Over the many years of my career thus far, I have had the opportunity of working with so many different people. Even outside of work, there are interactions with representatives of various shops, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, etc. Everyone loves feedback. Everyone wants to know how they have performed. Very early in my career, the CEO of the company I worked for told all of us youngsters that every hotel and every large company always seeks feedback from its customers. They want to know how they have done and more importantly, how they can improve. Since then, I have found myself asking for a feedback form from various organizations at different times. Unfortunately, more often that not, it has been when I have not been happy with the service. My feedback in these instances have often long winded, providing the context and narrating the story from my perspective. The outcome has been varied. This approach does not work at the office, however. I could hardly write down lengthy stories to my directs when I needed to provide feedback to them. Also, very importantly, I learnt that I would need to encourage the right behaviour which meant that I had to provide feedback on the good as well as the bad.
Why provide feedback?
One of the many tasks that a Manager has is to ensure his/ her team is aligned with the business. An important way of achieving this goal is by ensuring that the team is heading in the right direction with every team member pulling his/ her weight. This can only happen when the behaviour of individual team members is in-line with the vision that the team has. Why behaviour? Because everything else that we often hear – attitude, intention, etc. are completely subjective. Behaviour is something that can be captured or is evident in a video footage with or without audio. This can include the content in an email, the voice and tone in a Zoom/ Teams meeting or the behaviour towards a person or people in a team meeting. As a Manager, I wanted to ensure that my team members behaved in a way that represented the team in the best light possible for the work environment. Everything else, especially improvement in outcomes and results of the work performed comes under coaching (and delegation), one of the 3 main tools of the Manager (the other two being 1:1s and feedback, of course). I provided feedback because
- a) it was an important tool to fashion the behaviour of my team
- b) everyone loves feedback on how they are performing
- c) it was my job
How did I provide feedback?
The most important thing about feedback that I learnt – stay calm and do it with a smile. There were times when I was upset with a team member and would love to go and provide “feedback”. Only, it would not be feedback then. It would be a rant. For example, there would be this individual who was habitually late to meetings. Even when there was an action for him in the meeting, he would not be on time. Various tactics were tried, including the jocular fine for every minute that they would be late in coming in. It was very annoying for everyone that he would walk in late consistently. It was my job to remain calm and simply walk up to the person after the meeting (or after a couple of hours) and ask them – “Can I give you some feedback?” before letting them know how their behaviour was disrespecting others if they could change it. I admit that this took a lot of practice and I am not sure if I really mastered it, but nonetheless it is the correct way to do it.
Apart from being calm, the second important aspect is the timing of the feedback. It must be provided as soon as possible after the event. It may be tempting to simply let things go because we are simply not tailored to think in the constructive fashion that is the cornerstone of feedback. Often, feedback I have received has been more criticism than anything useful that I can work upon. For example, “Do not do X, it is not good”. “You are not good at this, are you?” “This work was poor”, etc. Although the person providing the feedback thought they were doing their job, it left me feeling confused. Ok, what exactly was not good? What was the problem? At times, I would be able to ask more probing questions and at others, there was simply no opportunity to either ask the question or questioning was not welcome. Over the years, I tried to avoid this approach even if I was unconsciously employing it with my team. Another reason providing feedback is postponed is that Managers are wary of some employees who are more combative than others. My personality is such that I avoid confrontation and if there are others like me, then they would also not go and confront employees right away. Regardless of the type of personality, the job requires one to provide feedback and therefore, it must be provided in a timely fashion. Waiting for a week or a month or worse, the annual appraisal cycle to provide feedback on an event that happened 8 months prior defeats the purpose completely. Until mind reading is a perfected art, team members have no way of knowing what is expected out of them unless the feedback is provided with an open and calm mind.
My method of providing feedback: I would first ask the person if I could provide them feedback. Probably unnecessary because not a single time did I receive a negative response to the question. I would then frame it this way: “In X situation, when you did Y, then what happened or what happens is that… <impact>. Can you change that?” For example, “When you did not communicate about a likely delay on delivering your commitments in advance , it reflected poorly on your and the team’s professionalism. Can you change that?” Discussion on the quality of the work is outside of the scope of feedback as it stands. It must happen during separate 1:1s. Feedback is to be provided quickly and briefly.
I worked hard on attempting to provide positive feedback as much as constructive feedback. So when someone did something good – maybe provide a great technical session to the team, which was well researched, prepared and provided the team with information that they needed to know, it became imperative for me to let them know about that as well. The format would be much the same. “Can I give you some feedback?” <pause and await acknowledgement> “When you prepare well for a session and provide the team with the information they need to know, it helps you and the team as well. Thank you for doing a good job”.
The intention with providing any feedback is to be as specific as possible. A general “good work” glosses over the nuances of the behaviour. It needs effort on the part of the person providing the feedback because it is not as easy as it may sound. Introspection plays a major part in providing feedback because it needs to tie into the core ethos of the team that one is trying to build. Like I said, not easy :). I believe that when done well and with consistency, the team responds magnificently to the feedback mechanism. I am fairly certain that the team members had a good time joking about the “formal” process that I would go through starting with “Can I give you some feedback?”, but hey, it is a style and it worked.
What do you think? Have you received feedback that left you feeling confused and disillusioned? Have you provided feedback that you later thought could be more constructive? Or maybe you never even bothered to think about this aspect of feedback at all? After all, in a world focused on growth, impressions and results, do such tools even matter?
Mithun's Musings 