Hot Seats
Hot Seats is a structured round of peer feedback where one person sits still and listens while everyone else tells them, in turn, what to keep doing and what to change.
A short sequence walks through the round: one person sits, the rest speak in turn, and the loop repeats for the next name.
Reach for this when…
- A team gives only vague, hedged feedback in reviews.
- One person's blind spot keeps surfacing but nobody names it to their face.
- You need a fast way to surface real feedback before a big transition.
How to run it
- Each person prepares specific, observed-behaviour feedback for everyone else, sorted into Improve and Inspire.
- One person takes the seat and stays silent except to say thank you.
- Round one: each other person gives Improve feedback, one to three examples.
- Round two: each person gives Inspire feedback.
- Rotate until everyone has sat in the seat, then debrief individually: what will you keep, what will you change.
A worked example
Situation. Camila Vera ran a textile workshop in Quito, Ecuador, where her floor supervisors gave each other only polite, general praise in weekly reviews.
Applied. She ran a Hot Seats round with the five supervisors, forcing Improve feedback first, one specific example at a time, before any Inspire comments.
Result. Two supervisors heard, for the first time, that they undercut each other in front of workers. Both changed the behaviour inside a fortnight.
The catch
It only works if people can name specific, observed behaviour rather than vague impressions, so untrained groups slide into generalities or thinly veiled point-scoring. The 'thank you only' rule protects the person in the seat but can also let real disagreement go unresolved. Skip the debrief and it is just a bruising exercise with no learning attached.
If the feedback in the room is all Inspire and no Improve, the group is being polite, not honest.