Feedback: The Breakfast of Champions
What do you do after a great performance at the orchestra or a Broadway show? … Give a standing ovation.
What do you do before and after your favorite band plays your favorite song at a concert? … Stand and cheer.
What do you do when your favorite team scores a touchdown or makes a great play? … Get fired up and make some noise.
What do you do when your favorite team disappoints you, repeatedly? … If you are from Philadelphia, like I am, you boo.
The common denominator: entertainers and athletes who perform live get real-time feedback. They do well, we cheer; they do poorly, we boo.
I believe that all performers need immediate feedback. There is a feedback loop in school, it's called tests and final grades.
The feedback system in business for most companies is at best an annual review, usually tied to a possible salary increase. In my opinion, that is far too long to wait to get feedback. I worked at a company where we could only write down areas for improvement in our annual review of employees. We could give positive feedback, but not in writing. Management/HR/Legal didn’t want anything positive in the reviews should we want to fire them later. I kid you not.
Feedback is information about reactions to a person’s performance. Feedback is immediate for live performers, and while it certainly may not be great in the moment when the feedback is not favorable, at least the performer knows where they stand with their audience.
Since feedback is information about reactions to a person’s performance, I believe that in business we should give and expect immediate feedback, just like entertainers receive.
Organizational culture is formed by what we reward and punish. Therefore, it's imperative that leaders acknowledge the behavior you’d like to perpetuate. Whenever you see the behavior you want, acknowledge it, immediately. Acknowledgement may be the most powerful leadership tool and at the same time the least utilized. Acknowledgment is valued by the recipient, builds relatedness and really works.
When you see behavior you don’t want, you should also call it out immediately, in private of course. When providing corrective feedback, focus on the behavior which doesn’t work, not the person.
If feedback can be such an effective leadership tool, then why is it so rare in the workplace? I’m sure there are many reasons. Here are a few that come to mind:
Unfortunately, too much workplace feedback is negative. If we only give negative feedback, it gives feedback a bad name.
Feedback in the workplace is one-to-one, and as a result, more personal. It's not me amongst a crowd cheering or booing in the stands. If feedback is viewed negatively, as it is for many, one-on-one feedback occurs as confrontational, and most people avoid confrontation.
We don’t receive acknowledgement in the workplace, so we don’t give it. This is culture at work. We model the behavior we observe.
We see a job well done and discount it, or say, ”That’s what I’m paying them to do.”
Too many leaders simply don’t take the time to recognize a job well done or hard work above and beyond what’s expected.
Likely, no one ever taught us how to give feedback.
The first thing to do is alter your context for feedback. Feedback is not just for correcting behavior. If you see it that way, of course you’d want to avoid it.
Feedback is not difficult. When you are giving corrective feedback, I’d encourage you to first, begin the conversation by asking your employee, “How do you think that went?” Once they respond, you can probe for better understanding. Then you provide your feedback. You may soften what they said or say something completely different.
Second is acknowledgement. You talk to the person, by name and say, “I’d like to acknowledge you for… (insert something very specific here).” Don’t say, “For doing a great job.” Say something like, “I’d like to acknowledge the great work you did on XYZ project. I was impressed by how you led the team and dealt with the three problems that could have sidetracked the project. You didn’t allow those interruptions to get in the way of delivering on time. Thank you.”
As a sales manager, after every sales call I went on with my reps, I’d ask, “What do you think you could improve upon?” Of course, I’d probe their response, so I understood why they were saying what they said. I would either agree, or say, ”No, I thought you did that really well. I think you should work on ABC.” Then I asked what they thought they did well. After they responded, I always found something else to acknowledge them for.
By the end of the conversation, they self-evaluated and provided their own feedback with my tweaking as I saw appropriate. We would then end the conversation with two positive comments:
One from them in regards to what they thought went well, and
One from me affirming and acknowledging what I saw as a strength.
If you want to lead a winning team, you must master giving feedback; it is the breakfast of champions.
The most effective way to build a culture of high performance is to provide immediate feedback, both corrective feedback and acknowledgement.
Don’t only give feedback when something needs correcting, or else you will unwittingly define feedback as something is wrong.
If you want to be a champion, you should embrace feedback: the good, the bad and the ugly. All of it provides information about reactions to your performance. Without feedback, how will you, or your team, know what to improve upon?