How Embracing Feedback Helps You Avoid the Vacuum
Retrospectives are more than a project post-mortem designed to look back at the various happenings along the way of a newly completed job. Their true worth comes from creating an opportunity for members to provide valuable feedback not just to each other but also to the stakeholders on the quality of the project’s execution.
Feedback is an often dreaded and misunderstood word. Bill Gates, through a recent TED talk, focused on this notorious "F" word when he talked about getting teachers the feedback they deserve so they can improve their practice. He opined that a strong foundation of constructive feedback is an absolutely essential tool in athletics, but in education, the practice is almost nonexistant.
Teachers aren’t the only ones who avoid feedback, and the primary reason that most profesisonals fear feedback is because they expect to hear something negative.
But it’s not just the ones who avoid hearing feedback that are to blame for its lack of popularity. The success of the process actually depends on both the mentor and the mentee. The role of a feedback giver can be better understood from the four-response model suggested by Ken Blanchard in his book, The Little Book of Coaching. Blanchard mentions the following commonly found responses to many mentees’ work:
1. No response: No acknowledgement whatsoever of the work done.
2. Negative response: The mentor is always on the lookout for mistakes both minor and major and always points them out.
3. Redirection response: The mentor redirects the energies of the people toward the goals when a mistake or failure happens.
4. Positive response: The mentor makes efforts to find the positive things and bestows a genuine appreciation for workers’ contributions.
While it’s important for a mentor to take care and give the appropriate response (preferably “redirection”), the mentee also plays an important role in the process, and that role is one of an active feedback seeker. Former Intel chairman Andy Grove narrates an incident about Steve Jobs:
Some of us from Silicon Valley were invited to a dinner in Palo Alto. It was 1983. At one point during the meal, Steve Jobs stands up and yells, 'Nobody over 30 can possibly understand what computing is all about.' I pulled him aside, waved my finger, and lectured him, telling him, 'You're incredibly arrogant. You don't know what you don't know.' His response was, 'Teach me. Tell me what I should know.'
As Rashmi Datt explains in her book, Manage Emotions to Win, it’s debatable whether Jobs changed after this incident, but to his credit, he at least welcomed feedback by saying "Tell me more."
It takes courage to allow feedback to stay at the center of the conversation while keeping egos aside.
I’ll end with a simple yet eloquent quote from Peter Maxwell Davies that captures the essence of feedback. "If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum."
