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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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.
Friday again - time to share some of the most profound posts that I loved reading last week. These brilliant posts hit the point and leave us with some excellent lessons. A big high-five to these amazing folks.
- Six Thoughts About Middle Management - by Lisa Haneberg
Lisa says, “Management is a social act. Conversations are your currency to generate excellence and bring out the best in others. Erode relationships, erode results.”
- 10 Things: Addressed And Your Awesome Potential Will Be Unleashed- by NICHOLAS BATE
Professor Bate says, “Believe in Yourself. You don’t have to be liked by everybody to do great things, to live the Life you wish, to change the world. AGREE THAT WITH YOURSELF.”
- How to Discuss an Employee Performance Problem - by Dan McCarthy
Dan reminds us, “Knowing how to sit down with an employee and have an effective conversation about a performance problem is one of the hardest things for any manager to do, new or experienced, and should never be taken for granted.” He also offers practical tips to handle a performance problem.
- Three Years of CO - by Kurt Harden
Cultural Offering blog completed three years and Kurt ruminates on the journey so far. He says, “That is the deal that is blogging. You take a shot at it. Put some thoughts down. Words to sentences to paragraphs, all to hone your skills - writing, reading, thinking. Sometimes you hit and sometimes you miss. But over time there are more hits than misses.”
- The performance value of total concentration - by Tim Sanders
Tim Sanders posted a small and important reminder that working on one thing with total concentration has tremendous performance value. He also reminds that we can’t excel at all things at a time. Must read if you are struggling with your productivity.
Have a Fantastic Friday and a refreshing weekend!
Tags: Friday High-Five, Round Up
Career Related, Improvement & Development, Leadership, Managing Communication, Managing People, Managing Projects, Process Improvement, Quality, Random Musings | Tanmay August 20, 2010 | 
Comments (2)
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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Friday is a great day to share links to some of the best thinking out there. I am fortunate to a part of a wonderful leadership/management community who so generously share their ideas, insights and knowledge. So, here are 5 posts that I totally enjoyed reading in the last week, and I am sure you will enjoy them too.
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Lisa Haneberg (who also wrote an advance praise in my book #QUALITYtweet) thinks that PASSION at workplace can be fostered by addressing some of the key elements of our work. What are they? Check it out. A very useful post for HR folks, business leaders and managers.
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Have a Fantastic Friday and a refreshing weekend!
Photo Courtesy: Holtsman’s Flickr Stream
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!
A few weeks back, my friend Becky Robinson at Mountain State University gifted me with a copy of John C. Maxwell’s latest book “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect”. The book, as the title suggests, is all about establishing meaningful connections to build great relationships at work and in personal life. The book introduction says,
“Connecting is the ability to identify with people and relate with them in a way that increases your influence with them. And the ability to communicate and connect with others is a major determining factor in reaching your potential. to be successful, you must work with others. To do that at your absolute best, you must learn to connect”
It was interesting to note the difference between “communication” and “connection”. I learned that communication is about content and connection is about relevance of that content and how it is received by others. Connecting with others is more than just transactional communication. It is about seeing others as human beings, understanding them, their energies and establish a deeper connection.
I have observed that all great “performers” are great connectors too. A singer has to understand the taste of audience and sing accordingly. A trainer has to connect with participants. An actor has to truly connect with the character being played. A blogger has to connect with the readers. An organization needs to connect with the customers.
Ability to build meaningful connections is the first step towards engaging others and building an influence. Connecting with others accelerates learning and spreads the ideas.
Maxwell’s book offers useful ideas for connecting with a group, connecting one-on-one and connecting with audience. The book does not offer any ground breaking ideas – we all know that we need to connect effectively. Still, the book does a GREAT job of outlining and reinforcing the fundamentals of connecting through explanations, stories and action points at the end of each chapter.
If you are a leader, an aspiring one or a professional who wants to make a big difference, this is a great book to pick up and read.
Have a GREAT week ahead!
One of my friends recently joined a new organization at a senior position. When we met over a cup of coffee a few days before his joining, he mentioned to me that his primary challenge would be to build trust. As professionals, we interact with a wide variety of people including our customers, suppliers, new team members, cross departmental folks and people at the customer’s end. Success of these interactions largely depends on trust we are able to build.
Our conversation took an exploratory turn and we started thinking about ways to build trust in a new assignment. The following prominent lessons emerged out:
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Deliver Results: This comes first on the list because in a business setting, trust is difficult to build without first building a track record. When you are new, let your work make a profound statement. Focus on early-wins. We instantly agreed on this one.
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Keep Commitments: Consistently meeting your commitments is a great way to build trust. Clients love it when you ship on time. People love it when you keep your promises. Use productivity tools, reminder systems, whatever. But keep your commitments.
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Give Respect: Trust and respect go hand in hand. If you want to be trusted, you first need to be respected. Giving respect to others is the starting point of building meaningful connections with others. Respect people, respect their views, listen to them and respect their time. Ditto with trust - extend trust and you get it back in equal measures. Lao Tzu said this, "He who does not trust enough, will not be trusted."
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Clarify Expectations: When you are new to an organization, it is very important that you manage expectations well. Let people know what they can expect from you. What you expect from them. Clarifying expectations helps you gain a focus on results.
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Be Integral: Simply put,
integrity is congruence between your thoughts, words and deeds.
Practice what you preach and preach what you practice. When new in an organization, people carefully observe you to gauge the integrity. Transparency is important too.
As a leader, when you are engaged to build a team and make a difference, you need to carefully examine your own behavior. Thinking a step ahead, we realized that the above findings are equally relevant to the organizations too, when they deal with their customers and build trust. Most companies loose clients/people either because they are not trustworthy or their people aren’t.
Walk the talk and talk the walk – that’s the simplest formula for building trust as a leader, professional or an organization.
On that note, have a wonderful Wednesday!
P.S. BIG Thanks to Wally Bock for selecting my post 5 Ideas To Ensure That Lessons are ‘Really’ Learned in Management Improvement Carnival #104.
Quality of relationships between the team members is one of the determinants of success as a team - be it project, process improvement initiative or an organization building one. Success of projects/initiatives is generally attributed to processes and rituals. Processes are crucial but not sufficient. It is people who work, co-operate with each other, demonstrate trust, work as a team, share a common goal, exercise their ‘discretionary effort’ and make things happen.
Leader’s role is very crucial here. Leaders can simply do transactional communication ("Do this form by end of tomorrow and lets review it then") or truly connect with their team members. Connecting skillfully with people means:
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understanding them (and their value)
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their aspirations
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their communication preferences
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what they bring to the table
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building mutual trust
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listening well to everyone
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communicating your values
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understanding complementary skills
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how each one of them can play to their strengths
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invest in their development
With this understanding, leaders have to weave a web of relationships amongst the team members by doing right communication and necessary team building activities. When team is connected, they understand and appreciate different roles and how each role impacts the success.
Success happens when the team members feel that they belong to a team, actively participate and work towards team’s success. In my experience, people forget the success of projects/initiatives on a long run, but they always remember the fun they had while executing the work. People cherish relationships they build while working.
So critical question today is - How are you leveraging relationships in your team / projects / initiatives?
I wrote earlier about “11 Things Project Managers & Leaders Should Never Do” and then continued the chain of thoughts with another post titled “7 (More) Things Project Managers & Leaders Should Never Do.
This is the final part of this series which is compiled to form a handy and portable summary “25 Things Managers & Leaders Should NEVER Do” (Download PDF)
If you are a supervisor, manager or a leader at any level, you should NEVER:
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Conduct long and unscheduled meetings. When you don’t respect your team member’s time, you loose respect too. Resist conducting unscheduled meetings when they are not needed. Even if you do, keep them short. Another mistake? Not conduct meetings at all!
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Try doing critical portions of the work by self. Yes, that may minimize the risk of failure, but your team members will not grow. Delegate and then guide them. Let them raise their game too. Act as a catalyst who helps them improve. If you do everything, you are not doing enough. You need to do more by doing less – and delegation is the way to go.
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Fail to say “No”. Not saying no when it is needed (to clients, stakeholders and bosses) can be a real killer for you, your project and your people. Saying no firmly, but politely is an art every leader has to master. Say no, so that you can say yes to more important stuff.
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Not reviewing the progress. When you don’t review the progress periodically, you loose momentum. Projects generally start on a high note – keep the momentum going by periodic reviews. Take a stock, retrospect and take corrective steps to ensure that your team is on track. Review early and often.
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Run away from fears. In fact, leaders embrace their fears. Fear is our most important emotion. We fear criticism, we fear failure and we fear risk. This should not stop us from doing stuff. It should rather help us doing stuff better. A leader has to overcome fear and help team members do the same.
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Not acknowledging what they don’t know. Leaders become integral when they know what they don’t know – and when they acknowledge it. It is not weak, but a courageous act to acknowledge what you don’t know. You will easily find someone who does. This again boils down to having humility to accept things you don’t know.
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Fail to “celebrate”. We live in an action oriented world, where doing is sometimes over emphasized. We complete one phase and quickly jump onto the another. Celebrate small wins. It gives new energy to the team and also extends an opportunity to know each other better. Celebrating is very human – do it often.
Download your own copy of the full compilation. Share it with your friends. Share it with anyone who is an aspiring leader. Revisit it after a month. After all, we all need constant reminders on what we should “NOT” do!
Thanks for all your comments and support to this series.
