Getting #feedback is hard

Photo by Criterion

I remember when I was in the Israeli Air Force an officer responsible for teaching one of the cadet courses and I had the following conversation:

Officer: Hey, you guys teach how to give feedback, right?

Me: Yes, do you want us to give a class to the cadets?

Officer: Yes, but I want you to teach them how to receive feedback.

Me: What do you mean?

Officer: We try to provide feedback all the time, but they keep arguing and talking back. I want you to teach them how to listen so my constructive feedback will be more effective.

I am reminded of this conversation every once in a while whenever I have trouble dealing with feedback myself. I ask myself from time to time should we teach people how to receive feedback?

While I would be inclined to agree that some people are very difficult when exposed to feedback – even constructive well intended one – my answer would generally be no. One of the first points I teach when I talk about feedback is very intuitive and usually is revealed by the students instead of lectured to them. Getting feedback is hard. There are a lot of reasons for this, many of them psychological and emotional. But I don’t really need to tell you that, as you probably felt it before. Everybody who ever got some feedback – and all of us have – felt it.

When I analyze it in hindsight I think the request of the officer suffered from a misunderstanding of one of the most basic principles of communication. In most cases, when there is miscommunication, it is the fault of the transmitter and not of the receiver. That is why I always try to refrain from saying “You don’t understand” and instead say: “I did not explain myself well”. Saying – “they just don’t listen” – takes the responsibility of your hands and puts it on the listener. The question is not if somebody else isn’t listening. The question is: are you talking in a way that will allow them to listen to you?

That is what I said to that officer. Teaching people how to receive feedback will probably not do any good, if you do not take the responsibility for giving true and effective feedback yourself. We should focus on how you give feedback and especially on ways of finding out why your cadets are unresponsive for you attempts to give them constructive feedback.

He did not like my answer. He did not come back.  I can guess why.  Getting feedback is really hard.

Do you take responsibility for giving constructive feedback or do you think that people are just not listening to you?

Elad

More on stopping with the rules

A few days ago I wrote about the lesson I learned from visiting the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel in Mumbai – we need to stop trying and create rules for employees. I quoted something I wrote after watching  Barry Schwartz’s talk at TED:

Let them to the job – people work differently. They produce the same outcomes differently. Don’t interfere. Don’t make up rules. Maybe, as Barry says, don’t even create incentives (I am not sure I totally agree with that one). Don’t try to make them do the job the way you would have done it. Give them the intellectual and mental space to work it on their own. Provide support and training but don’t create rules about the specific job. If phase one was done correctly, they will find the way to produce the outcomes you required.

Yesterday, I saw the above Jonathan Zittrain TED talk. In it he talks about how the Internet is working because total strangers act, anonymously, without getting paid for it, kindly and humanly. It is a very entertaining  talk, but one paragraph seemed really relevant to what I was trying to say about rules:

… what we see in this phenomenon is something that the crazed, late traffic engineer Hans Monderman discovered in the Netherlands, and here in South Kensington, that sometimes if you remove some of the external rules and signs and everything else, you can actually end up with a safer environment in which people can function, and one in which they are more human with each other. They’re realizing that they have to take responsibility for what they do.

Wow. Exactly.

I think it is time to go back to a simpler type of workplace. Where we trust our employees to do the right thing. Where we build infrastructure and give guidance, but we do not set up the specific rules about how to do everything. Where we let people create their own mechanisms of safety, efficiency and motivation instead of using our mechanisms of control. Where trust leads to happiness. Where we promote responsibility and accountability. Where we celebrate common sense, humanism, innovation and excellence.

No more rules!

Elad

What can mangers learn from the Milgram Experiment?

Photo by Festeban

The Milgram Experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience (in this case, giving a lethal electric shock to another person).In layman terms, Milgram showed in his experiment people’s tendency to conform to an authority figure.

This experiment was mentioned in our Marketing class a week ago as a reminder of the power we, as managers, will have over people, meaning, especially consumers. If people will generally do what ever you tell them and will easily believe whatever you tell them, that means you have a power and responsibility.

I especially enjoyed the discussion in class because just a few days before that I watched a Law & Order: SVU episode that dealt with the same experiment, featuring Robin Williams. In it, Williams plays a man who lost his wife because he listened quietly to his doctor even though he knew the doctor was wrong. This drives him mad and he starts calling people claiming to be Detective Milgram convincing them to do terrible things. He starts a movement calling people to: “Stop being sheep”. This video is the end of this great episode:

Both of these mentions of the Milgram Experiment got me to think on the implications of that experiment to people in managerial positions. The fact that we have the power of authority is a given. The fact that this power comes with responsibility is also a given. But most of the time managers don’t use this power to bring people to perform acts that conflict with their personal conscience. They just use that power to ignore people. And by that, they lose so much.

Most people will conform to authority. As managers we should discourage that. We should recognize those who challenge our authority in a constructive ways. We should encourage institutionalized devil advocacy. The responsibility lies with us as managers.

And off course, the coin has two sides. As employees, how do we treat our managers? Are we behaving like sheep? Do we stand up for what we believe in?

I will finish with a quote by Hugh Macleod from Gapinvoid, that is not directly linked to this subject, but which I find invigorating to think about from time to time.

The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.

So, what is your personal takeaway from the Milgram Experiment?

Elad

On power, responsibility, Lord Acton and Spiderman

 

Photo by natalie’s new york

When I was serving in the Israeli Air force I used to conduct training for course commanders. It was usually a course given to the best commanders who were promoted to be senior commanders and given the task of handling a team of commanders in order to deliver a training course for new soldiers. Their promotion usually meant that they came from within their team and had to lead and manage their former equal teammates and personal friends. This created a lot of fears about the personal relationships inside the team and regarding the respect they are will receive from their team-members.

Training session after training session I saw the same response to this fear. The new team leaders tried to hide their power. In the statements to the team they always planned to say something on the line of: “I am not you commander, I am your friend. We will decide together. I don’t want to impose anything on you”.

This story came up to mind this week while I was reading an article for my organizational behaviour course. It is an article from 1992 by Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford University Graduate School of Business professor, titled: “Understanding power in organizations”. One of Pfeffer’s claims in this article is that we have an ambivalent approach to power. We all know it is important, but we don’t want to be known as using it, because we know it can be used for bad things. A short quote:

If leadership involves skill at developing and exercising power and influence as well as the will to do so, then perhaps one of the causes of the so-called leadership crisis in organizations in the United States is just this attempt to sidestep issues of power.

Yes. Power can be used to do bad things. But we all know the famous saying by Lord Acton: “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely“. Well, I might be naïve. But I actually prefer a less skilled philosopher, but that in this case, one that makes a better point. Spiderman. “With great power comes great responsibility“. Yes, power can corrupt. But if it corrupts us, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Yes, power can corrupt, but that should not stop us from doing things (link in Hebrew). The fact that we get the opportunity to yield power, as managers, leaders (or commanders) is a gift given to us. We can do with great things, for good or bad. It depends upon us.

In essence this is what I always tried to tell those young commanders. The fact that you have power does not change by the way you present yourselves. The fact that you chose to hide your powers, to hide from your responsibilities, is what hinders the effectiveness of your leadership. The power you are given is something to embrace, so make sure you do something good with. Having power does not mean you have to make all the decisions yourselves, although some people with power act like that. It means that your bear the responsibility.

In the end of my course notes in organizational behaviour on he subject of influence and power I found the following thought:

Creating power for subordinates does not imply a reduction of your own power. You can maintain your own power and increase the power of others. Rather than cutting up the pie, make the pie bigger!

Exactly!

So, how do you, as a manager or a leader treat the power you are given? What do you intend to do with it? How will you bear the responsibility?

Elad