After I finished speaking to a large crowd, a friend of mine rushed up to me and said, “Your zipper is undone.”
I would like to have had that feedback before I took the stage.
It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but as one older gentleman said, “I’m not so concerned that I forget to zip up; I will be concerned when I forget to unzip.”
Anyway, on other occasions where I had forgotten to zip, a friend of mine or even an event organizer graciously pointed it out before I took the stage.
I welcomed their feedback.
A survey of 50,000 executives showed that the top 10% in seeking feedback were in the 86th percentile of leadership effectiveness. Leaders seek feedback.
The ability to give feedback holds a direct correlation with employee engagement. The more feedback, the greater the engagement. Leaders provide feedback.
This topic is front of mind for me because of a survey of IT employees I recently conducted for a company; the number one request was for regular and consistent feedback. People want to grow.
As a CIO, you lead leaders. Last week, we discussed how to rise above your rank. Today, we look into how leaders help other leaders to thrive.
Tricky And Sticky
Feedback is tricky. In receiving feedback, we are caught between our desire to excel and our desire for acceptance.
In giving feedback, we dance with a person’s insecurity and our intent on sensitivity.
We don’t want to confuse direct communication with micromanagement.
Traditional feedback focuses on what a person thinks about another’s performance and how to improve it.
That’s not necessarily the way to make feedback stick.
Feedback works for us when we make two fundamental shifts, one philosophical and the other functional.
The philosophical shift is to realize that feedback is not the main actor in a person’s development. Thriving is.
I want feedback in order to thrive; I give feedback to help another person thrive. Feedback is a supporting actor in the overall arch of a person’s growth. So is competence.
Competence has to do with the knowledge, steps and checklists that any employee given their field must have as a base. Competence is objective. Does a person demonstrate knowledge and ability?
Feedback is too often subjective and too often misses the goal of helping another thrive. And the problem is in science.
Feedback And Science
Your brain is uniquely wired. You have synaptic connections that are more dense in areas and less dense in areas. Your more and your less are different from mine, more or less.
Brain science indicates that we grow more in our areas of greater ability. In other words, we grow more where there is already more.
When attention is given to where a person is strong, it promotes learning. When attention is given to where a person is weak, it smothers learning.
Critical feedback narrows our thinking; strength-building feedback opens our thinking.
According to Marcus Buckingham, such science calls us to rethink three pieces of feedback.
- Source of Truth: We assume that someone outside of a person is more objective about a person’s growth than the person themselves. That’s not true (yes, we have blind spots, but hold that thought). Traditional feedback is guilty of helping another person improve in an area by having them do it how we ourselves do it. Hence, the source of truth for a person seeking feedback is the other person’s preference. Group feedback only exacerbates the problem.
- Means of Learning: Traditional feedback is gap-driven. But we learn best where we have less gap than more gap. As a supporting actor helping a person to thrive, feedback must move from being critical of a weakness to being supportive of a strength.
- Belief about Excellence: Traditional feedback sets excellence up as a standard to reach rather than something a person expresses.
Making It Work
Feedback rests on three primary practices:
- Reset A Performance: The one source of truth I have to share is about my experience with someone’s performance. Which leads to a great way for us to get feedback for ourselves: “What did you experience as I ____?”
- Reinforce A Behavior: We get what we celebrate. Our feedback goes a lot further when we call out good that we want to see built on and repeated.
- Recognize Excellence: People bring unique worth. Underline the excellence they bring more than the excellence they attained.
Clearly, thriving involves course correction. You, like me, receive correction better when it is in the context of a strength (doing better what I already do well) and when it is not ambiguous (as in, “I don’t think you are assertive enough” - who knows what to do with that)?
In the end, feedback that helps a person thrives is characterized by:
- Expectations of competencies being set in advance. Correcting to a competence is different from feedback on job performance focused on growth.
- Expressing what you experience rather than what is your own way.
- Encouragement or caution along the way and not just at the end of a project or event.
- Allowing a person to feedback on their performance first.
- Setting feedback in context of strengths.
When the feedback results in a constructive way forward for a person, we get to be an advocate. Traditional feedback set us up as an adversary.
