How do your people respond to your feedback? Do they respect and seek your sage counsel or could it do with a little finesse? Feedback is an art, here’s how to be effective at it…
So much to explore as part of this blog…What’s the best approach to giving feedback? How do we structure feedback? How do we handle those people that don't respond well to feedback? And what about the challenge of having to feed back to our boss. Don’t worry I’ve got that covered too! What else are we going to explore? We’ll look at how to offer praise, which is clearly a lovely thing to do AND perhaps for some, the slightly more challenging – delivering developmental feedback. You’ll also get a chance to practice with a scenario that’s totally relatable to the work environment AND I’ll introduce you to a feedback model that’s easy to use AND remember.
We’ve all received feedback multiple times in our lives, both in and outside the workplace….so we kind of know what good and bad feedback sounds like….I’m not talking about the content of the feedback, I’m sure ALL the feedback you’ve receive has been out of this world….I’m talking about the WAY in which it’s delivered. So before we get into the detail, lets look at how certain behaviours from managers can make ALL the difference in how feedback is received.
How about this work place experience…Ever had the following, or something similar delivered to you by your boss…an out of the blue, totally unexpected….”can I have a quick word with you in my office.”….Now assuming you have…..was that a mini “fist-pump” moment? Did you find yourself instantly filled with excitement eager to hear what they had to say? Or was it – an instant moment of dread, sudden heart palpitations…your mind racing at a million miles per hour, trying desperately to work out what it is you’ve unknowingly messed up on? It’s interesting isn’t it, how such a short sentence can have such a huge impact on us – The ambiguity as to what it’s about…the uncertainty as to what you’re about to walk into. If you’ve been reading these blogs from the beginning. Think back to the start of this journey and the list you created of ALL the positive attributes of quality leadership….Is this how your chosen leader would act? What would they do differently?
While the above example may not always be linked to a manager needing to share feedback – The principle of approaching something of importance in a mindful fashion, understanding how your actions affect others is an important one…especially when feedback is involved. It’s reasonable to say not all of us are as open to feedback as others, be that positive or developmental, so sharpening up on those leadership skills empathy, sensitivity, listening, assertiveness and planning, isn’t ever going to be time wasted – Delivering structured, timely, well thought through feedback, be that positive or developmental is an art, and one that can garner you a great deal of respect.
Here’s another scenario. Imagine you’re within your work place walking down a corridor and somebody senior, whom you’ve a great deal of respect for, and as far as you’re aware has no idea who you are, pass by one another…They stop, call you by name and say, “just wanted to mention, I heard about that project you were leading on, incredible result, I know there were challenges but you really delivered…keep up the great work.” How would that make you feel? I’m assuming pretty good?…Now the point I’m making…isn’t to go randomly wandering the halls of your workplace giving out unsolicited feedback! But to highlight, how little time and effort it can take, to make a huge impact on anothers motivation.
Lets briefly pick up on the theme of motivation and apply it to feedback. Now this won’t be hard, take a moment and imagine you’ve just delivered on a huge project, you made it come in ahead of time, under budget and the end result has exceeded expectations. Now just image you were to receive feedback on this incredible achievement - How would you prefer it’s delivered? Privately, 121, or a big announcement in front of the team, dept, hell make it the whole business? :). It doesn’t matter which one you chose, the point here is we’re all different, just because you want your praise sung from the hill-tops, doesn’t mean members of your team do. I mean If I was to take this example to extremes, the last thing you’d want is for someone to under-perform purely because they fear how they’ll be rewarded / recognised, but the potentials there, so it's something to be mindful of.
Right, time to introduce the feedback model. It’s called SAID, it stands for:
Situation
Action
Impact
Development.
What’s great about the model is it can be used for both praise and developmental feedback but something else that’s powerful is the way the model’s structured. It assists you in separating the behaviour from the person. What I mean by that, is when you’re feeding back in the workplace the focus is on behaviour not personality…Taking this out of the workplace for a moment - For example if you were with a child and they were having a tantrum in a shopping mall, it would be like you saying to the child…”I love you, I don’t love your behaviour.” The same approach can be applied at work, it’s not about decimating anothers character, it’s about highlighting inappropriate behaviour, so there’s an awareness of some changes that are necessary…so for example it would sound like “you’re a valued and highly regarded member of the team…the way you acted in front of that client earlier however, wasn’t in keeping with your normal high standards” – you’re distancing the person from the behaviour.
Going back to the SAID model, I’ll briefly talk you through each letter of SAID and how best to use it to structure feedback.
The S stands for Situation, the purpose here is for you to make what you share indisputable, “I was there, you were there, this was the situation – you’re basically describing what’s happened” next is…
The A which stands for action, “this is where you spell-out what the person did, their behaviours – maybe didn’t listen, talked a lot, ignored people, lacked attention to detail”
The I is for Impact, so at this stage you’re describing how the behaviours/actions impacted upon other people/the team/the business/a client…The final element to SAID is…
The D and it stands for development. And here you’re simply generating accountability – through the asking of open questions, for example “what will you do differently next time?” Or in the case of praise, “how might you apply this same great work ethic to X?” Basically what you’re looking for here is to elicit a commitment to which they can be held accountable, while there’ll always be a time and place to “tell” people what to do, it’s far from developmental and rarely empowering.
When it comes to feedback remember the mantra “seek first to understand before being understood” which is to say, begin the process of feedbacking by first gaining an understanding of what happened from the others perspective. Through doing so you’ll gain context and potentially insights you weren’t fully aware of. And of course other key points to highlight are to give it in a timely fashion and in an appropriate place. And finally I’m conscious the SAID example I’ve shared here is a little dry in it’s tone, meaning it could be softened up and expanded upon to make it more engaging and personable. The message here, is that the model is simply a guide and a structure to follow, how you make SAID sound and the way in which you articulate it is totally down to you, it’s not prescriptive, make it your own…
Practice scenario:
You lead the learning and development dept within your organisation. There’s a major recruitment drive taking place and this involves the organisation and running of a number of assessment days where potential new recruits are being put through their paces, completing online tests , face to face interviews and getting involved in high pressure role play scenarios run by “subject matter experts” (SME’s) from within the company.
The SME’s are sacrificing their time to support and ensuring they were all available on the same days has proved challenging and time consuming. On top of this, it became evident that due to the number of quality applicants and the logistics of running numerous assessments, covering different themes concurrently over multiple days, a hotel has been booked to enable the use of different break-out rooms and the events be fully catered.
Charlotte your lead training manager has sorted out the joining instructions, booked the rooms, created an itinerary, created the role play scenario’s and liaised with the subject matter experts regarding their availability. She’s also been responsible for booking the hotel and liaising with the contacts there to ensure the breakout rooms and session timings coincide with the hotels catering operations.
The first assessment day took place at the end of last week. Coincidently both you and Charlotte had booked the days off as annual leave some time ago and it’s your first day back in the office. You’ve just received a phone call from Milly the head of IT who was unaware that the assessment days were taking place as nothing had been organised with her.
She was shocked to hear from one of the SME’s at the hotel who had been expecting laptops to be available for the new recruits to complete the online tests. Because it was such short notice and the assessment sessions were taking place off-site Milly had to negotiate with the hotel to provide IT resource which created significant delays to the running of the days as well as additional cost. Plus there were software compatibility issues and security concerns to navigate, which proved hugely time consuming too. Milly ended up having to sacrifice a member of her team who is currently heavily involved in a high profile business wide IT upgrade project, to travel to the hotel to support with the logistics, which has now impacted upon deadlines Milly and her team had committed to.
Needless to say Milly is not happy at all and wants to know why her and her team were not informed of the assessment sessions taking place given they historically have always supported with the necessary IT required.
Because of the delays to the flow of the day a number of delegates chose to leave early as things were to run over, so this will involve rescheduling new sessions, and reimbursing them for their travel. In addition, feedback from those that did complete the day, hasn’t been kind either, with many feeling the day felt very disorganised and not reflective of the companies brand.
Task: Using the SAID feedback model, structure exactly how you’d feedback to Charlotte…
Now if you’re expecting me to share with you the perfect example of what the feedback “should” look like you’ll be disappointed. Having done this hundreds of times with thousands of people I’ve seen countless variations and it’d be amiss of me to suggest there’s an all perfect version to be shared. That said I’d suggest as a form of personal review, take a look at how you’ve approached the recognition of Charlottes obvious hardwork vs how assertive you’ve been in your language regarding the impact of the mistakes that were made – which were of course significant, from a time perspective / financial perspective AND brand reputation. Remember however, the feedback is linked to actions/behaviours, it’s not a character assassination!
Let’s continue the journey by looking at how to handle those that don’t respond well, when feedbacks given – no matter how artful we become at delivering it lol. Let me start by asking you a question…Thinking back to when you’ve delivered developmental feedback in the past, when you’ve had a situation where someones been less than responsive, how would you describe what you experienced? Were they in denial? Super angry? Or were they just utterly shocked? How about a scenario where they’re desperate to move on, so they just kind of accept everything you say? Or perhaps they rationalised everything with a….”yeah, but that happened because…”. Take a moment now, think about your team, think about some feedback you’re gonna have to share – how will the person respond?.....9 times out of 10, you’ll have a good handle on the likely response - But there’s definitely no harm in a little consideration and definitely some preparation, should the unexpected happen.
So here they are again:
Denial
Anger
Shock
Acceptance
Rationalisation
Have a think…What’s the best course of action should one or more of these materialise when you’re next giving feedback? Imagine you experience someone in denial…a good course of action initially would to give them a voice, hear them out, if someone denies clear facts you can safely assume it’s their emotions that are leading them astray. Now through showing empathy and actively listening there’s a chance they may hear for themselves the ridiculousness of what they’re saying and in turn talk themselves into acceptance. But if not, this is where the model helps you…the “situation” part enables you to share “information” the indisputable facts about what happened. That’s not to say it’s easy, especially if there’s emotional intensity in your interaction up to that point.
It’s worth remembering that as a manager and leader your ability to connect and build rapport with another is essential – assuming you’ve DONE that, there’s actually room here to build someone up, despite their earlier denials, should they begin to accept reality - highlighting the level of strong personal leadership it takes when ones is able to change their thinking and accept something they once didn’t, is a rare quality, and certainly worth acknowledgement.
Next one then….Anger!....In many ways this has close ties to denial and the two can often be experienced together. But lets for now stick purely with anger….I think the core message here – don’t fight fire with fire, let someone rant if necessarty, the quicker they can release the emotions they’re experiencing the better. There’s obviously a conversation to be had regarding level of appropriateness this type of behaviour represents in the work place, but I don’t want to get bogged down in that, context will clearly play a part. Let’s stick with handling the anger….Its going to come as no surprise that once again it’ll boil down to your ability to, listen, empathise, build rapport, without allowing their high emotions to spark your own. There’s a school of thought that says, should the situation become so volatile, as to become unproductive, that you call an end to the feedback in that moment, advise the individual to take time-out, go cool down – but what you definitely DON’T do is cancel…you agree there and then upon a time /place to reconvene.
So what about….shock!...It’s worth highlighting here, that this response can sometimes lead to such heightened emotions due to the feedback being at such a level of unexpectedness that it creates overwhelming emotions that can lead to upset and sadness. Or from a positive perspective, tears of joy. So be prepared, you’re going to seriously need to focus on your empathy building skills, should you experience this. Another point to make here, and this very much falls into YOUR camp, and that’s YOUR responsibility to ensure all feedback is given in a timely fashion – There’s a high likelihood of shock, if you’ve waited 3 weeks to feedback on something!
Two more to go – “acceptance” now you’d think this is the one we’d all want to hear, and lets not kid ourselves, you’d be right, nothing better than someone responding well to feedback, committing to actions and following through on the changes needed…of course the issue’s when someone’s acceptance has zero to do with acknowledgment and everything to do with wanting to get away from the negative emotions they’re experiencing. This behaviour probably becomes easier to spot when someone’s got form for this type or response, so if you’ve got someone who’s likely to be quick to accept, prepare yourself with examples of previous times they’ve made promises, but not followed through.
And on to our final behaviour…and it’s a biggie….in fact I’d be willing to bet you’ve used this one on multiple occasions yourself, as have I, it’s by far the most common – rationalisation…which sounds like “oh yeah, but…I did that because.” From a management perspective there’s actually something to be mindful of here and by not heeding this advise it has the potential to damage YOUR credibility and that’s….they may be right!! It may well be the thing they’re claiming was the reason why they did what they did…because it may actually have happened. In which case the actions they took may have been entirely appropriate given the circumstances….So giant warning here…Do your homework, if you haven’t done what you can, to have gained as clear a perspective as possible prior to delivering any feedback…things could backfire – so be mindful of that.
Of course there’s always the possibility they’re simply rationalising and making excuses, in which case it’s going to boil down to you having a conversation about personal leadership and taking responsibility, to stop shifting blame and take ownership. So how did they compare to your thinking? Similar? I’ve no doubt a number of these duplicated what you’d already researched for yourself, hopefully though I shared a few approaches new to you…..
So there’s one final theme before we wrap up our session on feedback…and that’s feeding back to our boss or someone of greater seniority than you. For many people, neither are easy things to do, but done in the right way, rising to this challenge, and done in the right way, it has the potential to garner you copious amounts of respect. So if you’ve got a scenario like this coming up soon and you’ve been second guessing yourself as to whether you should even bother…let me share an approach that works
First up - Be tactful. Respect their position and ensure you make a judgement on when the most appropriate time and place will be.
Secondly, be consultative…what I mean by this is, provide the feedback through asking questions…something like “What are your thoughts on how x was presented to the client?” In affect you're planting the seed, while creating conversation. This enables an easier transition to discussing the topic you wish to share.
Three - ensure that whatever this feedback is being focused on, it's focusing on your issues, not some wider challenges…
And finally think about how this conversation you’re having with them will lead to benefits for them – so come armed with that old cliché “solutions not problems.”