Building a Feedback Relationship

Seth Godin’s recent post on Direct and useful project feedback contained a good tip on how to build a feedback relationship with a team. It seems so obvious – and yet, I’ve never been in a work environment where we tried this out. I’m going to change that!

How do you develop the trust and esteem you need in the third example? Sit with the team and jointly criticize other work. Before you start developing, spend time giving feedback on how someone else could have done a better job (on a design, on the foley in a movie, on a logo). By earning the right to give feedback externally, you make it more likely you’ve got the right to do it internally.

“Tell Me How I’m Doing” – Interaction as Feedback

After mulling over Tell Me How I’m Doing (excerpt here) for a few days, here’s what I think is worth taking away:

1. The leadership fable genre is overdone. I hope to never use it.

2. Interaction as feedback; feedback as interaction. Author Richard Williams basically classifies any form of human interaction – conversation, body language, small talk – as feedback, and points out that without it we shrivel up and become shadows of our former self. What I’ll take away is that attention is sometimes the type of feedback that’s needed, and that all too often the better a job an employee (or manager) does, the less attention is paid to him/her. Less attention equals less interaction equals less feedback equals shrivelling up and wondering if anything you’re doing matters at all. I think Williams is trying to promote a mindset shift from feedback as a specific, planned, timed act to a mode of relating to each other. We relate to each other all the time, interact with each other all the time, and therefore are always giving each other feedback.

“Plus-ing” – Building on Ideas

Yesterday, Sasha Dichter blogged about “plus-ing” – a culture of combining and building on ideas, rather than tearing ideas down and pointing out where they’ll go wrong:

All of you smart, critically-minded people out there (you know who you are) ask yourself how often, when asked to give feedback of one sort or another, [you] jump right in to all the little or big changes you think should be made.  This is actually the easy way out: you feel like you’re being helpful, improving the output, and it makes you look smart to boot.  And when you’re talking to someone you like and respect, you assume they know you think they’re smart/capable/etc. and that the thing they’ve just done (the practice presentation, the brainstormed idea) is pretty good.

Not only am I guilty as charged, but I’ve also worked with a lot of people who are also guilty as charged!  (Smiles to all of you – you know who you are). In fact, I read his post just before replying to someone’s draft documents with my page-long list of recommended changes, a list which didn’t comment on what I thought did work and why.

Dichter’s next point relates to my previous posts on feedback, and my firm belief in the importance of positive feedback:

If something is mostly good, start with that.  And don’t talk in general terms (”It’s really great.”) as this is neither credible nor useful.  Give this part real attention and thought.  Give it as much analysis as you give your (subsequent) critique. Tell the person what’s good.  Be very specific about what you like.

This will accomplish three things: first, it will give the person just as much feedback about what works as about what doesn’t, so she has a chance to amplify and strengthen the best part of what she’s done.  Second, the person will feel good and gain in confidence.

Perhaps most important, it gives you practice at giving positive feedback in an honest, genuine, and specific fashion – which is actually much harder than it looks.

I’ll go one further. Not only will this give you more practice at doing something that’s difficult, but I suspect it will also make you a better manager. The more practice you have articulating what actually works, the better you will be able to give instructions, delegate, and set clear expectations. You’ll be better able to give the instructions that are needed up front, which will reduce the time you spend later on giving critical feedback and wondering why someone didn’t live up to your expectations.

Now, the onus is on me to take this advice – a tough challenge for someone whose default calling is to edit other people’s words and thoughts.

Tips for Gathering Performance Feedback – Part Three

The third installment of what I’ve learned conducting 360 reviews.

3. Build trust throughout the process. If you’ve been asked to conduct a performance review for someone, he/she is putting his/her trust in you. You will hear what the client’s managers, employees, and coworkers see as strengths, and you will likely hear some naked, unadorned criticism. Your client is making himself/herself vulnerable, and you need to provide a safe space for that vulnerability.

a) Keep the client informed. One of the best ways to build trust is to make it clear what you are doing, why you are doing it, and when it will be done. Review the plan for the performance review with your client. What questions will you be asking? Who will you be speaking to? What will you guarantee in terms of confidentiality? How will you frame the discussion with the respondents? How will you follow up with them? Which steps will the client be a part of? What is the timeline for each step?

b) Introduce yourself and your qualifications. Make sure the respondents know who you are and why you are conducting the review. It helps to have the client contact the respondents to introduce you. One mistake I made was to start one review process assuming that most of the respondents knew me or had been told I would be contacting them. I found out I was wrong when I got an email that said, “Who are you and why are you doing this?”

c) Be flexible to the respondents’ preferences. Respondents are doing a favour for you and your client by sharing their time and thoughts. Work to accommodate them! If they prefer a phone call over an online survey, pick up the phone. If they prefer to talk face to face, set up a meeting. If you arrange an interview and they prefer open-ended questions, go open-ended. If they prefer that you structure the interview, come prepared. Of course, the degree to which you can be flexible depends on the purposes of the review (e.g. if you need hard quantitative data, you need to be consistent in how you gather it), but for the most part, you and your client will learn the most when you conduct the interview in a way that works best for respondents.

c) Discuss what comes next. After the questions have been answered, the data have been sorted, and themes are bubbling to the surface, your client might feel a bit lost. “I knew I wanted feedback,” he/she says, “but what do I do with it?” Prepare for this question before you meet with your client to discuss the results of the review. Make sure you can discuss, with examples, some of the things your client is known and valued for. Make sure you can describe diplomatically, but accurately, the behaviours or patterns that are holding the client back in his/her performance and work relationships. Provide ample opportunity for the client to pause, consider, and contribute their reactions as you discuss the results.

d) Above all, be ready to summarize feedback themes and suggest appropriate goals. Suggest goals that include behaviour/traits for the client to maintain, and ones to develop. Furthermore, provide your client with options for support as he/she acts on all this feedback: if you do performance coaching, explain how you would support him/her in this process. Or refer your client to someone who can provide coaching, or help the client prepare a plan for asking a manager or colleague to work with him/her over the next few months as the client tries to bring the feedback to life in his/her performance.

Tips for Gathering Performance Feedback – Part Two

The second installment of what I’ve learned conducting 360 reviews.

2. Determine the best format for the desired outcomes.

If you’re seeking feedback, you can gather it through an online survey (Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo are easy to use and either free or cheap), by interviewing people yourself, or by asking a third party to conduct interviews.

The questions you ask, and the way you ask them, determine the answers you will get. Do a test run of your survey or interview questions to understand how respondents interpret and answer them. Here are some different purposes for reviews I’ve conducted, and how we designed it accordingly:

a) Baseline comparison. One person wanted a baseline gauge of her abilities in ten different areas. She planned to compare these baseline results with the results a year later. In this case, the design was fairly straightforward: survey questions were designed to evaluate the ten areas in both qualititative and quantitative ways. The exact same survey can be used a year from now to show if there has been any improvement in her performance in these areas. The entire survey was conducted online.

b) Recognition and direction. Another individual wanted to know if he was meeting goals he had set for himself, and wanted input into what goals to work on next. We used rating scale questions to see how well he was achieving goals, and open-ended questions to explore areas of strength and weakness. Respondents answered online, and we had follow-up telephone discussions with a subset of respondents to explore their answers further.

c) Exploratory and relationship-focused. A third individual wanted to understand what his team knew about him that he didn’t know. Rather than an online survey, this performance review consisted of open-ended questions in telephone conversations, and was more participant-directed than client-directed. The outcome was a series of themes and learning opportunities that we might not have discovered if we had set out with our own pre-formed questions to explore.

Next post: part three – trust and relationship-building while conducting reviews.

Tips for Gathering Performance Feedback – Part One

Over the past year, I delved into a new professional development area by conducting 360 performance reviews. Here is some of what I’ve learned, part one.

1. Find the right people to participate.

a) Upward, downward, and lateral. Get feedback from people the client works for, people who work for him/her, and people he/she works with. Make sure you have an adequate sample size to represent all three categories.

b) Representative viewpoints. Check each category to see if you have an adequate representation of different genders and ethnicities.

c) Positive and constructive. Don’t limit respondees to people with whom the client has a positive relationship. Ask the client: Who will give you positive feedback? And who will have constructive feedback for you? Often, the people the client hasn’t been able to develop a close relationship with are the people who will have the best information for the next learning opportunity.

d) Who stands to benefit. Ask the client who he/she will work with the most in the next six months. Be sure to include these people as respondents, so that their input feeds into the client’s working relationships in the months to come.

Next post: part two – deciding on the best format for gathering feedback.

Feedback As Growth-Affirming

Some previous posts have looked at feedback from a business books perspective. I thought I’d mix it up with some notes from a training program for psychotherapists (I started taking this program earlier this year).

We’re using information from Christine Caldwell’s book Getting Our Bodies Back to guide our feedback. She describes feedback as: descriptive, value-neutral, without agenda, providing multiple options, and growth-affirming. Feedback is contrasted with criticism, which is interpretive, judgemental, has an agenda, reduces options, and affirms control.

Here are a few quotes from Caldwell – I choose these quotes because I can see their value in an organizational or business context.

Feedback has no agenda. How many times have we said, “But I want him to see what he is doing to himself!”… It may be that the person in question is messing up. But if we need to explain this to him or her from some agenda of our own, we will again pollute that person’s growth opportunity with our own unfinished business.

Caldwell provides the example agenda of deflecting excitement. If the feedback giver is uncomfortable with being with his or her own energy and excitement, and if the feedback recipient generated energy or excitement in him or her, then the feedback giver might give feedback with the agenda of deflecting or reducing excitement (e.g. giving the feedback that the person was too enthusiastic or over-the-top in their presentation). I can definitely think of times when I’ve been guilty of this agenda.

Feedback creates more options in a relationship… With the truth before us, we can choose… We feel free to use this information in our own best interests.

Being criticized decreases our options: we can basically only fight or flee or freeze…

Criticism only affirms control. It gives us one more experience of being wrong and incapable of being right without the constant criticism of others to keep us in line. It affirms that our boundaries are outside of us and that we would fall down without them. It retards the growth and development of internal limits that form from our experience of what works and what doesn’t work.

Finally, she describes true feedback as growth-affirming:

Real feedback allows us to self-regulate, given the proper information and nourishment. Becuase it is a description of either what we are doing or what is occurring in others, it addresses that part of ourselves oriented toward growth and fulfillment.

A lot of managers who have a 360 or similar assessment conducted for them request information on how they give and receive feedback. I wonder what new information could be gleaned if those questions on how they give and receive feedback were framed around some of Caldwell’s descriptions – is my feedback value-neutral, without an agenda? When I give you feedback, do you feel that I have affirmed your growth? Have more options opened in our relationship?

Feedback as Downward Accountability

As part of the feedback theme on this blog, I’m sharing the idea of feedback as downward accountability, which I’ve taken from an anecdote shared in the Most Significant Change handbook. This outlook moves feedback from being viewed as an extra, an optional nice-to-have, and instead puts it in the realm of responsibility.

Perhaps one way to address this problem more directly would be to rename this stage in the M[ost] S[ignificant] C[hange] implementation process “Downward Accountability”, to create and assert rights to knowledge about decisions [...] made by others, rather than treating “feedback” almost as an optional item. (p. 35).

This term makes feedback one-directional, though, and I believe in upward and downward and lateral accountability. But the accountability notion is a useful change in mindset. So perhaps rather than using the word “feedback”, I’ll start playing with the notion of feedback as “accountability” instead – information I need to share and receive from a position of my own responsibilities.

Feedforward

Enough about feedback! Marshall Goldsmith, an executive coach, leadership author, and the “TM” behind the Goldsmith Coaching Process (TM) (and, coincidentally, someone my dad learned from back in his management consulting days – I grew up listening to theory from Marshall), writes that it’s not all about the feedback, it’s about the feedforward.

His article, “Try feedforward instead of feedback”, can be downloaded here. In this article, he argues that the fundamental problem with all feedback is that it focuses on the past. Feedforward focuses on the future, and therefore can be “expansive and dynamic”, rather than “limited and static”.

The article outlines a sample exercise to try feedforward. Two participants engage with each other. The first describes one behaviour that they would like to change, and asks the listener for feedforward: “two suggestions for the future that might help them achieve a positive change in their selected behaviour.” Rules: no comments about the past (feedback) can be made. No critique of suggestions given is offered. Listen, take notes, process, and thank your listener for their suggestions.

After this round, roles are reversed, and then the exercise can be repeated with another partner(s) until everyone ends up with a library of feedforward suggestions for making their desired change.

See the article for a more detailed description, as well as the “Eleven Reasons to Try FeedForward” section.

What I like about this model is: 1) the feedforward recipient has a lot of control over identifying what she/he knows will make a difference in her/his life, and what she/he has the motivation to work on. 2) Suggestions are helpful. They open up doors of possibility. Negative feedback from the past, on the other hand, can just bog people down. 3) After gathering suggestions from multiple people, the feedforward recipient has the autonomy to pick and choose the ones that she/he knows will work best for her/him.

Best Feedback Explanation Yet

There’s been a feedback theme here lately, so I’m posting on one of two spectacular demonstrations of feedback that I saw this weekend.

I was taking the Co-Active Coaching Fundamentals course with the Coaches Training Institute (more on this later). After the first of many practice coaching sessions, we prepared to give feedback from the acting client to the acting coach. Rather than go through a model of how to give feedback, what to say and how to say it, etc., the facilitators just demonstrated:

Demo part one: Person A stood with a wastebasket behind her and tried to throw flipchart markers backwards over her head and have them land in the wastebasket. After each throw, Person B gave feedback. During the first set of feedback, each piece of feedback in no way helped Person A get the next marker closer to the wastebasket. Person B said things like, “Well, that throw was okay.” “That one was a really nice colour.” “That made a really cool sound as it landed.” “Have I told you that I think you’re a great person?”

It was a perfect demonstration of how unhelpful feedback can be when it’s non-specific or irrelevant.

Demo part two: After each throw, Person B gave Person A clear feedback: “You need to throw it about three feet further.” “Okay, the distance is good now, but about a foot to your left.” “You bounced off the wastebasket that time; just put enough into it to get it two inches further and you’ll be there.”

No theorizing, no instructions, just a clear demonstration that good feedback is feedback that helps the recipient get closer to their goal.