The Value of Feedback

At various stages during my corporate journey, I have many peers, team members & bosses to thank, for having made me wealthier in thought and action. Its these learnings that stayed with me and contributed to my development and I will always remain indebted to all of them.

I am tempted to humbly share one such experience for those who may like to pick up threads to weave into their lives, in their own way.

This story goes back to the late 80’s. During my days as the Regional Manager (South), it was my privilege to have had a wonderful team of highly qualified and very competent sales engineers and an efficient secretary who managed the office administration.

Most of the times our sales team including myself were on the field visiting customers and distributors across the region for expanding our revenue footprint and providing service on applications of our products, while my efficient secretary held fort back in office.

In a span of three years after I started the Bangalore regional office, we had built a wonderful and cohesive team, together established local systems and processes that helped us improve service to our valued customers, and created a pleasant working culture, weathered the storm of a vicious strike in our Plant and built a decent market position as the preferred partner of our customers.

On completion of those three years, I had decided to move out of this company to pursue my growth aspirations and to relocate . I was disrupting a well-established personal and professional life and moving out of my comfort zone to take on another challenge not knowing that I was about to pass through a turbulent zone in my career, but that’s for another day.

That eventful day which was my last working day in office, my colleagues and I decided to gather informally in my office cabin, for a brief chat. ?The discussion soon veered towards providing feedback to my colleagues on the opportunity areas for change and improvement.

Since each one of them was keen to get feedback from me, I decided to do this on a one-on-one basis, and it would be time well spent.

As our individual session progressed, I thought I should also take the opportunity to seek feedback for myself. One of my colleagues graciously agreed, and what he told me was unexpectedly hard hitting and beyond my imagination.

Here is what he said:

“Amongst the many good things that I had done, was to build a very open and transparent culture and that working together had been a very productive and wonderful experience, however, as the team leader, I had taken away the opportunity to allow my colleagues to develop”. It was like a lightening strike which came like a bolt from the blues.

I had considered myself a very friendly and open boss with not even the slightest intention to do any such thing. In fact, I thought, I had given all the freedom to my colleagues and the space that they needed, to deliver great outcomes, which they had done exceptionally well.

I fell silent for a few seconds and then humbly asked him to explain why he thought so, with a few examples, and this is what he did. He walked across to his room, picked up a sheaf of papers lying on his table and showed them to me.

Those days, the system in our office was, that all the incoming mails would first be received by my secretary, inwarded into a register, and then kept for perusal, on my desk. I would scrutinize the mail and make a few noting’s on the papers and my secretary would then forward them to the concerned engineer for taking necessary action.

On each paper that my colleague showed to me, my noting’s would read as below:

“Please do the following: giving at least two to three action points’, actually giving an impression that I had already laid the options on paper. Without realising the implications, I was unknowingly following this practice, thinking to myself that I was actually helping my colleague to resolve the issue at hand. I was being prescriptive, with a very highly competent colleague.

Rightly so, my colleague felt that, had I just forwarded the paper to him and asked him to decide his chosen course of action, it would have given him the opportunity to think independently, chose his own options, and do what he thought was right, in his way, to generate the desired outcomes.

This feedback turned out to be an extremely precious piece of advice as I journeyed through my career. I thanked my colleague profusely for sharing this wonderful feedback with me. I had become richer in thought as a leader.

My Learnings

I had learnt a very valuable lesson indeed, that while delegating downward, I must give the opportunity to my colleagues to think and explore their own options in the interest of their development. It’s not enough to recruit talented and competent people and bind them to a certain style of working. You need to set them free to explore their potential, while being there for them as a mentor when they needed you.

As I gathered more experience, I also learnt that this principle could not be universally applied to everyone. it was necessary to develop a flexible leadership style and be discerning while delegating, depending on the context, the level of importance of the issue, competence and capability of the colleague.?