Teach Employees To Receive Feedback on Their Terms

You often hear the concept that feedback is a gift, and it truly is yet we cannot use that approach as some reactive way to facilitate a positive relationship with feedback when so often it is perceived as negative. A positive cadence of feedback structured by the recipient is the secret sauce. There is such a simple concept called WIIFT, what is in it for them.

Recently I was teaching this concept to a bunch of individual contributors at a client of ours. I said think about feedback as something that you need to structure and receive before somebody needs to provide you feedback. After making this statement people looked at me very puzzled. I said think about your childhood when you knew you were going to get in trouble, but you went and told your parents before they could even get angry about it. After this comment people started to nod. I said how many of you know what your strengths are and have those been validated by your manager? Everybody in the room started to shake their head. I then asked how many of you know areas where your manager feels you need to improve through some feedback you have received? All the people started to nod. Therein lies the problem.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:37

I think one of the most powerful things when you negotiate, when you have a challenge, when you, um, are to receive feedback, if you're gonna get in a fight with your spouse, so often we wait, We wait for the inevitable. Think about your childhood when you knew you did something wrong and your parents were gonna get mad, right? What did we do? We hid, we couldn't wait. Is mom or dad home? Is dad home? Is he mad? And one of the best things that I always learned was to get there before they feel the need to give you feedback or get angry. You get ahead of the curve for lack of better description. It's such a simple concept and we've lost so much sight with it. And one of the things that we can do is to cultivate a culture of proactive feedback, getting feedback before somebody feels the need to provide it. Now, I'm gonna make a very strong comment. I think feedback really has a loaded feel to it. I think it has a substance to it that can be, uh, powerful and damaging. And I'm gonna say this, you know, I hear this all the time. Well, feedback's a gift. You know, it is a gift. There's no getting around that it is a gift yet. Then why do we still provide constructive feedback so readily versus strength based feedback? And so I think about those things and I think, you know, where are we missing this opportunity? And I think it's because leaders are stretched thin. So if you have, let's just say a one to 10 ratio, you're a leader and you are, uh, in charge of 10 people, that person providing feedback, and we subscribe at our company to a three to one ratio. Think about that. Three strengths for everyone that's constructive or opportunistic to improve. Yet when you take 10 times three plus one, that's 40 sets of feedback that over a period of time, over a, a week needs to be given. Now here's the funny thing. We've been trained to look for the things that we need to fix or adjust or provide feedback on that might not be going so well. We're not conditioned to provide strength-based feedback. Now let me explain that further. Think about when somebody says to an employee, You know, I need to see my office. What's the employee's first response? For 28 years, I've asked that question. In all 28 years, I've only heard two positive responses. Every single time people say, Uhoh, what did I do? I must be in trouble. Am I being written up? Am I being fired? So why not reverse the model and have the 10 people in control of the feedback? Why not have the 10 people taught how

Speaker 2: 3:35

To feedback on their terms? Now, let's say we've got, uh, Charlie and Lisa, and Lisa's the boss. And you know, Charlie is one of those employees who, um, really doesn't handle feedback well. And Charlie goes through a sequence of events and meets with Lisa and says, Lisa, you know, I'd like to schedule 10 minutes on your calendar. Um, and he goes in there and he says, You know, Lisa, where do you feel like I'm performing? Well, if you could gimme two areas, so I'm aware. And what's the one area where you feel like I can raise my game? Think about what I just said, Raise my game, not where I should dreadfully throw my head into a wall because I've done something wrong. Now, what's just happened there? One, it's done on Charlie's terms. The language makes it easier for him to receive. And here's the cool part, It's made it easy for Lisa to deliver. She doesn't have to schedule. She's not in a reactive mode. She's not conditioned by what she sees is wrong. Now with that being said, let's say Lisa does see something, does see something that Charlie needs to improve. Now there's at least a cadence that Charlie controlled that started to condition him to create a more favorable relationship with feedback on his own terms, with what we call wh what's in it for them in this case, What's in it for Charlie? So the coolest thing about this is if you teach employees how to do this, guess what's gonna happen? It's going to increase feedback delivery. It's going to increase feedback, acceptance. It's going to increase comfort for both the provider and the receiver of feedback.