The Feedback Imperative

How to Give Everyday Feedback to Speed Up Your Team's Success

Anna Carroll

• Publisher: River Grove Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781938416668
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

See faster results through everyday feedback. The Feedback Imperative: How to Give Everyday Feedback to Speed Up Your Team’s Success reveals the hidden reasons why giving feedback to employees can be so difficult and yet so urgently needed in today’s workplace, and provides the definitive steps for overcoming feedback avoidance and taking great leaps forward with employee engagement, retention, and performance. Anna Carroll applies her extensive research and expertise in business consulting and psychology to illustrate how brain science, generational trends, our information economy, limiting beliefs, and organizational culture collide in the new workplace, creating a huge gap between the supply and demand of helpful professional feedback. In her “Seven Steps to Everyday Feedback” and sixteen tools for self-assessment and planning, Carroll provides detailed instructions for leaders to execute a feedback turnaround that will quench their team members’ thirst for helpful feedback and build a culture in which employee-to-leader and peer-to-peer feedback are welcome as well.

PART ONE

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FAST, PLENTIFUL
FEEDBACK IS A MUST
RIGHT NOW

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CHAPTER 1

Faster Feedback Everywhere … Except from Managers

As I heard my client, Gerald, explain that he was going to have to fire Tony, a recently recruited vice president from GE, it reminded me of similar conversations I’d had with other leaders about disappointing hires. Gerald’s VP was veering off in different directions, focusing on the wrong priorities, and just didn’t get the company culture. I asked Gerald if he had been giving feedback along the way, and whether the he had a clue about what was about to happen. Gerald replied, “Well not exactly. I just didn’t have time to spell out everything for him. After all, he’s in a very visible and highly compensated role, and he should know what we expect of him. He’ll get a nice severance, and it’ll be OK.”

I felt weary. Stories like Gerald’s, of people being fired from companies, were the most shocking. But there were hundreds more about employees still in jobs where they were underperforming, about people being tiptoed around and ignored by their managers, team members who were puzzled about why they weren’t being developed or promoted, and those who were leaving or who had already left their companies because no one talked to them about how they were doing and so they were sure no one cared. There were stories from young and promising professionals who only found out at the end of their first year on the job that their manager didn’t think they were performing so well. “What do you mean? Why didn’t you talk to me about this earlier?” was their startled response.

The common denominator in each of these disheartening situations is little or no feedback. If I imagine a different era—say a hundred years ago—and envision how humans communicated with the people who worked for them, they may not have offered more feedback. But they couldn’t have provided less of it than we are giving our employees today.

Digital feedback is omnipresent

In a world apart from conversations between managers and their direct reports, feedback is abundant. If you are a seller of game apps on Amazon or furniture on eBay, you can access a wealth of feedback, including statistics on your reliability and comments about your goofy game icons or the condition the rocking chair arrived in. Don’t be surprised to see your exact words parroted back to you in an online review of how you handled a complaint on your toll-free number. Your customers’ delight or frustration with their order is feedback that you can use immediately to improve your business.

Likewise, retail stores, credit card companies, call centers providing technical support, and businesses everywhere are collecting feedback and delivering it to the providers of that service—right down to the individual Apple genius who helped you with your slow computer or the hotel booking agent who accommodated your special request. By checking sites such as CollegeProwler.com, even college administrators can see how their school is perceived by current students and can address mounting complaints about their short library hours or shabby dorms. Doctors see their personalities dissected by patients on HealthGrades.com and other sites. Feedback about customer perceptions is available everywhere.

You’re also getting instant feedback that tracks your progress on everyday tasks—such as filling out forms or buying airplane tickets. You can see that you are 50 percent finished with an online auto-insurance claim or note that three steps remain as you book an online ticket, by following a colorful graph at the top of the page. When you’re lured into answering the multiple-choice survey on your online news site about which leader is to blame for the latest crisis, you get an instant summary and graphic display of how everyone else weighed in. Instant feedback measures such as these are examples of “gamification” tools borrowed from computer-game developers to let users know how they’re doing at all times.¹

So, what is feedback, really?

Although the term “feedback” is seen and heard everywhere today, whether in reference to online customer surveys or as workplace jargon for “criticism,” it’s actually a much simpler and more fundamental notion. Feedback is information from past action that is used to guide future action. The movement of the information from past to future action is called a feedback loop.²

Figure 1.1. The feedback loop

To learn or change, feedback is essential. When you practice a new tennis serve, for example, your coach gives you information about how much lower you should hold your racket so that you can improve. In turn, you make the adjustment in your practice. When you change the way you serve the tennis ball based on the new information, you complete the feedback loop.

The more feedback we get, the more we want

One of the four principles of the gamification revolution in our lives is that rapid feedback cycles maintain engagement.³ For example, using a Fitbit wristwatch or other gadget to track our fitness actions throughout the day motivates us to walk ten or twenty minutes more—to get closer to the ten thousand steps a day recommended by health experts. When we can instantly track our progress, we are fueled to try new behaviors, stick with our efforts longer, and have more fun doing them than if we don’t have this information. We have accepted that a desire to learn is instinctual, but it turns out that we need feedback to fuel that learning.

Copious digital information satisfies this hunger in many aspects of our physical world. GPS satellite data gives us more confidence to explore places unknown. Weather predictions have become increasingly accurate in the last few years, due to more information coming in to paint a detailed picture of storm paths and wind currents. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy’s path and destructive power were predicted with great accuracy by the data-rich projection model enabled by new technology.⁴ Although destruction and power outages could not have been completely prevented in the locations where the storm hit, our new expectation is to be able to gather enough information to predict where humans will be safe or unsafe. We will never want to return to a time where we have less information.

In business, we rely on superfast information to design, build, and improve products and services around the world. The quality of Intel’s chip manufacturing can be held to the same high standards in Oregon, India, Malaysia, and Vietnam because of the huge amount of information simultaneously transmitted between all of Intel’s locations; in response, necessary adjustments can be made in the output from one plant to compensate for a need in another. With computers talking to other computers twenty-four hours a day, the supply of information drives better decisions about design, costs, schedules, sales, suppliers, quality, and every other aspect of a business enterprise. The more information we get, the more we want.

Similarly, in the workplace, everyone needs feedback information that will help them improve.

Accuracy is king

The usefulness of feedback is dependent on the accuracy of the information collected. If your tennis coach knew nothing about the sport and gave you random information about where to hold the racket, this bad information would be unlikely to help you improve.

In the hotel business, if your feedback comes only from guests who receive a free night in the presidential suite with its grand piano, marble floors, and a full view of the city, it does not represent your customer base and is therefore unlikely to guide you toward the most promising changes.

Likewise, if your manager deprives you of accurate information about your current actions and its results, you both will be deprived of better results in the future.

More feedback is better

If you’re scouring eBay for that exact out-of-print copy of an illustrated version of Three Little Pigs that your grandmother read to you as a child, you may see that both Roger and Amy happen to have it in stock. Roger has a five-star rating, based on ten reviews. Amy has a 4.8-star rating, but it’s based on twelve thousand reviews. Who are you going to buy the book from? Amy, of course, because you have way more feedback information about her performance; you are fairly sure that the book will reach you in good shape, while with Roger there’s a feeling that you are taking a risk. New online customer-feedback systems capture data from a larger and larger percentage of the total number of customers so that the changes being requested are a safer bet for decision makers responding to the feedback. If you only receive feedback on one slice of data about your work, you will not know which adjustments will make the biggest difference.

The more frequent the feedback loops, the more improvement possible

If you are learning how to do West Coast swing, two-step, tango, or any other dance, there are multiple ways to seek feedback: by taking lessons from a dance teacher, by dancing with an experienced partner, or just by comparing your steps to a DVD. You would never try a new step only once. You want to practice it, get feedback on whether you are doing it well, and incorporate your feedback as you practice more. The more frequently you can cycle through your feedback loops of information, adjustment, and results, the faster you will master the dance.

The same holds true for learning on the job. The more frequent the feedback, the easier it is to learn and improve. The simple truth is that employees need more feedback from their managers. At work, a person’s manager is their primary source of feedback information. If you are a manager, you may be the only source of feedback about whether an employee is doing a good job and, more importantly, what adjustments the employee can make to improve on a continuous basis.

Some employees get most of their feedback directly from their customers, from real-time reports about sales, complaints to a call center, or the number of bugs in their computer code. However, these sources alone—without input from their leaders—offer only a snapshot, not a full view of what is required of them in the role.

A manager’s feedback role

If sales are down, there are usually multiple factors in play—targeting the right prospects, getting access to decision makers, diagnosing needs, presenting value that addresses customer needs, and so on. If you manage sales representatives, you can guide them toward better ways to utilize their time. For example, you may see that more preparation for meeting with high-dollar prospects will pay off. As you help the sales reps redirect their efforts, you can energize them along the way.

A manager mus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part One Fast, Plentiful Feedback Is a Must Right Now
• Part Two Getting Ready for Everyday Feedback
• Part Three Six Steps to Everyday Feedback
• Part Four Faster Feedback Loops to Accelerate the Whole Company
• Conclusion Leaping Ahead from Your Feedback Loops
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author