In the second installment of her three part series on Authentic Feedback – Founder, Sara Sweat shares a few elements of the important foundation your organization can build to get the most benefit from authentic feedback.
Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO, A Life Curated
As I shared last week, “I’m on a mission to civilize” and restore the tarnished reputation of feedback as a vital tool for innovation and team building. In the first installment, I discussed four of the top reasons why feedback fails to deliver for teams and organizations.
#1. We equate feedback with criticism & cruelty.
#2. We have failed to establish unified goals, language, & structure for feedback as a company.
#3. Feedback is only delivered top-down.
#4. We don’t equip our leaders to deliver feedback well.
The highest functioning & most valuable feedback processes are systemic – consistently defined and utilized across all teams, monitored and measured regularly, and deeply connected to a company’s culture.
Remember, with feedback, we’re just changing the way we communicate – but communication…changes everything.
Know What You Don’t Know
Every good project starts with a baseline. You can’t set goals until you first understand your company’s current position. Start small, with a simple multiple choice employee survey focused on a handful of key areas.
Things like:
- The current process for feedback
- Productivity
- Employee sentiment
- Professional development
- Cross divisional collaboration
By structuring the bulk of the survey as multiple choice answers, your data will be easier to organize and weigh.
But, you’ll still want one or two open ended questions to gather ideas and things you can’t anticipate from your employees. You’ll be grateful for the frankness a few open ended questions can supply.
Create Definitions
Now that you have fresh insight, it seems like a great time to set some goals, right?
Oops – not quite yet. You can’t set a goal for something that isn’t defined. And, the right definitions can save you significant time & effort once you’ve launched.
For example, if your survey results found your organization is resistant to “feedback”, defining your initiative as a “performance coaching program” or “innovation kickstarter” could eliminate some resistance before you even begin.
Start by thinking through questions like:
- What outcomes are you trying to drive with this program & how should that influence its name or components?
- Will you adopt terms like “positive” and “negative” feedback & create different processes for how that’s delivered or normalize all feedback as equal and useful information?
- How important are visual or verbal cues to how your team members need to hear feedback?
- How will you define appropriate standards for communication so every team member can confidently identify & redirect observations that are too critical or too vague to be useful?
- What mechanisms are needed for feedback to be given and received omni-directionally across the organization?
Set Tentative Goals & Validate Them
Once we understand our baseline and the terminology we’ll use, we can set some simple goals. I’m a fan of the tried and true S.M.A.R.T. framework for goal setting as it requires you to define measurement criteria from the start.
For example, let’s say we’d like to increase innovation. To achieve it, we need employees who are willing to be vulnerable, offer up high quality ideas often, collaborate across divisions, & iterate frequently. To convert that to a S.M.A.R.T goal, you might choose to measure one or more elements of the behavior we’d like to see in a specific and actionable way.
Focus your initial goals on the places where your needs and your team members’ desires most significantly overlap.
In that same example, if poor collaboration between 2 divisions is slowing innovation – chances are our baseline employee survey results will highlight things like “poor ownership” or “poor communication” scores from cross divisional counterparts within those same two areas of the company.
So, we’d set a S.M.A.R.T. goal around improving ownership scores first. By aligning these two divisions around a goal we’ll get them talking, increase empathy, & strengthen collaboration to identify the blocker between their teams. Just this activity will have benefit – even before you impact ownership.
Once you have an initial 3-5 goals, validate your assumptions with the company in another brief survey. You know you’ve selected the right goals when the majority of team members agree that these S.M.A.R.T. goals matter & would create positive and meaningful change.
Leaders. Learn. Launch.
Aligned people leaders who expertly give and receive feedback as part of their team culture are your single greatest asset in a formal feedback program. So, investing in their expertise is always worthwhile.
Not only do they need to understand your definitions and goals, but they need felt experience with giving and receiving feedback in a systemic way. They need mentors and spaces to practices things like:
- Setting expectations about feedback
- Effectively leveraging data in feedback
- Overcoming objections
- Handling poor responses to feedback
- Identifying culture disruptors and redirecting them
- The power of externalization
- Storytelling tactics
- Feedback as a cultural norm
- Continuous feedback best practices
Most importantly, you’ll want a forum that allows you to hear their feedback early and often. Not only will this provide you with valuable insight into the program itself, it will help you continue to adapt your leadership development to equip them to meet the challenges of their roles.
When you finally launch the program broadly, you will have earned your leaders trust & their genuine excitement about its impact will help the rest of the organization feel invested.
Celebrate little wins loudly and monitor often to ensure a consistent experience for every employee.
Actually, Act.
The only thing worse than never asking for feedback, is asking & doing nothing with it.
The purpose of feedback is not simply to better understand a situation, but to continuously improve by making the optimal action more obvious and efficacious.
Let’s continue with our example in which innovation was the goal and cross divisional collaboration was a blocker due to the perception that two divisions take insufficient ownership of their tasks. Our S.M.A.R.T. goal asked these two teams to work together to improve ownership scores.
But, what if their efforts uncover that ownership isn’t an issue at all? If each team actually takes extreme ownership of their tasks, but simply has too many accountabilities to be effective – what next?
If we stop our process after correctly defining the problem, we might see improved empathy & perhaps even strengthened collaboration between these teams, but we’ll continue to see poor innovation. Because the root of the problem isn’t something collaboration alone can address.
We, as leadership within the broader organization, must take additional action. Are all the accountabilities for each team creating value? Are these resources the only or best ones to own them? What other options exist for solving these tasks that might free up the bandwidth necessary for innovation?
Our opportunity for action creates a tremendous opportunity. If we take action in the right way to solve the underlying issue we uncovered, innovation will soar – along with team member trust, satisfaction, and retention.
Measure Twice.
A highly functioning feedback program will create its own measurable results. But, don’t forget to measure the impact of the actions you take in response to it, as well. You’ll find that the impact of feedback goes far beyond your intended goals.
When you’ve achieved all you set out to do, go back to the very beginning of your process & launch a new survey. Waiting to be uncovered are different questions and uniquely bold ideas that reflect the new organization you & your employees are building together.
Best of all, if you let it, your feedback program will make you a different leader, too. Wiser, more versatile, and better equipped for whatever happens next.
Next week, we’ll close out our series on Authentic Feedback with some practical advice to optimize on the feedback you receive & strengthen the feedback you deliver.
