Turning Constructive Feedback Into a Power Tool

I was given some amazing feedback on a talk that I gave to a group of CEOs in Oklahoma awhile back. I took too long and added too many details to my opening story before I explained the context and reason for the story. The CEO who provided the feedback was lost and found himself wondering where I was going. He found himself wandering off. I sometimes get lost in the story when I am speaking and often lose track of my audience. It is not good. That feedback caused me to seriously revamp the opening of my speech, starting with some direct context early on in the speech. The last couple of talks I gave since were markedly better and gained more powerful, early engagement from the CEO groups. I was able to turn that feedback into gold immediately. In my early business career, that would not have been the case for me. This is the result of learning how to celebrate feedback when I get it. (p.s. I sent the CEO a small gift to thank him in this case.)

For the last several decades, I have been leading teams that build enterprise software applications. I have watched hundreds of teams build products, some of which succeeded and some of which failed. One of the distinguishing features of successful teams is how they handle constructive feedback from their customers, stakeholders, and users. Successful teams thoroughly and passionately embrace feedback. They dig into it, dive into root cause discussions, and determine how they will learn from it. The very best teams celebrate it when they get really meaty, detailed feedback. I’ve observed a very different pattern amongst unsuccessful teams.

What typically happens when teams receive constructive feedback about their work?

What I have observed is that the team’s behavior follows very closely the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross grief cycle. Teams faced with negative feedback go through each stage of the cycle, in turn. My conjecture is that this occurs for a few obvious reasons. Teams of people spend eight hours or more a day working on their products and services. One-third of their day, most days of their working lives. I equate it to calling their baby “ugly.” It is a perfectly natural response to having your work criticized. Here are the stages, as I have observed them:

1. Denial: They are somewhat shocked and in a state of denial. “How could that have happened?” is commonly heard.

2. Anger: They get angry, sometimes at the customer, sometimes at themselves, but they usually express some sense of frustration and anger.

3. Bargaining: They try to negotiate and downplay the impact of the problem. “It's not that big of a deal,” “The customer is overreacting,” or “We can deal with this later.”

4. Sadness: They recognize the error and think through the root causes. They enter a state of remorse and sadness for the errors and omissions that led to the problem.

5. Acceptance: They realize they have to address the problem in some way.

Most of the teams I have observed clean up the mess that was made, eventually. However, instead of keying in on the learning, celebrating it, building the learnings into their systems, and sharing the learnings with other teams, they tend to carefully sweep these incidents under the rug. On underperforming teams, you will see this pattern where the teams do not want to talk about their flaws, errors, and mistakes out loud. The problems get quietly resolved and teams promptly move on to the next challenge of the day and forget about looking for the learnings. Maybe it happens because they are worried about embarrassment, perception, or worse, a black mark on their performance review. This is a huge, missed opportunity.

The key here is that learning really doesn’t start until after they start to look for the root causes, after the acceptance phase of the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross cycle.

As a result of this phenomenon, the amount of business value via both hard labor expenses and missed opportunity costs can be profound. There is no productive business value created in the time spent below the line. It is all waste, represented by the red hashed area of the graph. No business value is created until something is learned and it creates sustainable value if that learning is integrated into the business's systems, processes, and products.

When leaders set the example of celebrating constructive feedback and the learning that results, teams learn to buck this trend. It can be as simple as teaching your teams to identify the emotions associated with having their work criticized so that they can identify the cycle in action, earlier. When they can see it, they can change their behavior and move through the cycles faster, getting to the learning and integration of the learning into systems and processes faster.

Constructive feedback is an expected behavior when you have authentic advocates. Advocates are the people who are invested in your long-term success. They demonstrate that they care about your future when they invest the time from their busy days to tell you how badly you screwed up and they offer up ideas about how to fix it. These behaviors deserve to be celebrated when you see them. Thriving teams recognize this and capitalize on it in profound ways. Often, they will engage the customer in the resolution process and in fixing the systems that led to the problem. When teams have incorporated systems for productively handling constructive feedback and are operating really well, they celebrate the learnings and the requisite innovations that result from their customers, completing the cycle.

Not all feedback is useful. Some feedback, particularly the kind that comes from people who do not care about your collective future, might be cataloged under “complaints.” You know what this feedback looks like because it doesn’t typically carry any thoughtful or helpful information that can help you improve. Often, when you get complaints from people who are not advocates, they often don’t give that feedback to you. They give it to everyone or anyone else who will listen or worse, they may post it in a public forum. You should listen to this feedback as well, but give more weight to the feedback that you get from the customers who demonstrate that they care about your success and demonstrate positive intent to improve, together.

Knowing how to tell the difference between complaints and authentically delivered constructive feedback is a powerful muscle that needs to be developed if you want to develop a culture that innovates. When your teams break this cycle and the learning accelerates, your organization will realize the business value of the feedback much more quickly as demonstrated in the yellow area in the graph above.

Notice there is still a red area, as I do not think it is reasonable to expect that we can eliminate this cycle. It is a normal part of human processing, and we will be better off if we embrace and acknowledge that it is going to happen. The goal here is to improve our conversations about feedback and to reduce the amount of time and energy expended beneath the line. you have to acknowledge your team's humanity.

Here is a list of things you can experiment with as a leader to foster faster integration of learning from constructive feedback:

>> Model the behavior. If you are not modeling these behaviors yourself, they will not stick. Celebrate when you get constructive feedback and identify the cycle within your self. Do it out loud with your team.

>> Teach your teams this cycle. Once they have awareness of the cycle, it is impossible to ignore and you may find that they want to celebrate it when they see it and even create some humor around it.

>> Create the space in your ceremonies for constructive feedback review, celebration, learning, and integration. Purposefully integrate feedback processing into your meetings, especially recurring meetings.

>> Formally measure the receipt of constructive feedback as a positive force in your organization.

What gets measured, gets managed - Peter Drucker

>> Celebrate the learnings broadly by finding ways to tell stories about the learnings and resulting innovations.

>> Include your advocate customers in the process wherever possible. It reinforces the relationship and strengthens the bond.

If you liked this, give me a thumbs up, share widely, and let me know how it works for you. I promise to honor your feedback.

REFERENCES

On Grief and Grieving, by Elizabeth Kubler Ross

An Advocacy Strategy is Nutrition for Your Culture, by Me

Bragging Rights, How to Pull Customers Over the Advocacy Threshold, by Me

The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker