Stepping Toward Excellence
Finding excellence requires passion, persistence, principles, clarity, direction, and more. Excellence isn’t easy. Congratulations if you joined the pursuit. But there’s a key ingredient you’re likely missing that smooths the path and greases the wheels.
The pursuit of excellence requires feedback that describes, affirms, and improves useful behaviors or exposes ineffective ones. However, feedback from employees suggests they seldom receive sufficient feedback.
If you aren’t giving enough feedback,
you aren’t getting enough, either.
Research shows that of all behaviors leaders fail worst at asking for feedback. (From: The Leadership Challenge)
The pursuit of excellence demands leaders invite feedback.
Two questions:
How can you ask for feedback and not feel subservient to others? Serving is strength; subservience is weakness. Inviting feedback suggests passion to improve skills and enhance progress. Receiving feedback indicates strength.
How can you ask for feedback without others feeling superior to you? (Question from a workshop participant)
- Ask for and give feedback. One directional feedback encourages superior to inferior dynamics.
- Focus on one person. Ask for feedback but don’t give feedback during the same conversation. (Option one)
- Engage in feedback conversations. (Option two) “Let’s talk about how we’re doing.” But avoid any hint that you’ve asked for feedback as an excuse to give it.
- Lifting the ego of others may not be all bad. People need to feel important, useful, even powerful.
- When their ego puts you down, they need feedback on giving feedback.
Five feedback power tips:
- “How am I doing?” invites feedback about you.
- “How is my hands-off approaching working with you?” invites feedback about behaviors.
- Explain your goals while asking for feedback. “What behaviors have you seen me engage in that lift employee morale?”
- Explore specific behavioral improvements. The emphasis is on explore.
- Confirm and affirm effective behaviors.
What feedback techniques work best for you?
What feedback disasters have you seen?
Providing feedback is one of the more challenging aspects of teaching. I find that most of the time, providing feedback works best if I can reframe the topic; usually show how a positive trait that is being under used or over used can lead to difficulties. Most areas of growth tend to be just out of balance personality traits in my experience.
Without feedback, we don’t have all the information we need in order to reach that goal of excellence. Unfortunately, I have personally seen where the request for feedback was a poorly executed attempt to appear inclusive, with no intent to follow through. The group assumed that all the feedback would be negative whining and the process needed to be controlled to eliminate any suggestion of weakness. It takes courage to ask for honest feedback and courage to admit error, but if the ultimate goal is excellence, then it needs to be heard. If someone doesn’t want to hear about the warts as well as the roses, don’t ak!
Dan, did you sleep in today? 😉
One successful approach is in the prep stage, is to point out that the process/presentation/information is being piloted and feedback is essential to find out if what is happening is cogent and aligned. (There also may be a degree of forgiveness with a pilot, which opens the door a bit more.) Woven into the pilot is the value of continuous improvement which may also benefit from being explicitly stated. Being able to state how the feedback will (and when) be applied might also help encourage increased engagement. Indicating that we need a Clint Eastwood mindset…we need the good, the bad, and the ugly which may lighten the approach but endorses the need.
Most feedback disasters that I have experienced were when I didn’t do enough prep work or while in process did not clearly match up the process and values with those involved.
Thank you for posting this. Long-time reader, first time poster. The benefit of feedback is that it can be a trust-building opportunity for managers. The downside of feedback is that if the conversation is not structured (I appreciate the comment about focusing on one person for each conversation.), it can quickly go south and spiral into personal attacks (often unintentionally by the “attacker”).
Thank you for feedback power tips. Very helpful for structuring conversations so they are action and results oriented.
Back in 1978, when I started doing performance management work (focused on improvement and behavioral engineering, not appraisal!), we developed a Feedback Analysis Checklist of 14 items that would support HIGH levels of performance. It is eye-opening for most people, since they might check off 4 to 6 items on this and possibly realize that their performance processes do NOT support good performance.
The analogy is learning to play the piano when you cannot hear the notes for 10 seconds.
The checklist is self-explanatory, and ANY improvement would be, well, an improvement.
You can find a discussion and a download link on my blog on, well, performance!
http://performancemanagementcompanyblog.com/tag/feedback-analysis/
I would love to have your comments. And it is designed to use as a workshop or meeting tool to discuss possibilities and ideas. It is not a simple dry analytical tool, since that is usually employed by simple dry analysts and not by leaders reading Dan’s blog!
Dan,
Another great post. 35 years ago in Air Force Squadron Officers School I learned about Johari’s Window. It reveals the opportunities for better leadership and stronger teams that come from being open to feedback. I shared your post on my blog and am posting a followup of my own to introduce Johari’s window to small but appreciated group of readers. Thanks for ongoing inspiration.
Thanks for the great post Dan. I think that many times when we ask for feedback those we ask feel they need to tell us something that we want to hear and not what they really think. It has taken awhile for me to find those true comrades tht will be honest so tht I can learn and grow. It is important to seek those people out and not settle for the yea-sayers.
Not only taking feedback, but following up and implementing that feedback is important. Customers often feel that their feedback is not taken seriously with big corporations, and it really isn’t very often. Not only making changes but publicizing those changes is the answer-think Dominos’ “pizza turnaround” campaign http://youtu.be/AH5R56jILag
When giving effective feedback, it’s definitely wise to consider not only what words flow from our lips, but also how they flow. In fact, I always try to remember…what I believe in is evidenced by how I LIVE, not just by what I say.
Good stuff, Dan…or can I call you “Freak-Man?” (BTW, “Freak-Man” is a compliment.)
Great read. This helps me learn a lot about asking for and giving feedback. To add to what Dan says, I would use his tips for some of the personal relationships as well. Could do me no harm at all.
Thanks Dan,
Best regards – Dipal
Great information! Thanks for sharing. Traces back to Maxwell’s “Law of the Scoreboard.” Your team/individuals have to know the score in order to make adjustments. Love the “Power Tips.”