Feedback

Giving/Receiving Feedback

So what’s great or not so great about receiving and giving feedback? Why do we find it difficult to either give feedback or receive feedback?

Deep within us is a deep desire to receive acknowledgement, to feel we are doing well, that we are ok. Truth is we seek a confirmation that we are well liked and appreciated for whom we are and what we do. Painfully, when we receive feedback this expectation is not met

Most of our lives we go about collecting artifacts, symbols, materials and possessions that help us to gain more influence to manage and cope with the world around us. Our possessions reveal us and what we wish to be.

Our clothes, accessories, and possessions are carefully cultivated to ‘show’ who we are and establish linkages with the world we wish to belong to. We all wish to belong, to establish a niche for ourselves, and to anchor ourselves, to mobilize our becoming.

Yet feedback is still a very delicate subject for each of us. It requires a skill: the ability to ‘give feedback’. But is that enough. Is feedback skills a sufficient condition?

I argued in a previous blog, that only when a student is ready, a teacher appears. So too, I maintain, that the effectiveness of feedback is best, when the recipient is ready to receive the feedback.  Feedback needs to be ‘thanked’ if it is going to work.

 If feedback is just received, understood, it can be rather painful. Preparing the other for a feedback session is more critical than the act of giving feedback. 

The timing for feedback is critical. It must be well timed for it to be useful. A leader needs to be on the look out for such ‘coaching moments’.

Feedback and Coaching go together. Which means rather than give feedback, help set up the exploration:

·     “Elena, that did not go very well for you, it seems. What do you think went wrong?”

·     Instead of ‘what is the problem’ ask: What would be the outcome you would most like?

·     What would you do differently the next time?

·     What is this incident helping you to learn about yourself?

·     What is the one thing, you know that you must start doing / stop doing?

·     How important is this for you to get right?

It seems to me, that what is ‘imploded from within’ receives ownership. Unless we get the other to define the problem, gather data for analysis, analyze the data, make sense of it (interpret it), own the problem, resolve the options for resolution, and evaluate the results, true change will not occur.

Feedback is not about focusing on the issue: the issues on the ‘table top”. Instead feedback and coaching must focus on working simultaneously with the modes of thinking, modes of feeling and the modes of acting. We need to provide the client with insight into those core processes, and not just with what comes up on the table top.

Marshall Goldsmith wisely argues that Feedback as a tool should be replaced by Feed Forward. Feed forward is the process where you encourage employees to come to you with an issue they want resolved, a behavior they want to alter. This brings the focus on the future rather than the past.

Read more about feed forward on this link.

(http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/cim/articles_display.php?aid=110)