilitation-training/]
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