HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT FEEDBACK?

Someone once said – ‘Feedback is the breakfast of champions.’ Personally, I think that pancakes, crispy bacon and maple syrup are the breakfast of champions. However, there’s no doubt that giving your team members feedback is absolutely vital to ensure a motivated team who’ll deliver results. In Chapter 9 we’ll take a close look at what really motivates people at work; however, one of the top three factors is feedback.

The majority of people want to know how they’re doing at work. They want to know when they’re doing well and they want to know when they could be doing better. There are a small minority of people who don’t want feedback at all; but let’s face it, you don’t want these people on your team anyway.

Okay, so I’ll accept the fact that many people don’t want to hear bad things about their job performance. However, it depends on how they hear the bad news that will affect their motivation at work. I’m sure that you’d want to know if you were doing your job okay; I know I would.

I used to run seminars on behalf of an American training company. Every so often they would send a senior training manager to sit in on my seminars for a day or two and give me feedback. Inevitably, from time to time, I might conduct part of the seminar in a manner not quite in line with the way this training company wanted it done. When it came to giving me feedback I was left in no doubt that they wanted it done in a particular way. Of course the training manager also told me what she did like about my way of running the seminar.

At the end of these feedback sessions I can always remember feeling good about myself. I was receiving feedback that confirmed what I was doing well and also some productive feedback that enabled me to do even better in the future.

Like many people, I can be very sensitive to negative feedback. At the end of any seminar or workshop I scan the feedback forms looking for any comment that would dare to suggest that I hadn’t done a good job.

Remember what I said in Chapter 2 about thinking and not reacting? Well I’ve learned to practise what I preach. It’s easy for me to look at negative feedback on the forms and say ‘You can’t please all the people all the time’ or ‘Who cares?’ or ‘What do they know?’. I try to keep an open mind and think about what’s being said on the feedback forms. Is it something I should do something about? If this person didn’t like something that I said, maybe there were others who felt the same way but didn’t make any comment? All I want to do in my job is be the best that I can be, so it’s important to listen to what my ‘customers’ have to say.

HOW DOES EVERYONE ELSE FEEL?

We all feel differently about feedback because we are all different. Some people love it, others are okay with it and others just hate it.

I’m sure that you have people on your team who always want to know how they’re doing. They come and speak to you and show what they’re doing. ‘Is this okay boss, am I doing this right?’ They are constantly looking for reassurance that they’re doing the right thing. Then you’ll have others on your team who never come and speak to you and get most uncomfortable whether you’re giving them the good news or the bad.

I used to manage teams of field sales people and a lot of our conversations would be by telephone in the course of the working day. I also used to receive phone calls at home in the evening, usually about something I needed to be kept up to date on. However, there were always a couple of people on the team who would phone much more than others. ‘Just wanted to let you know what happened with this customer today Alan’ or ‘just thought I’d update you on my figures.’ Often it was information that was surplus to requirements but it was just that person’s way of getting some feedback. They weren’t necessarily looking for praise; they just needed to know that they were doing okay. It all ties in with the acknowledgement that we looked at earlier.

There were others in the team that I hardly ever heard from except when I phoned them or went to see them.

But let’s think about you for a moment. You might be the kind of person who is comfortable with lots of feedback or maybe you’d prefer it in much smaller doses. The important point is this: the way you feel about receiving feedback could affect the way you give it to your team.

Managers who are happy to receive feedback are usually happy to give it to their team members because they believe their entire team feel the same as they do.

And of course, if you look at it the other way round, managers less comfortable with feedback tend to believe that their team feel the same way. This is often the biggest danger because many managers don’t receive feedback from their manager and subconsciously feel, ‘Why should I give feedback to my guys when I don’t get it?’

Whether you receive feedback or not; whether you feel uncomfortable giving it or not – you still need to do it for your people. Just be aware that they’re all different individuals and they might react in different ways. Almost everyone wants feedback – how much is just a matter of degree.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

Before we get into the different kinds of feedback and how we do it, I just want to be clear on a few points.

The feedback I’m talking about here isn’t some sort of formalised appraisal that takes place with our team members every month or every six months or once a year. This feedback happens continually and it happens when you see or hear something you want to give feedback on. The trick is – keep it simple. If you see or hear something you do like, you tell the team member about it. If you see or hear something you don’t like or feel could be done better, you tell the team member about it and you coach them.

CONFIRMING FEEDBACK

This is about giving the good news. It’s about confirming to your team member that you approve of whatever it is you’ve seen them do or heard them say. It’s a compliment or a thank you.

It also seems to be something that some managers have great difficulty with. They take the attitude ‘Why tell people that you’re pleased with them when they’re only doing what they’re paid to do in the first place.’ A great deal of this attitude stems from what we said in Chapter 1, about managers having to be big and tough and macho. And managers don’t do all that touchy-feely stuff; saying thank you is for wimps.

If you still feel a bit like that, think for a moment about how you felt when a manager gave you a genuine compliment or a thank you for a job well done. (Hopefully you can remember a time.) I bet you felt pretty good and probably motivated to do even better. I’m also sure you didn’t think your boss was a big softy or that he lacked courage; probably the opposite.

Motivational Managers realise that almost every member of their team reacts positively to Confirming feedback. The team members feel better about themselves and they feel motivated to repeat the behaviour. There is a saying that goes, ‘You get more of what you reward.’

Michael LeBoeuf tells this fable in his book The Greatest Management Principle in the World:

A man went fishing one day. He looked over the side of his boat and saw a snake with a frog in its mouth. Feeling sorry for the frog, he reached down, gently took the frog from the snake and set the frog free. But then he felt sorry for the snake. He looked around the boat, but he had no food. All he had was a bottle of whisky; so he opened the bottle and gave the snake a few shots. The snake want off happy, the frog was happy and the man was happy to have performed such a good deed. He thought everything was fine until about ten minutes passed and he heard something knock against the side of the boat. With stunned disbelief, the fisherman looked down and saw the snake was back with two frogs!

I was setting up the room for a two-day training seminar in a hotel recently. The General Manager of the hotel happened to be passing and came into the room. He introduced himself: ‘Good morning Mr Fairweather, my name is Tom Mitchell and I’m the General Manager. Is everything okay with your room and are you being looked after?’ I was very pleased with his approach and I mentioned it to the Conference Manager later in the day. I asked him to speak to the General Manager: ‘Please tell Mr Mitchell that I really liked the way he came into the room this morning, introduced himself to me and enquired if everything was okay. He made me feel like a special customer.’

The next morning as I was getting ready to start, the General Manager appeared again. ‘Everything all right Mr Fairweather?’ was his enquiry. Now I know that this manager doesn’t go round all the meeting rooms every morning enquiring if everything is okay. I was just getting a bit more of ‘what I had rewarded’.

So if you tell one of your team that you like the way they have completed some aspect of their work, you’ll find that they continue to do that work in the same way or probably even better.

You’ve got to be genuine

Sometimes on a seminar, I ask the group, ‘Who likes receiving compliments?’ Often only a minority will put up their hand. I then ask, ‘Who likes receiving a genuine compliment?’ This time almost everyone puts up their hand. People often feel that a compliment isn’t really meant and they sometimes feel a bit patronised. That’s why it’s important that your Confirming feedback is genuine and it sounds genuine. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it!

Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, once said, ‘Nothing else can substitute for a few well chosen, well timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.’

Confirming feedback is worth a fortune to you in terms of motivating your team and achieving your outcomes. It needs to be done well and we’re going to look at how to do that. However, for the moment, let’s look at the other side of the coin.

PRODUCTIVE FEEDBACK

This is about giving feedback on behaviour you’re not happy with. As you spend time with your team you are going to see and hear things that are not going to ensure your outcomes. I’m emphasising the word ‘outcomes’ because at the end of the day these are what count. This is where you have to keep thinking and not reacting. It’s inevitable that you’ll see and hear things in your team that you don’t like and you react to. If you do, engage your thinking mind and ask yourself, ‘Is this something that is going to stop me achieving my outcome of a happy and motivated team who achieve their targets?’ I’ve often had to ‘bite my tongue’ when I’ve seen or heard something that would not be the way I’d do it.

As I’ve made the point before in this book, results or as I like to call them, outcomes, are what matter to the Motivational Manager. If you see or hear something that’s going to stop you achieving your outcomes, then you need to do something about it. If it’s not going to affect your outcomes – keep your mouth shut!

Competencies: I’m not a fan

You may work in an organisation that has a competency program. These organisations have a list of behavioural competencies for a particular role and managers are required to rate team members on each one. They then ‘encourage’ the team member to work on the competencies they lack and the manager ‘rates’ the team member again at a later date.

This approach suits human resources departments as it imposes an ordered process on staff development. The only thing is – it doesn’t work.

In an article in the Gallup Management Journal, Marcus Buckingham cites an experiment conducted in the late 1950s by the British and American military to develop the ‘perfect’ officer. The idea was to define the behaviours of the perfect officer, measure each person on these behaviours and then train each person to develop the behaviours he didn’t naturally have.

Forty years later, after several attempts to tweak and redesign it, the military decided to abandon this approach to leadership development because it didn’t work. It didn’t measurably improve productivity, customer satisfaction, staff retention, attendance records or any other real-world measures of performance.

Ironically, many business organisations have now adopted the competency approach to developing people.

I once did some customer service training with a large organisation for their customer service agents. At the end of the training the human resources manager asked me to complete a competency document for each attendee. There were two computer-based forms to be completed with nearly a hundred statements. I was to tick the appropriate box, choosing from unsatisfactory to totally fantastic. I tried to explain to the HR manager that I didn’t feel that I’d spent enough time with the participants to make a judgement; however, she insisted.

If you have this type of procedure in your organisation then you’re just going to have to work with it. However, Motivational Managers rebel against it and I would encourage you to make your feelings known to your manager in a structured and positive way. I’ll give you some ideas on how to do this later in the chapter.

As a manager, I’m not too concerned if a sales person doesn’t fill in a report as per the company way if they’re bringing in the orders and ensuring that the customers are happy. I would, however, evaluate the sales person’s report writing in terms of how it affects my overall efficiency. If it affected my outcomes then I’d do something about it.

Competency programs are well-intentioned. However, they won’t help you achieve your outcomes as a manager and they could demotivate your team.