The Feedback Formula
Folks have a lot of anxiety over giving feedback, especially the kind that falls on the “hard conversation” side of things. People often delay or skip for either a selfless reason or a selfish one.
- Selfless: We all know what it feels like to receive a hard message, and so we don’t want to make someone else feel that way
- Selfish: We don’t want to have to deal with someone’s emotional response!
There are no silver bullets for doing this well, but we can take a bit of the edge off with a simple formula for giving feedback. This formula works whether we’re giving feedback — I prefer the word “coaching” — on what to improve (Improvement Coaching — Chapter 8 of When They Win, You Win) or on what to continue (Continue Coaching, Chapter 9).
Switching from the idea of a “hard conversation” to using the phrase “Improvement Coaching” hopefully helps us somewhat revise our mindset from something “mean” to something that’s about helping another to be more successful.
Continue Coaching, fka praise, usually gets short shrift. It should be done at a 5:1 ratio to Improvement Coaching (5:1 Continue:Improve), at least according not only to me, but also to both the Positive Coaching Alliance and a guy named John Gottman in his book, “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.”
Continue Coaching, just like Improvement Coaching, deserves to be planned and rehearsed. Good Continue Coaching is specific — “good job” is not coaching. That’s what cheerleaders say, over on the sideline. You’re a coach, on the field, so you must be specific. By being specific you force yourself to articulate your own and your team’s standards, which helps to regularly clarify for people what is expected of them.
OK, the formula (Chapter 12 of #WTWYW, and see the video).
First, decide if you are going to give Improvement Coaching or Continue Coaching, and you’ll also decide if this coaching is about a result/work product or a behavior. Mentally put yourself in one of those four quadrants (see video).
Second, we have to decide which wrapper to use. Do we use SBI, invented and popularized by The Center for Creative Leadership or do we use SWI, invented and currently being popularized by me 😂. An Improve and the Continue example of SBI:
Improve:
- Situation (problem, context): “Jane, in our team meeting…”
- Behavior: “…I felt that when the team was trying to probe your analysis to help improve it, it seemed that you reacted defensively, which…”
- Impact: “…might make folks less likely to do that for you in the future, and makes it tough for us to live our team value of helping each other to be successful.”
Continue:
- Situation (problem, context): “Jane, In our team meeting…”
- Behavior: “…I loved how you asked questions about Antonio’s analysis, because it’s going to help him refine his thinking, and give us a better chance to make a quality decision…”
- Impact: “…this sort of behavior makes it possible for us to live our team value of helping each other to be successful.”
Next, add an appropriate entrance ramp. One of the problems with coaching folks is we often spend more time talking ABOUT the what we want to say and not actually saying it. Use an economical entrance ramp, and get right into it. Examples:
- I think I see something that’s getting in your way, are you in a spot where you can hear that right now?
- I was hoping to take a few minutes to talk about something I see you doing really well. Got time now?
Now, your exit ramp, “OK, let me pause there, what are you thinking about all this?” Remember, around us at all times are four truths:
- My truth
- Your truth
- Our shared truth
- An objective truth
No one has #4 — not even physics has a single unified theory, so you’re certainly not going to find an objective truth on your team. Best we can achieve is #3. It’s important to realize that when you provide coaching, you’ve only shared your own truth. You absolutely have not shared an objective truth. Serve the ball back to your employee to discuss so that you can develop a shared truth together, and never forget, the spirit of all of this is to help your people to be more successful (and certainly not to win an argument). This mindset often shines through to your folks.
Remember, whether you are Rich Fairbank leading Capital One or Rachelle leading the sandwich line folks at Jersey Mike’s, the manager’s job description is exactly the same (covered on p. 30 of When They Win, You Win). It is:
- Deliver an aligned result
- Enable the success of the people on your team
Coaching is your cheapest, most readily available, and most effective tool to achieve both. What are your thoughts?
