In my career so far, I have seen number of confrontations arising out of a negative feedback that is shared honestly. Some people disagree (or take it personally) when a negative feedback is shared in performance appraisal. Others don’t like it when client points out areas of improvement. As humans, we crave for validation and negative feedback does just opposite to that. It hurts our ego and hence we tend to instantly react, respond and confront. Equally true is the fact that all our growth depends on what we learn out of negative feedback we get.
In a way, giving or getting negative feedback is an inevitable part of our work lives. You can be on the either side, but by following some simple thumb rules, you can make it a constructive exercise. Here is what I have learned so far:
When giving a negative feedback
- Share perspective: Share some background information and build the stage. Direct feedback can be misconstrued.
- Be sincere: Make sure that when you deliver the feedback, it is heard in the right earnest. Be polite and firm.
- Be factual: Share your feelings but do not forget facts. Be conclusive.
- Don’t sugarcoat: We are naturally not comfortable sharing negative feedback and hence we make it mild. Keep it straight.
- Make it constructive: by offering help, solution alternatives, facilitation or arranging for external help. A negative feedback should help them grow.
When receiving negative feedback
- Listen: to the words, the body language and all that is not spoken, but still said. Take it all in.
- Don’t react immediately: Reacting instantly is considered as ‘being defensive’ unless you have facts on hand. Even when you do that, be polite and firm. Take time to think, if needed.
- Ask questions (to understand, not to defend): Open ended questions help in understanding the perspective and getting to the root of the problem.
- Accept wherever apt: Do not hesitate in accepting wherever apt. Accepting your flaws is a sign of strength, not weakness.
- Learn from the feedback: Treat every negative feedback as an opportunity to learn something. Make it constructive yourself, if the other person doesn’t.
Things to remember in both
- Be graceful: There is no substitute for grace at workplace. We all make mistakes, big and small. Key is to ensure that we maintain the decorum. Being firm doesn’t mean being rude.
- Be human: We are humans and we are sharing feedback with human. Seek to understand the other party, their views and concerns.
Have a FANTASTIC Friday!
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ALSO READ: On Constructive Criticism
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I wrote earlier about Nine I’s and Great Leadership. The post received a very good response (on twitter, in blogosphere and in comments) and that led me to further think about Nine I’s that leaders should be careful and conscious about. These are personal traits of a leader that have a direct impact on a team/organization’s performance. Here they go:
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Ignorance: A leader cannot afford to be ignorant. Lack of knowledge can be your biggest bottleneck. Leaders are expected to solve important problems for which sufficient knowledge is at the core.
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Inaction: This simply means ‘lack of action where some is expected or appropriate’. People expect leaders to take actions in the right direction. Actions that change people. Actions that have an impact.
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Ineffective: Leadership delivers performance. Results that matter. Ineffectual means ‘not producing any or the desired effect’. When leaders lack ability to cope with a role or situation, they become ineffectual.
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Inattentive: Leaders have to be mindful. Attentive to people. To details. To the upcoming trends. Being attentive also means that a leader listens actively. A leader who does not pay attention to things eventually becomes ineffectual.
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Incapable: Capability is as much about strength and power, as it is about qualification and capacity. A leader needs to have strong personal traits, strength to deal with difficulties and power to take right decisions.
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Impolite: Leaders, as they ascend in their positions, become more
polite and humble. It is said that
success should go to your heart and not head. When it goes into head, leaders become impolite and rude. Would you work with a rude leader?
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Inconclusive: When dealing with people and customers, leaders face many issues. The key is to resolve those issues conclusively. A leader has to be conclusive in thoughts, words and deeds. Inconclusive leader creates chaos.
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Inconsistent: Leaders who are inconsistent in their behavior, or who have self-contradictory elements, never generate trust. People look for continuity in character and integrity in actions.
Consistency is the key in building trust.
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Indifferent: With indifference, leaders cease to be leaders. They have no particular interest, concern or sympathy.
Indifference is the first step to mediocrity. Effective leaders are concerned, they
take work personally and really care about things.
Have a Wonderful Wednesday!
Tip: For a better understanding and correlation, read this post along with my earlier post Nine I’s and Great Leadership. As a further reference, you can also download 25 Things Managers and Leaders Should Never Do [PDF]
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Also: Thanks to Amit Agarwal (India’s first Professional Blogger at award winning Digital Inspiration blog) for listing QAspire Blog in Directory of Top Indian Blogs under ‘HR/Management/Business’ category.
Here is a simple idea: Whenever you have a new manager (project manager/departmental leader) joining in your organization, put him/her through a simple training program on how to manage people. Train existing managers as well.
The premise: Most project managers/team leaders get work done through team. I have also seen that a lot of people become managers because of their seniority in technical positions. But we know that managing people is far more than just technical skills. Most managers fail because they don’t know how people are managed.
Here are a few things (bare minimum) that MUST be included in the training:
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Leadership basics, traits and core expectations from a leader
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Setting a vision (for their projects/initiatives) and long-term thinking
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Fundamentals of dealing with people (and best practices therein)
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The art of effective delegation and empowerment
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Communication skills (oral and written), listening and non-verbal communication
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How to connect with people (team members, peers and clients)
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Leading with confidence
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Presentation skills
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Awareness about identifying and influencing impact of their actions on others
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How to coach and mentor people
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Kindness, care, humility and compassion at workplace
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A primer on vision and values of the organization and how it translates into real actions.
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Personal effectiveness and self-management
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Managing
conflicts and understanding differences in personality types
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Basic fact finding and interviewing skills
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Expectations Management at all levels
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(You can add more depending on your organization’s context)
Two critical points:
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Include a lot of real-life examples/stories for each of the above to make it interesting. To complement this effort, give them the URL’s of some of the
best leadership blogs out there. Share other useful resources like free presentations, eBooks, podcasts and videos that would help them get into a leadership mindset.
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To ensure that this training translates into meaningful actions, it is crucial to have a ‘leadership development program’ that continuously organizes trainings, inducts new people/aspiring leaders, conduct brainstorming and discussion sessions, seek feedbacks from people periodically to maintain the momentum and mature over a period of time.
I wrote in my book #QUALITYtweet that middle managers are the glue that joins the strategies at the top with actions at the bottom. Induction training like these are a small investment that go a long way in setting the precedence and ensuring that you find right channels to effectively transfer your strategy/values to all layers within the organization. It has a direct impact on overall employee morale’ and your effectiveness as an organization.
Have a Fantastic Friday!
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Download your copy of the 25 Things Managers and Leaders Should Never Do [PDF]. Read it, share it with your friends, or with anyone who is an aspiring leader.
Explore more articles tagged under “Leadership” at QAspire Blog.
Building quality involves cost. You spend efforts and energy on preventing the errors (prevention cost) and then checking your work (appraisal cost). These are positive costs, or rather investments that ensure that you get it right the first time.
The cost of rework when you or customer identifies a LOT of defects(internal/external failure costs) is huge and highly damaging too. It can have a direct impact on your business bottom lines.
So how do you maximize your possibility of getting it first time right when you deal with projects? Here are three most important things I could think of:
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Clarity: In projects (or in any initiative), when you shoot in the dark, the bullet comes back to kill you. Most projects fail because of lack of clarity. Project team needs to be clear of the purpose, business need, specific requirements of the customer and other implicit expectations. Clarity also demands a clear visibility in process, setting up right rituals, monitoring practices and responsibilities of the project team. Clarity means openness in communication.
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Discipline:
Execution demands discipline to do right things consistently. It demands
emotional labor. The plans you established needs to be followed. When you decide to review early and often, you should. Discipline, in simplest terms, is your ability to fill the gap between what you know and what you actually do.
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Constant Improvement: You planned, you did and then you also reviewed. Based on your experiences, you should be able to
improvise your processes. Change the tracks for better efficiency. Inculcate better habits. Fine tuning and alignment that happens in this phase not only helps you in this project, but also in subsequent ones.
I do not undermine the need to make mistakes and learn from them. When we research or try to innovate, we essentially do that with the objective of learning. But what about applying our lessons well? We can always get that right the first time, only if we decide to!
P.S: On a second thought, you can only innovate when you don’t have to worry about doing the routine stuff right. That is where processes and FTR approach can really help.
It pains to see teams where people work on a common goal but don’t get along well with each other. We work in teams and knowing how to get along well with others is extremely crucial. So how do you get along well with others and establish required comfort? Here are 10 broad pointers that may help.
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Reiterate Objectives: They need to be communicated often to stay focused as a team.
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Don’t boast: People don’t get along well with someone who constantly boasts. Make sure that ‘keeping them informed’ doesn’t sound like boasting.
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Listen and be genuinely interested: You can either do transactional communication or seek to connect with people.
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Ask open ended questions: Open ended questions not only foster great discussions but also allows you to know the other person.
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Be firm and polite: In disagreements, be firm and polite. There will be situations when you have take a stand or suggest improvements. Do that with grace.
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Have fun: Be cheerful. Celebrate together. When working with the team, be cheerful and make things more interesting that way.
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Don’t talk small: You have a goal to achieve as a team. Don’t let that focus dilute with small talks and gossiping. It drains the energy! Beware!
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Motivate others: Motivate others to raise their game. Be generous when praising. Acknowledge that sincere effort. Say ‘Thanks’ often.
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Be the benchmark: People take more clues from your conduct, than from words. Make it a great conduct. Be the benchmark when it comes to quality of outcomes.
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Keep your promises: When you keep your promises, you demonstrate integrity and build lot of trust.
TEAM stands for “Together Everyone Achieves More” – but that is only possible when the team gets along well with each other. Understanding of these fundamentals goes a long way in building remarkable teams that deliver!
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Last week, I had a short conversation with one of my colleagues in HR about the all important topic of employee engagement. In an impromptu conversation, we touched upon a very important point: People love (and remember) stories, not facts.
We loved it when our grandparents wrapped important life lessons in form of stories. Vivid situations weaved in words and narrated with great zeal. The stories I heard in my childhood, and the messages therein, are still afresh in my memory. My daughter almost gets hooked when a story is narrated. We grow up on stories, so do our belief system and our world view.
For leaders, ability to communicate using stories, choosing stories in line with listener’s current context and structuring them for maximum impact are very crucial skills.
Here are a few ways you can use power of storytelling:
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As a speaker/presenter, you can use stories to capture the imagination of audience. The lessons we learn as conclusions of interesting stories make a bigger impact than getting directly to the lessons. Great presenters tell great stories, anecdotes and experiences that truly engage the audience. They make a point at the end of each story.
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As a business leader, your biggest challenge is to keep your people engaged with your mission and with their work. Inspire them with stories about the organization. Show them the future. Tell tales of triumphs and trials, of success and failures, of past and future. Stories reinforce the belief system. Stories validate people’s aspirations and empower them. Stories create alignment and hence culture. Your people, new hires and aspiring leaders are not as fascinated by numbers as they are with the stories associated with the organization. Listen to their stories as well.
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As a sales leader, you can use power of well crafted stories to project your organization. Numbers and explicit details are fine, but stories of your inception, growth, challenges, success stories (in similar context) can help you a great deal in establishing comfort and confidence with your prospective customers.
Critical Question: How can you leverage the power of storytelling to enrich your conversations, build great relationships, truly connect with people and make a difference?
Have a FANTASTIC Friday and a great weekend ahead!
Many years ago, I had a chance to visit a friend’s farm on a weekend. My friend owned a huge farm on the outskirts of the city where they had employed farmers. A farmer’s outcome was quality of the crop. To ensure this, the farmer worked the soil, got the best seeds from the marketplace, sowed them all and watered them with great care. When these crops grew, he would nurture the growth of each crop. Farmers have to wait for months before seeds turn into standing crop. Certain situations (like weather, timely rain etc.) are out of their control, but farmers have to be eternally optimistic that crops will grow and yield the desired results. He did just that by extending a lot of human care to the crops.
Aren’t leaders farmers too? Leaders do to people what the farmer did to crops. Cultivate them to deliver desired outcomes. ‘Cultivate‘ is used mostly in agricultural context, but its real meaning is “foster the growth of“.
A leaders outcome is the quality of their team’s outcome. To ensure this, a leader has to get best people, work on them, understand them, share the vision, align their actions, get the best of them, communicate often and nurture their performance with great care. Leaders know that they may have to wait for long before people deliver desired outcomes. Certain situations are still out of a leader’s control, but a leader too, has to be eternally optimistic about people and their potential. I was thinking that if a farmer can extend human care to a crop, isn’t it absolutely must for leaders to see/treat their team members as ‘humans’ and not just ‘resources’?
That’s my take away for today: Great leaders are farmers - cultivators of human potential.
Have you ever experienced the following?
You complete a project and then do a small ‘post-mortem / retrospective analysis’ of what went well and what did not. You then document these lessons in a nice looking template and share it with all stakeholders before getting onto the next project. Next project looks exciting in the beginning and then, same set of challenges are encountered. “Lessons-Learned” often end up being “Lessons-Documented-In-Last-Project-That-Are-Going-To-Show-Up-Again”.
All improvement depends on lessons you document and what you, as a leader, do about it. If you are a business leader, project leader or an improvement expert, here are five practical things you can do to ensure that lessons are really learned.
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Assign Responsibility: If you have a quality group, great! If you don’t, you can assign the role of improvement expert to any senior member in your team. Mandate should be to improve the process and implement the improvements. Project Managers are best candidates since they deal with these challenges day in and day out.
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Focus on “actions”: Once documented, identify a set of immediate actions to be taken to ensure that these lessons go into practice. Compile a central action log that contains lessons from all the projects / retrospectives. Assign responsibility for each action and have a deadline. Track the progress from time to time.
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Maintain a central log of lessons learned: Unless lessons are visible, they don’t go into practice. One idea is to maintain a central log of all lessons learned, actions and resulting improvements. This is also a great way to track improvements.
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Revisit them: It is easy to get back to your project challenges and forget the lessons learned. Revisit them from time to time. Have monthly update meetings, publish these on your intranet, create easy to view lists of Do’s and Don’ts – whatever! But make sure that lessons learned are visible to people.
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“Lessons Learned” as inputs to Process Improvement: Convert each lesson into a process. Get the buy-in from teams and then train everyone. This is also a great way to ensure that your quality system evolves with challenges you face in your context.
Lessons are only ‘learned’ when they find their way into the future projects as positive experiences. Challenges help us grow – only when we face new challenges each time and learn how to tackle the ‘old monsters’. Unless we do that, repeating challenges will only wear you and your team out!
Lessons then, are not learned, but just documented. Not fun – I am sure you’ll agree!
June 2010 - a brilliant month as far as blogging is concerned. I wrote on a wide variety of topics and a lot of my writing was recognized by the blogosphere. That was satisfying. Recognitions raise the bar and help us to do better. June was also a month of anticipating some respite in heat with monsoon setting in. Unfortunately, it hasn’t yet - but it seems it will set in soon. So, I look forward to July 2010.
In case you missed reading any of my posts, here is a quick round up of all my writing in June 2010. (You can also visit monthly round ups of Jan 2010, Feb 2010, Mar 2010, April 2010 and May 2010)
My writing at QAspire Blog
Recognitions
Looking forward to July 2010 - Wish you a GREAT one!
The rubber meets the road when you, as a business leader…
- deliver real business results to customers (not just deliver an excellent pitch with an impressive powerpoint)
- start executing relentlessly (not just define your strategy on paper at an off site planning retreat)
- implement improvements in your processes (not when you create that good looking document with improvement areas)
- pick up the phone and talk to that frustrated customer (and not get into a chain of email exchange)
- lead by example and live your values (not just pass instructions for others to follow. Not just document your values on the website)
- act on your customer’s feedback (not just collect it through your customer feedback program!)
- start treating your people like “humans” (and not just “resources” or “capital”)
- “do” equal to or more than what you “say” (and not the reverse)
- start thinking about “preventing” problems (not just “correcting” them after they happen)
- work “on” your business (not just “in” it - easy to get consumed working “in” the business)
- communicate and share feedbacks often with your people (not just in their quarterly performance review)
- start looking at ways to solve problems (rather than finding someone else to blame)
- stay lean, flat and accountable (and not let your growth turn you into a bureaucratic, heavy top-down structure)
- understand that excellence is everybody’s job (not just a single department or a few people in the team)
- only speak when you completely, totally mean it (and not just throw clichés to please them now)
P.S: “Where the rubber meets the road” is an idiom that refers to the tyre of a vehicle on the surface of a road, meaning “where it really counts.” It is used to represent the defining moments or focus on real actions.
Bonus: My post “15 ideas To Ensure That Trainings Effectively Deliver Value” was featured in HR Carnival over at i4cp PRoductivity Blog - along with a host of other brilliant posts on talent management, general HR, managerial advice and career advice. If you are a people manager or HR professional, this carnival edition is a MUST READ!
Also download (PDF) 100 fantastic insights that will help you become “BRILLIANT At The Basics of Business” - from none other than NICHOLAS BATE. Visit him for this and tonnes of other great resources - I am sure you will admire his generosity as much as I do.
Tags: action, execution, HR, Leadership, People, results
Career Related, Improvement & Development, Leadership, Managing People, Process Improvement, Quality | Tanmay June 10, 2010 | 
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