Is feedback the food of growth?
Giving feedback is a key management skill, yet, so many managers I meet worry about how to do it. Let’s face it – we don’t have many great role models out there, do we? Looking at some of the TV programmes with a ‘feedback’ element probably won’t help ….
Britain’s Got Talent has a great feature – if the judges don’t like someone’s performance they press a loud buzzer and a big red cross lights up, how well would that go down at work? To be fair, they do back it up with comments, ‘that was lousy’, ‘You have a dreadful singing voice’, ‘ I hated it…’ How helpful is that to the individual? How does it help them to improve?
The ‘X Factor’ works along similar lines, quite subjective – not always helpful even with the positive comments: ‘ I really love your voice’ ‘ You did really well tonight’ WHAT did the singer do that was good? We learn a lot from feedback about what we do well but it has to contain information about our behaviour or performance for it to be useful to us.
A recent series on BBC 2 – The Speaker, was looking for the Young Speaker of the Year and there were some amazingly confident 14-18 year olds on that programme. The judges and mentors were particularly good at giving helpful, constructive feedback. They clearly described what they liked or didn’t like, why it worked or didn’t work and if it didn’t what else the presenter could have done instead. So there’s a great structure for you …
What and Why for positive feedback and for things you’d like someone to do differently or better, use the What, Why, What structure. For example:
WHAT – you asked that customer some great open questions
WHY – that worked well because you were able to gather all the information needed in order to solve their problem.
Or
WHAT – you did most of the talking in the last meeting
WHY – that didn’t work because you didn’t get any ideas from the team
WHAT – you could have done instead was ask questions and pause more …
Try it next time you have to give feedback and let us know how it works for you.
This is a guest post by Margaret Burnside from the Centre for People Development, a CMI approved centre, you can follow her on Twitter
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Comments
Let me expand your excellent post, based on teaching this skill for a few decades. It's also covered in my Working Supervisor's Support Kit
What – what you did. No adjectives.
Why – reasons we're talking about it how it affects others or performance
Wait – now wait for the person you're speaking with to talk
That last step is vital if you actually want to have a conversation about the behavior or performance.
Good structure too Wally - thanks for this - I also think a variation in any situation where you are helping someone to learn or develop is to use them all as questions - What do you think you did there? Why do you think it worked, or didn't work? and, if needed, What else could you have done instead? We could then structure it: What, wait, why, wait, what, wait!!
Seriously though, this only works if you are the manager, coach, mentor etc. if its feedback to your peer or boss or if the individual doesn't see you in the 'helper' role the questions can sound really patronising. Your structure of What, why, wait would work well in those circumstances.
Thanks for the comment.
I think the questions are ideal after you shift into conversation mode. The steps you outlined, with "Wait" is designed to the get the issue and its importance out in the open and set the stage for conversation. Once that conversation starts, the questions can be powerful tools.
You're absolutely right though, that if the person making the approach isn't seen as a helper, the manner of the approach may not matter much. But that's a different sort of problem from what most supervisors face most of the time.
One of things I like is taken from the Toyota Way and the fact that everything they do has a customer, ie they strip out all of the waste where people are doing stuff for no practical reason. In such a scenario where everything you do has a customer, both internally or externally, you're always getting feedback from them on the quality of your work. It's only where your work doesn't really impact upon anyone else that it becomes an issue to appraise people in such an infrequent way.
Wouldn't disagree with anything posted so far.
In my experience you need to split feedback according to the appropriateness of the situation - either a tell situation or a coaching situation.
Tell is good when you want to give praise or just need to cover off a negative in a fairly short but clear way and the time to do it is immediately. e.g. I really liked xxxx because it xxxx which mean that xxx. Well done - I'd like to see more of that (or whatever).
Coaching requires more time but is great for situations where you want the person to reflect on their performance and come up with the solution to how they can improve (on the basis you expect them to either know the answer or be able to come up with something close).
I think one of the issues we have, is that as English folk - we have a natural tendency to shy away from giving sincere compliments to someone. However, this just means that if you CAN master the art of sincerely complimenting and giving proper respectful feedback - you'll win respect instantly.