Giving AND Receiving Feedback and Difficult Conversations

Who likes having feedback conversations? Yep, not many of us, that’s for sure! Its hard enough as it is, but add in today’s hybrid/remote working complexities, plus being overwhelmingly busy, and it’s suddenly a hundred times harder.

Feedback, feedforward, difficult conversations, put whatever marketing spin you like on it & call it what you want, it’s one of the hardest things to consistently do and get right. However, it can be done. When you have some pragmatic, real-world parameters, and practical frameworks around it, it can actually work very well, and can make everyone’s life a whole lot more empowering, engaging - and more productive - as a result.

If you’re going to do any training around this for your people, I’d highly recommend you do it with the leader and their team all in the one training program. Some people may not be comfortable with that because it holds people accountable – but they’re probably not going to be comfortable with anything anyway, so no loss!

When the whole team do the training together you get the best outcomes because everyone gets the same clear message that it’s about how you give and receive feedback. That way you start to develop a team culture around feedback/feedforward right there and then in the training.

That then leads to better accountability, better understanding, better engagement, and better outcomes.? It also spotlights and shows up the nay-sayers, and often gets them to start getting on board – begrudgingly and under peer/team pressure at first maybe, but they still get dragged along, and it’s usually a good start. When they get going, it usually isn’t as bad as the thought anyway, and most come round to at least some semblance of more of positive attitude.

?The bottom line is about taking action and having real-time, regular, day-to-day, real-world conversations. The above graphic ??courtesy of HBR says it all.

They key messages we teach in our Giving amp; Receiving Feedback and Difficult Conversations programs are:

1.????? Feedback is always a 2-way street and a 360-degree responsibility.

2.????? How people give AND receive feedback are equally important.

3.????? If you’re not getting what you need you have a responsibility to ask!

4.????? It needs to be honest but always mutually respectful.

5.????? It must be frequent, specific, and genuine.

6.????? It must enable, motivate and/or promote understanding one way or another.

7.????? It must be truthful, useful, and kind.

8.????? Come from a Coaching Leadership or feedForward perspective – how can we learn from this? What can we do differently/ better next time? What can we learn? What can we learn and do to stop this happening again?

You can’t fix the past. And hanging someone out to dry for a mistake (like the media and politicians do!) is only going to make people hide it better next time, blame someone else, care even less about you and the team and strengthen the downward flush of the disengagement spiral.

9.????? Build a culture of Catching People Doing Something Right as the primary operating mode.

Then, when you have to have a difficult conversation it’s much better accepted. Because you take time to acknowledge what people do well the vast majority of the time, they are more likely to take the critical feedback on board (if delivered respectfully!) because there’s a balance. Trust, engagement and understanding flow because people feel seen and acknowledged.

10.? The little things are just as important as the big things. Sweat the small stuff.

11.? Fixing things yourself as the leader rather than having a coaching/development conversation about it with your team simply doesn’t work.

You just end up with more work. Plus disengaged people who think you’re a perfectionist micro-manager who doesn’t care about developing people and doesn’t trust them to learn and grow. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and it may not be your actual thinking and reality - you genuinely may be trying to save time and get sh!t done faster - but the team reality is likely to be the above ??

The busier we get as leaders the greater the tendency to expect people to just get on with the job. Again, it’s easy to slip into that thinking without realising it – boiling frog syndrome. Rarely is it something people often consciously jump into, it creeps up on us – I’ve had it happen with my teenage son recently, and I can promise you it doesn’t end well!!

The inner monologue that says: “that’s what you should be doing, just get on with it!” … “that’s what people are paid for, for crying out loud just do it…” and “I’ll praise people when they do something exceptional, but don’t need to give them a medal for doing their day-job as that’s what they should be doing!” and “just get on with it & get it done” … “haven’t got time for that sh!t”

And look, I get it, there’s some truth in that, of course. ?

The problem is, when you get an inkling into understanding the Neuroscience behind Teamwork (see the article I wrote recently on The Neuroscience of Teamwork and Psychological Safety), you realise that by having the above thinking, just pushing people and criticising them for what they’re not doing and ignoring the things they do well, then you effectively drain people’s motivation cups dry.

As a rule of thumb, negative/critical feedback is received by our brains as up to 5 times more negatively powerful and impactful than one piece of positive feedback.

Imagine 1 piece of critical feedback is like taking 5 drops of water out of a glass and each piece of positive feedback is 1 drop in.

Even if people start with a full cup, you can see the equation quickly runs people dry.

And that’s almost exactly what happens – people run dry: they feel like the life’s being constantly sucked out of them.

“Nothing’s good enough… I don’t get acknowledged for all the things I do work hard on, for the effort I put in, for what I actually do do well…. I just get railed out for the one or 2 mistakes I make…f*ck it, why bother! I’ve had enough! I give up!” People engagement and Psychological Safety flush down the toilet of the disengagement vortex.

Growing up as a kid, it was like that with my Dad. He was a hard man. A Prison Officer in some of the UK’s highest security prisons dealing daily with the worst criminals of society - with a background of being brought up on a farm by grandparents who had survived WWII. Positive reinforcement wasn’t exactly a thing, shall we say!

Nothing was ever good enough. I was expected to do all the chores and do them perfectly – anything less wasn’t acceptable. Being given praise for doing what I should be doing was simply anathema! I should be grateful I got to do it in the first place and should take pride in it and do it perfect in the first place - that was the expectation (The Four Yorkshiremen sketch springs to mind!)!

We can easily fall into that trap as leaders, especially when we’re working our butts off and are also overwhelmed and being crushed under the weight of what we have to do as well. That has to change if we want engaged, effective, collaborative, trusting productive teams – and don’t we all want that?

12.? When a team has a true culture of Giving and Receiving honest, respectful, genuine, supportive, acknowledging what people do well which includes sweating the small stuff, and have a ‘how can we learn and grow?’ Feedback/FeedForward/Coaching culture, the world changes – for the better. For everyone.

An example of the power of a great feedback/feedforward culture.

We rolled out our Giving & Receiving Feedback program to 601 mangers and teams across 2 agencies in a large NSW Government Department. One agency benchmarked it though CEB/Gartner, against the top leadership development programs in Australia, NZ, the UK, US, and S Africa… the feedback from managers 9-12 months after the program was delivered was that it boosted productivity by an average of 26%! The productivity results were on a par with all the world’s top leadership programs across all the nations.

That was an extended version that included a 1-day training program followed by 1 – 2 hours of coaching for each participant 2-3 weeks after the training, followed 2-3 weeks later by a ?-day follow up training program.

Obviously we recommend you run the proven extended program to get the best results. However, we realise you may not have the budget or capacity to run the extended program. If so, you’ll still get great results from the 1-day training we offer – we guarantee that with our 100% Money-back Guarantee (see website for our very reasonable Ts & Cs).

As with all our training programs, we get participants to build their individual personal action plan as the day progresses, so they have a list of real actions they can apply in the real world – new actions; things they’ll keep doing; actions they do but can improve on; and things they’ll stop doing.

For more information on our Giving & Receiving Feedback and supporting coaching programs, click here OR If you want to have a conversation about developing your team’s Giving & Receiving Feedback capabilities, get in touch here