The fifth chapter of Changing Your Team From The Inside is titled: Care Personally. Why that? Because, at the time I was reviewing the book to prepare its first publication, I read Radical Candor a book by Kim Scott.
I changed the quote starting the chapter with this one from Kim Scott:
“The meaning of Radical Candor is care personally, challenge directly, and when you do both at the same time, that’s good.”
You can’t give any valuable feedback to someone you don’t care about. Furthermore, it is extremely difficult, to receive feedback and use them effectively, when they come from people with whom you are not connected enough.
The March-April 2019 issue of the Harvard Business Review displays a catchy title on its cover: Why Feedback Fails.
The article, The Feedback Fallacy, explains that focusing people on their shortcomings doesn’t enable learning; it impairs it.
Instead, the authors, Marcus Buckingham, and Ashley Goodall recommend to:
Look for outcomes.
Excellence is an outcome. When you see a colleague do something excellent, stop her or him and say it.
Replay your instinctive reactions.
Say it by expressing your personal reactions to what just happened. You are not trying to fix them, you make them realize the impact of what they just did.
Never lose sight of your highest-priority interrupt.
Looking for excellence should be your highest-priority interrupt. Mine is naturally precisely the opposite. I can see instantly what is not going well… Some personal work to catch me before reacting too fast.
Explore the present, past, and future.
If colleagues come to you with a problem, put them in the right mindset by having them state three things that are working well for them now.
Then explore the past: “When you had a problem like this in the past, what did you do that worked?”
Finally, turn to the future: “What do you already know you need to do? What do you already know works in this situation?”
I realized when I read the article, that the most efficient feedback I gave in the past is in fact following exactly that pattern. As I am reviewing the book for the second edition right now, I added to my list to review the chapter to take into account those findings.
What are your thoughts about this?
As usual, comments, email, Linkedin, Twitter, or even phone, your preferred means of communication is perfect for me.
Featured image is by Ryan McGuire
Comments
3 responses to “I have some feedback”
Thank you for putting into words exactly how I reacted to the HBR article! Though I feel that I do a decent job at recognizing people for the positive, constructive things they’ve done, the “knee jerk” reaction is to immediately look at the things that are not working well, and focus there! After this article, I noticed that I am now taking advantage of some recent situations at work to use the good examples I’m seeing from my associates as the types of behaviors that I want them to focus on.
Thank you for the feedback, Og!
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