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How we handle feedback in a relationship has an enormous impact on that relationship. And changing how we handle feedback can often transform that relationship. Let’s look at four common variations, where feedback was out of whack and how letting someone in made a difference. A GOOD LISTENER ASKS FOR HELP It wasn’t until a few years ago that Roseanne noticed that her relationships were lopsided: “People come to me for help.
“What are you doing that is disabling your staff from learning?”
We Triangulate for Comfort, but Not Coaching
But extracting feedback from jerkiness is just the kind of thing friends can help you do.
Just because Ivan is difficult doesn’t mean Amy is not.
make two lists—what’s wrong with the feedback, and what might be right or helpful
Just as there are no perfect learning people, there are no perfect organizational feedback systems.
It’s risky for any individual manager to give fully honest reviews. If handled poorly by either giver or receiver, such conversations can damage trust, working
But then again, it’s risky not to. Problems fester,
63 percent of executives surveyed say their biggest challenge to effective performance management is that their managers lack courage to have the difficult performance discussions.
What’s hard is to figure out what would help, especially because of the vast range of goals that performance systems are charged with accomplishing:
you can’t “metric” your way around the fact that feedback is a relationship-based, judgment-laced process.
We need to equip receivers to create pull—to drive their own learning, to seek honest mirrors
we consider this challenge—of imperfect people within imperfect systems—and offer ideas for improvement
When we are asked to make a choice about a subject we’re worried about, and we are presented only with the benefits, we supply the potential drawbacks on our own—some real and some imagined. And then we construct an imaginary way out: Why accept a plan with so many drawbacks when we could accept a plan with no drawbacks?
this was not an administrative problem, but a human problem.
SEPARATE APPRECIATION, COACHING, AND EVALUATION A single performance management
The “one big coaching meeting each year with twenty suggestions” or even “two coaching meetings each year with ten suggestions each” isn’t likely to help, because at its core, coaching is a relationship, not a meeting.
The point here is not that you have to have an “appreciation system” in place; rather, it’s about having a cultural norm of appreciation that encourages everyone to notice (1) the genuine and unique positives in the work of others, and (2) how each team member hears appreciation and encouragement so that it can be best expressed to that person as an individual.
If you want “learning” to be valued, it has to be embedded in what is talked about with admiration, what is highlighted as important in the war stories that are told,
Highlight Learning Stories
Cultivate Growth Identities
The least appealing part of performance management for everyone involved is the phase called Nagging and Being Nagged. Setting goals, coaching, and completing appraisals are responsibilities that usually sit alongside the more pressing tasks already on everyone’s plates, and are often the first to get postponed
Cialdini is an expert on influence, and he argues that talking about negative behavior often has the unintended effect of reinforcing it as the social norm.
highlighting good norms does more to change disliked behavior than calling out bad norms.
In many ways, the manager is the culture: If they’re good learners, they set the tone for a learning culture.
We all need empathy and encouragement—supportive mirrors. But we also need clear and accurate information—honest mirrors.
Part of the challenge of feedback in organizations is due to differences of temperament and wiring;
you are the most important person in your own learning. Your organization or team or boss might support or stifle feedback. Either way, they can’t stop you from learning. You don’t have to depend on your annual review or your boss’s willingness to mentor.
