Thank you Rishad for eloquently sharing extremely valuable suggestions and approaches for providing and receiving helpful feedback. I learned a lot from this article and find this particular statement insightfully important: "by being accountable for our own feedback and by being comfortable helping others with feedback to unleash their growth is a sign of not just successful businesspeople but people who find success in every component of life."
I read your email today with the “six steps to giving better feedback”.
I always appreciate and have taken an interest in your writing, but I can’t agree with you about your top-down feedback approaches.
First, non-performance is not the problem to be addressed with feedback - non-performance is the symptom of something bigger, that’s missing, that if it weren’t missing you wouldn’t even be looking at needing feedback. Your six steps don’t get a manager to the core of the problem – and you’re not going to find out with your approach – without damage being done to any relatedness in the workplace. Relatedness and connectedness define high-performance business cultures that become the Best Places to Work.
The only thing an employee hears when you give your version of feedback is, “there must be something wrong with me, why am I this way?”, and “I give up trying to please this guy”. or, something worse. Then they leave. Your feedback focuses an employee not on working to improve performance, but on trying to figure out what they need to do to avoid the shaming and embarrassment of your so-called feedback. Comparing an employee’s performance to another employee’s performance is shaming and humiliating. It makes for an unsafe work environment.
Also, your approach has all the solutions in the hands of the employer – not the employees. In most cases employees, as a team, have better knowledge about the source of a core problem and as a result, the solution – ask your team “what’s missing” that if it wasn’t missing they’d be where you want them to be.
Not all employees will give you a BS answer just to get you off their back when you are being relational in your approach – and you're willing to own that you might not have set this whole thing up for success. You need to collaborate with the employees who are tasked with executing the strategy.
So, just ask them, “what’s missing?” What’s missing that if it weren’t missing nothing would have fallen through the cracks. Performance wouldn’t be an issue. Your personal feedback would not be necessary. If they don't come through with what they agreed to do it affects the entire company. So, the entire company needs to be involved in setting the direction of the business and it’s them who need to be the source of any feedback. All you do is ask the question, not provide the answer. They know what’s missing better than you. And now they're accountable for revenue growth.
This is known as Promise-Based Management; where instead of managing the employee, you manage aggregated employee team promises to take bold action - measuring the completion of ALL committed-to promises. You want action – you don’t want to have to spend your time, and experience the anxiety of coming up with employee “feedback”.
There’s much more to setting up a culture of performance through Promise-Based Management. You’ll find much of it in my book ‘THIRTEENERS Why Only 13% of Companies Successfully Execute Their Strategy – and How Yours Can Be One of Them.’ You can get it free by connecting with me on LinkedIn and requesting it. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dprosser/
Thank you Rishad for eloquently sharing extremely valuable suggestions and approaches for providing and receiving helpful feedback. I learned a lot from this article and find this particular statement insightfully important: "by being accountable for our own feedback and by being comfortable helping others with feedback to unleash their growth is a sign of not just successful businesspeople but people who find success in every component of life."
I read your email today with the “six steps to giving better feedback”.
I always appreciate and have taken an interest in your writing, but I can’t agree with you about your top-down feedback approaches.
First, non-performance is not the problem to be addressed with feedback - non-performance is the symptom of something bigger, that’s missing, that if it weren’t missing you wouldn’t even be looking at needing feedback. Your six steps don’t get a manager to the core of the problem – and you’re not going to find out with your approach – without damage being done to any relatedness in the workplace. Relatedness and connectedness define high-performance business cultures that become the Best Places to Work.
The only thing an employee hears when you give your version of feedback is, “there must be something wrong with me, why am I this way?”, and “I give up trying to please this guy”. or, something worse. Then they leave. Your feedback focuses an employee not on working to improve performance, but on trying to figure out what they need to do to avoid the shaming and embarrassment of your so-called feedback. Comparing an employee’s performance to another employee’s performance is shaming and humiliating. It makes for an unsafe work environment.
Also, your approach has all the solutions in the hands of the employer – not the employees. In most cases employees, as a team, have better knowledge about the source of a core problem and as a result, the solution – ask your team “what’s missing” that if it wasn’t missing they’d be where you want them to be.
Not all employees will give you a BS answer just to get you off their back when you are being relational in your approach – and you're willing to own that you might not have set this whole thing up for success. You need to collaborate with the employees who are tasked with executing the strategy.
So, just ask them, “what’s missing?” What’s missing that if it weren’t missing nothing would have fallen through the cracks. Performance wouldn’t be an issue. Your personal feedback would not be necessary. If they don't come through with what they agreed to do it affects the entire company. So, the entire company needs to be involved in setting the direction of the business and it’s them who need to be the source of any feedback. All you do is ask the question, not provide the answer. They know what’s missing better than you. And now they're accountable for revenue growth.
This is known as Promise-Based Management; where instead of managing the employee, you manage aggregated employee team promises to take bold action - measuring the completion of ALL committed-to promises. You want action – you don’t want to have to spend your time, and experience the anxiety of coming up with employee “feedback”.
There’s much more to setting up a culture of performance through Promise-Based Management. You’ll find much of it in my book ‘THIRTEENERS Why Only 13% of Companies Successfully Execute Their Strategy – and How Yours Can Be One of Them.’ You can get it free by connecting with me on LinkedIn and requesting it. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dprosser/