Whatif… Feedback is about relationships first, and change second?
“Feedback is a gift.” “Learn to accept feedback.” “Feedback matters.” Sure. All true…. but I believe we’ve been trained to look at feedback as a one way transitory mechanism. If we shift our paradigm to one of complex adaptive systems, it changes what feedback means, when and why we give it, and how we receive it.
We talk a lot in leadership development about giving feedback. And it is this very training that I believe puts people on edge. The starting assumption is that the person giving feedback is doing so because they have some sort of information or observation that is important to the receiver. What this often becomes though is a “I don’t like the way you are doing this thing and my feedback to you is based on getting you to conform to my way of thinking.”
There are two primary problems with this. The first is assuming that the person giving the feedback is somehow right. The second is that this automatically puts the other person on the defensive. Even the most enlightened person in the world has to intentionally say “I am willing to receive this feedback in some sort of way that isn’t just emotional so I don’t get defensive.”
As the feedback receiver, we do have some power over how we receive feedback. We can pay attention to our own emotional response. We can take time in between receiving the feedback and responding. We can discuss the feedback with others to sort of “triangulate” the information. And the biggest power we have is to simply ignore it and say that’s not helpful for me.
Because of this power, the person who is giving the feedback has some work to do. The first thing is to ask ourselves “why do I feel it is necessary to give this information to this person.” Who am I to say this? Are they doing something harmful or wrong that needs to be corrected? Or are they just acting in a way that rubs we wrong?
The second is to reframe feedback through the lens of problem-solving. Let’s say you have an employee who is not fulfilling the basic requirements of their role. It’s tempting to prep a feedback conversation where you gently but firmly say “you’re not doing things right and here is what you need to change”. Who out there reads this and responds with yes please! (no one - or certainly very few).
Instead, start by asking yourself why you think they might not be fulfilling their duties. Technically, what skills might they need to develop? And…. (harder to ask yourself) how might you be standing in the way of developing those skills? What resources, support, or connections might you be able to offer to help this person develop?
Moving beyond the technical; are there emotional barriers that they are facing (e.g., they feel overwhelmed, things are going on outside of work that are distracting them, they are having a conflict with a colleague)? What fears are they facing? How might you help them navigate the emotional journey? This might be reassurance that it’s ok if they don’t get it right the first time (this is why medical doctor’s train so long and so hard - so they make all their mistakes well before they start working on a real life patient!)
Managers aren’t just people who organize work and tell people what to do - they are coaches, mentors, educators, and leaders. It’s so simple to say “employees should just do their jobs and managers should just organize the goals”. But that’s in the past. Today’s world doesn’t work that way. The role of a supervisor or manager has fundamentally changed based on the expectations and experiences of people in the work place. Whatif…Feedback isn’t just to tell people how to change; it’s about building better connections in the relationships among agents in the system?