It's Feedback, and It's Important

I have been working with small and large businesses for over 40 years.? Lately, the topic of giving and receiving feedback and holding people accountable for their performance has become increasingly top of mind.? In an election year in California, political performance, population migration and feedback has also emerged as a repeated point of discussion.? They are intimately related.

Here’s why.

People don’t learn from their mistakes, they learn from the results of their mistakes.? Psychologists have known for decades that if consequences are to be effective learning tools, they must be 1.) close enough in time to pair with the behavior, and 2.) fairly certain to occur.?

For a business owner or manager, providing timely feedback to your staff is critical to their success, and thus to yours.? If they don’t know they are not performing, they can’t or won’t change their behavior.? Telling them how they're doing is not something to be afraid of, it is in their and your best interest.? It’s how people learn.? Customers provide direct and verifiable feedback to business owners by either patronizing a business or taking their business elsewhere.? Arguing with them that they should stay as they go out the door is a complete waste of your time.? You ignore the opportunity to help your employees or learn from your customers at great peril.? It will put you out of business.?

Politicians and public employees operate under a different set of rules.?? They are insulated from the consequences of their actions either by time (elections happen every few years), by union and civil service job protections, and by anonymity and ease of shifting responsibility to some other anonymous bureaucrat.? They vote themselves raises and impose both union and civil service protections which effectively prevent them from being dismissed absent some blatant criminal act.? They rarely face layoffs or cut-backs.? If the government loses money, so what?? They’ll just raise existing taxes or impose new ones.? Elected politicians slide from one office to another, or move into some civil service or board position afterwards, often on the public’s dole, or “interfacing” i.e. selling influence, to the private sector.? The result is that consequences are neither close in time nor relatively certain to occur.

The primary immediate source of feedback to the public sector is an independent, inquisitive and thoughtful press. Part of the press’s job is to hold powerful politicians and public officials accountable for their behavior.? Sadly, in California, most of the media has abandoned that responsibility.?

That said, some chickens are coming home to roost.? California is going broke.? People are leaving the state.? Business owners, tax payers, retirees are bailing out for a variety of reasons, but the most commonly cited are high taxes, poor services, high cost of living, over-regulation of business, failing infrastructure, the highest energy costs in the country (and going higher), relentless hectoring by people who claim they have unusually perceptive insights on social issues, crappy schools and a powerful, unpredictable and arbitrary bureaucracy.?

California politicians and their supporters in the press are not taking the departures well.? They are going thru the five stages of grief.? Right now, they are in Denial and are headed toward Anger.? In Denial, they make up statistics and cherry pick data to find some arbitrary and tiny sub-group whose population is increasing.? They will talk about how the population isn’t really shrinking that much, that net in-migration (much of it consisting of people who have no legal right to be in the United States at all) compensates for some of the population loss. ?In Anger, they blame the people leaving.? They call the populace whiners and demand that they not trash talk the state.?

This is completely nuts.?

Losing customers is feedback.? Going broke is feedback.? People leaving the state is feedback.? Ignore it at your peril.?