Check Your Feedback Practices - and Your Confidence

Risky, damaging and expensive crises often arise in the workplace through unwisely improvisational approaches to letting people know what is required and how their behaviours affect others or impact on organisational performance.

Managers, especially senior managers, are often caught in a bind of their own making. In a desire to encourage independence and growth they take a laisez-faire approach to the part of performance management that requires setting and holding boundaries. When this results in a conflict between their needs and the desires of those who report to them, they become anxious because, not having habituated boundary-holding and conflict-resolution practices every day, they consequently cannot apply them when they are most necessary.

The continuum of available behaviours then available is likely to involve on the one extreme smile-and-ignore-it and on the other, come-down-on-them-like-a-ton-of-bricks.

Smile-and-ignore-it involves choosing not to address the issues, usually through fear of repercussions and a perceived need to be liked: a fight-flight response is triggered and immobilises us. Eventually, when under-performance or other problems finally become too serious not to intervene whatever the risk, remedial initiatives then create stress and conflict. This is what I understand to have happened when managers tell me, We have had to performance-manage one of the staff. (This may involve coming-down-like-a-ton-of-bricks.) They mean that performance or relationship management priorities have been managed by exception until a crisis occurred, rather than by well-planned strategy designed to avoid crises. Staff may cry foul at that point, and make accusations (with some justification) of bullying or controlling behaviour.

Here are other common approaches to providing feedback that make it difficult for the intended receiver to hear and understand the message or be willing to do so. Check your own practices, with a view to finding starting-points for refining them:

1. Making comments that are so indirect or subtle that they can be ignored. If they thought long and hard enough about what I say, one manager recently told me, they'd get my point eventually, without my having to actually tell them.
   
   
2. Providing commentary that is analytical, heavily judgmental, labeling, prescriptive, interpretive or diagnostic. This causes the receiver to focus principally on their own emotions, rather than the message.
   
   
3. Giving negative feedback indirectly with attempts at humour, often confusing or barbed humour which can hurt. This also causes the receiver to focus on their emotions rather than the message.
   
   
4. Gossiping and complaining to others about those whose behaviours we dislike, rather than directly confronting them ourselves. We may do this in hope that our complaints will find their way back to those we complain about or at least hurt or damage them in some way. To justify this indirect, disrespectful and destructive behaviour we may find ways to de-humanize those we complain of by labeling them (assholes!) or defining them as The Enemy - people who are not in any way like us. (It may be time to re-read Lord of The Flies or to consider The Lucifer Effect studies of Philip Zimbardo.) One of the major negative outcomes of this technique is to "awfulise" the other and exacerbate their negative effect on ourselves by increasing the levels of our own frustration and anxiety: thus we give them much power over us.

Constructive performance feedback is well-timed, easily heard and understood. It clears the air, keeps performance incrementally on target, acknowledges people and their progress, shifts energy and improves attitudes, reduces frustration and difficult conflict. Above all, it enhances learning, the key to responding to change.

For most people, competence in giving constructive performance feedback with these qualities necessitates a degree of courage, self-esteem, self-confidence, and well-honed practices well beyond the ordinary. The diagnostic, conceptual and procedural bases for it are provided by our Hear and Be Heard books and training programmes. Personal readiness and actual competence depend on determination and discipline, and on sufficiently valuing it.

Further discussion:

Encourage the Heart
Ain't it Awful!
How Am I Doing?

Talk to us for further information or support with these ideas.

Tom Watkins
© Copyright 2002 - 2007 Tom Watkins Group. All rights reserved.

Select and contact a Mentor if you'd like to discuss these ideas or want support to make progress with your own issues.

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