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Relationships Management
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Responding to Criticism and Negative Feedback
Almost everyone I've ever known and worked with acknowledges significant difficulty with this fundamental relationship management skill. They tend, at least at times, to react to criticism and negative feedback with a range of defensive, hostile or avoiding tactics.
Sometimes they agree with criticism received no matter how poorly it is given and before it is clarified. At other times they retreat hurt, wounded, distressed or distraught, believing themselves to be victims of unfairness.
To respond constructively to criticism and negative feedback, it's useful to possess or develop a number of attitudinal abilities and skill-sets . . .
Read the full article ».
Expressing Anger, Annoyance or Displeasure
In terms of technique, there is little difference between giving constructive negative feedback, and expressing criticism, anger, annoyance or displeasure.
What is different about anger is its close links with fear and with the times in our lives when we experienced extreme and damaging expressions of it. Recollections of terror, panic, tyranny, oppression and violence can be brought quickly to the surface very easily and associated with our current impressions of someone's behaviour. Without care, we may find ourselves apparently dealing with a current issue but in reality, well and truly locked into replaying our past.
Before you criticise or give negative feedback to anyone else . . .
Read more, download free.
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.
In the desire to encourage independence and growth, managers, especially senior managers are often caught in a bind of their own making. Read more, download free.
Check Your Expectations of Your Organisation
What you find challenging about your leaders, managers or colleagues may be a direct result of and reveal more about the organisational structure, systems, processes and culture than anything else. If so, this may help you appreciate that sometimes, we are all in this together, experiencing different facets of the same problem: we are getting the behaviours our organisations designed and perpetuate.
Addressing the challenges from this perspective can lead to useful insights and considerate, constructive actions. Read more, download free.
Practise Self-responsibility
Most of us have barely scratched the surface of our own capacity for everyday effectiveness, partly because we expect, want or wait for others to change first. We make their unwelcome behaviours the focus of our unfocused and ineffective change efforts rather than realising our own potential for greater effectiveness or more direct influence.
Important, far-reaching change is often more possible than it seems. Read more, download free.
How are you feeling?
Why is there is so little spoken acknowledgement in dialogue, of what we know to be others' emotional states?
Feelings often constitute the bulk of what we want others to hear. But even when it is entirely obvious that emotional content exceeds logical content, listeners mostly acknowledge the logical component and criticise it when it is flawed. When we express worry, alarm, concern, upset, frustration or annoyance (for instance), it is comparatively rare for others to intentionally reflect our emotions by acknowledging them aloud to show we are heard and understood.
As listeners, we react to anger defensively or with our own hostility rather than simply acknowledge the angry feelings are part of the speaker's problem. Given opportunities to listen, we make it "about us" and listen to ourselves instead.
It's not as though it is difficult to register another person's feelings, and there are 412 unique emotional states most of us easily and routinely register. Read more, download free.
Gulf words syndrome and the language of conflict
The words we use can provide a window into our attitudes and applied values if we learn to observe and monitor the language we use in dialogue, especially when we feel strongly about an issue or others' behaviour. The process can also provide insights into:
- The causes of others' difficulties with us
- Our own difficulties in making ourselves heard when we are in conflict; and
- Why it is, sometimes, that everything we say creates a wider gulf between the parties.
During the 1991 Gulf war reporters at The Guardian demonstrated this, (though that may not have been their intention). They studied media coverage (in theirs and other UK newspapers) and noted the selective language used. The full list is at once hilarious, dismal and shocking: Read more, download free.
Problems in your interpersonal relationships? Test your problem-solving process.
An effective problem-solving process is fundamental for dealing effectively with criticism, hostility, negative feedback and conflict. It's essential too, for giving performance feedback and discussing sensitive issues.
How constructive is your problem-solving technique? How well does your team or group deal with day-to-day problems?
Test yourself »
Why are you leaving us? (Don't believe the answer)
An ongoing UK research programme has determined the major reasons people have for leaving their jobs. Interviews were held with people in different professional groups about their last job moves. The principal findings: poor quality line management is the most significant general cause of employee turnover and poor supervision the most important single factor.
A particularly significant finding was this: in most of these cases the resignations occurred without the organisation being aware of the real reasons. People who leave because they have received poor supervision tend not to tell their employers that this is why they are leaving. They cite other less contentious reasons such as pay rates, time for a change or personal reasons.
One conclusion that might be drawn is the absolute unreliability of what you are told by your staff about the quality of your people-skills and supervision practices. Read more, download free.
Some people are just impossible!
You'd prefer fewer difficult or destructive conflicts in your life? You'd like to be more mature and confident when confronted with differences? Sometimes your interactions are fraught with feelings of anxiety, anger, guilt, blame and thoughts of retaliation and attack? Too often, the causes of these problems are difficult to find and remedy? You're not alone, by any means.
These things are true for most people at one time or another. But far too many unnecessarily resign themselves to finding conflict "too hard" or too difficult for mature dialogue. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, they say and anyway, some people are just impossible. Well, it ain't necessarily so. Read more, download free.
How am I doing?
Constructive feedback is one of the main contributors to organisation, team and personal effectiveness. Faulty feedback is one the biggest contributors to their learning disabilities. If I don't know how I'm really doing because you don't or can't tell me or if I can't hear what you say because of the way you say it, I can't improve.
Managers often shoot themselves in the foot on this score: the gains they want are impossible in the working environment they create. Making a mistake in front of some managers is like cutting yourself in front of Dracula: the working environment becomes too poisonous for innovation, enthusiasm and efficiencies.
Constructive workplace feedback depends on managers' ability to develop trust and effective communication, skills that are often lacking or insufficiently present. Read more, download free.
Paying Attention at Meetings
Assignment:
Help a client group reduce wasted effort and staff complaints about The System.
Project Phase #1:
Act as Silent-Observer-of-Process at their management meeting (14 people, approximately 95.27 minutes) to raise awareness of their unconscious group behaviours and unintended consequences.
Observations, as follows:
- A ratio of nine closed questions (and many unhelpful answers) is asked for every open-ended question. The questioners express frustration about not getting enough of the information they want, fast enough. Those questioned (sometimes with double-barreled or triple-barreled closed questions), appear confused or under interrogation and riled.
- Negligible paraphrasing of long-windedness or differences. Few progress-monitoring summaries of often-meandering dialogue. In the rush to get through the agenda, no opportunities are provided to talk information into place within smaller groups. At times people appear over-loaded or confused by TMUI: Too Much Unsorted Information.
- Problem-solving efforts begin by defining problems as the absence of (very specific) solutions. Then, heated arguments about those and other solutions. Stages of problem definition and the clarification of likely causes are completely by-passed.
Conclusions:
Nothing new, here. This group behaves as other organisations routinely do (in this case at meetings), wasting a great deal of potential energy, blaming one another for the consequences without understanding the causes. They get through the agenda, but at significant cost.
What should change? Where to start? Read more, download free
Productivity, Interpersonal Competence and Constructive Relationships
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