Feedback

Marshall Goldsmith; Mark Reiter. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (pp. 134-164). Profile Books, 2013.

A Brief History of Feedback

Feedback has always been with us, ever since the first man knelt down at a pool of water to get a drink and saw his face reflected in the water’s surface. Formal up-the-ladder feedback designed to help managers didn’t appear until the middle of the previous century—with the first suggestion box. The feedback that matters to me is a more recent development of the last 30 years. It’s commonly called 360-degree feedback, because it is solicited from everybody at all levels of the organization. Until something better comes along, confidential 360-degree feedback is the best way for successful people to identify what they need to improve in their relationships at work.

Successful people only have two problems dealing with negative feedback. However, they are big problems: (a) they don’t want to hear it from us and (b) we don’t want to give it to them.

It’s not hard to see why people don’t want to hear negative feedback. Successful people are incredibly delusional about their achievements. Over 95 percent of the members in most successful groups believe that they perform in the top half of their group. While this is statistically ridiculous, it is psychologically real. Giving people negative feedback means “proving” they are wrong. Proving to successful people that they are wrong works just about as well as making them change. Not gonna happen.

Feedback generally doesn’t break through to successful people even when we adopt the eminently sane guideline of depersonalizing the feedback. That is, talk about the task, not the person. This is easy in theory. But successful people’s identities are often so closely connected to what they do that it’s naive to assume they will not take it personally when receiving negative feedback about the most important activity in their lives.

Basically, we accept feedback that is consistent with our self-image and reject feedback that is inconsistent.

It’s also easy to see why we don’t want to give feedback. In big organizations, successful people have power over us—over our paycheck, our advancement, our job security. The more successful these people are, the more power they have. Combine that power with the fairly predictable “kill the messenger” response to negative feedback and you can see why emperors will continue to rule without clothes. (Spot quiz: When was the last time your efforts to prove the boss wrong worked as a career-enhancing maneuver?)

I have other issues with traditional face-to-face negative feedback—and almost all of them boil down to the fact that it focuses on the past (a failed past at that), not a positive future. We can’t change the past. We can change the future. Negative feedback exists to prove us wrong (or at least many of us take it that way). Feedback can be employed by others to reinforce our feelings of failure, or at least remind us of them—and our reaction is rarely positive. (Spot quiz: When your spouse or partner reminds you of all your shortcomings, how well do you accept this trip down memory lane?)

More than anything, negative feedback shuts us down. We close ranks, turn into our shell, and shut the world out. Change does not happen in this environment.

But enough about what’s wrong with feedback. I’m not trying to prove that negative feedback creates dysfunction. Feedback is very useful for telling us “where we are.” Without feedback, I couldn’t work with my clients. I wouldn’t know what everyone thinks my client needs to change. Likewise, without feedback, we wouldn’t have results. We couldn’t keep score. We wouldn’t know if we were getting better or worse. Just as salespeople need feedback on what’s selling and leaders need feedback on how they are perceived by their subordinates, we all need feedback to see where we are, where we need to go, and to measure our progress.

We need honest, helpful feedback. It’s just hard to find. But I have a foolproof method for securing it.

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Stop Asking for Feedback and Then Expressing Your Opinion

Years ago I was riding an elevator with a famous trial lawyer who was well into his 80s at the time (but still practicing law). The elevator doors opened and a man smoking a cigarette got on. (This was in the early 1980s, before smoking was universally banned.) The lawyer panicked. He was allergic to smoke and he vainly tried to jump off the small cramped elevator so he wouldn’t have to breathe the smoke. Too late. The doors closed.

“Are you okay?” the smoker asked the lawyer.

“You know, you’re not supposed to smoke on elevators,” he told the man. “It’s against the law.”

The man said, “What are you, a lawyer?” He was in no mood to apologize or put out the cigarette. He was clearly prepared to argue with the lawyer, to defend his right to smoke.

“I don’t believe this,” said the lawyer. “You’re acting as if I’m wrong—that you’re the victim because I happen to be in the elevator while you’re breaking the law.”

It was one of those small but outrageous moments that remind you how defensive people can be, whether they are right or wrong—especially if they’re wrong.

I think about that elevator ride every time someone asks me for my advice and then after I give it, they render a less-than-glowing verdict about the quality of my advice. “I can’t believe it,” I say, with the lawyer’s words ringing in my ears. “You asked me for my opinion and now you’re arguing with me.”

It’s no different than our behavior when we argue with someone who’s giving us advice, offering feedback, or otherwise trying to help us. And we do that every time we ask for feedback and unthinkingly respond by expressing our opinion. When we ask a friend, “What do you think I should do in this situation?” we are setting up the expectation that we want an answer—and that we will give the answer full consideration and quite possibly use it. We are not announcing that we’re initiating an argument.

But that’s exactly what we’re doing when we ask for feedback from someone and then immediately express our opinion. This is certainly true when our opinion is negative (“I’m not sure about that. . . .”). Whatever we say, however softly we couch it, our opinion will sound defensive. It will resemble a rationalization, a denial, a negation, or an objection.

Stop doing that. Treat every piece of advice as a gift or a compliment and simply say, “Thank you.” No one expects you to act on every piece of advice. If you learn to listen—and act on the advice that makes sense—the people around you may be thrilled.

Feedback Moments: How to Get Good Feedback on Your Own

I realize few of you have the resources to hire a professional to do the “fieldwork” of getting great feedback.

When I work with executives I spend my first hours on the job conducting a 360-degree feedback review. I don’t want to drape the process in complexity and mystery. It’s really simple. With the client’s help, I identify all the people he or she works with who see his or her interpersonal challenges on a daily basis. These are the raters. I qualify them with my four commitment questions. And I have them fill out a leadership questionnaire. Sometimes the questions are customized to reflect the company’s values and objectives (at GE, for example, there’s a high premium placed on cooperation and sharing information across boundaries whereas at another company the premium value might be customer satisfaction).

The questions are simple. Does the executive in question:

Clearly communicate a vision.
Treat people with respect.
Solicit contrary opinions.
Encourage other people’s ideas.
Listen to other people in meetings.

That sort of thing. I ask people to rate their colleague on a numerical scale. From that, a statistical picture emerges, usually revealing one or two problem areas that we need to address. Surveys show that about 50% of corporate America uses something like this in evaluating employee performance and attitudes. If, somehow, this format has eluded you, I’ve included a 72-question leadership survey in an appendix to give you a picture of how professionals in this field operate.

But I’m not asking you to become a “feedback professional” here. I have to do it this way because I’m a newcomer at every company I work in. I don’t have any history with the client. I’ve never worked with him. All I know before I meet the client is what his or her boss has told me about him. So I have no alternative but to canvass the troops.

That said, if you’ve worked in a corporate environment large enough to have three employees in its human resources department, you’ve probably been a participant in something resembling 360-degree feedback.

Even if you haven’t, we’re all familiar with feedback—whether or not we label it as such.

We’ve all endured performance appraisals from our bosses. That’s feedback.

We’ve all gone through salary reviews. That’s the most direct feedback.

If we’re in sales, we’ve all read customer surveys of our performance. That’s feedback.

We’ve sat through quarterly sales meetings as our figures are stacked up against our quotas and projections. That, too, is feedback.

We’re being told all day long how we’re doing. And the reason we accept this feedback and actually attempt to respond to it (e.g., if we’re down in sales, we’ll try harder to bring the figures up) is that we accept the process: An authority figure “grades” us and we are motivated to do better because of it.

It’s not like that with interpersonal behavior, which is vague, subjective, unquantifiable, and open to wildly variant interpretations. But that doesn’t make it less important. It’s my contention—and it’s the bedrock thesis of this book—that interpersonal behavior is the difference-maker between being great and near-great, between getting the gold and settling for the bronze. (The higher you go, the more your “issues” are behavioral.)

So, how do we get this much-needed feedback if we have neither the skill nor resources nor opportunity to poll our peers on what they really think about us? We know what feedback is. We don’t know how to get it.

Basically, feedback comes to us in three forms: Solicited, unsolicited, and observation. Each of them works well, but not for everyone. Let’s look closely at all three to see which one’s right for you.

Solicited Feedback, or Knowing How to Ask

Solicited feedback is just that. We solicit opinions from people about what we’re doing wrong. Sounds simple, no? I am not always so optimistic.

I’m not saying that you, working on your own, cannot replicate my feedback retrieval methods. It’s quite possible that you could corral a dozen people who know you, qualify them with the four commitment test, and have them fill out a questionnaire about what you could be doing better.

My only concern is that we cannot be sure that you will (a) ask the right people, (b) ask the right questions, (c) interpret the answers properly, or (d) accept them as accurate. This harks back to my big issue with negative feedback: We don’t want to hear it and people don’t want to give it.

In my experience the best solicited feedback is confidential feedback. It’s good because nobody gets embarrassed or defensive. There are no emotional issues, because you do not know who to blame or retaliate against for attacking you. In the best cases, you have no sense of being attacked at all. You’re merely ingesting honest commentary—which you requested!—from blind but well-meaning sources.

The only problem: This is virtually impossible for one person working alone to pull off. To maintain the confidentiality (and avoid the emotionality) you need an unbiased third party to do the polling—someone like me.

Absent that, you have to ask people one-on-one. But that too is fraught with obstacles.

In my experience there are a hundred wrong ways to ask for feedback—and one right way. Most of us know the wrong ways. We ask someone,

“What do you think of me?”
“How do you feel about me?”
“What do you hate about me?
“What do you like about me?”

These are all variations of the same encounter group question designed to elicit honest feelings between people. Well, we’re not running encounter groups here.

These types of questions are particularly pernicious in power relationships where the boss is asking the bossed, “What do you think of me?” In a power relationship you have all kinds of issues that influence the answer—because the answer has consequences. People will not tell the truth if they think it will come back to haunt them—and in a power relationship subordinates have no guarantee that the unvarnished truth won’t anger the boss, send them back to the end of the line, or worse, get them fired.

When you think about it, these “what do you think of me?” encounter group questions are actually irrelevant. In the workplace you don’t have to like me; we don’t have to be buddies who hang out together after work. All we have to do is work well together. How we really “feel” about each other is practically moot.

Think about your colleagues at work. How many of them are your friends? For how many of them would you be willing to articulate your true feelings? How many of them have you actually thought about in terms of feelings? The answer, I suspect, is not that many. A small minority. And yet you probably work well together with a majority of your colleagues. That disconnect—between the small number of friends and the larger number of colleagues with whom you work well—should convince you once and for all that what people feel or think about you is not the key to getting better.

In soliciting feedback for yourself, the only question that works—the only one!—must be phrased like this: “How can I do better?”

Semantic variations are permitted, such as, “What can I do to be a better partner at home?” or, “What can I do to be a better colleague at work?” or, “What can I do to be a better leader of this group?” It varies with the circumstances. But you get the idea. Pure unadulterated issue-free feedback that makes change possible has to (a) solicit advice rather than criticism, (b) be directed towards the future rather than obsessed with the negative past, and (c) be couched in a way that suggests you will act on it; that in fact you are trying to do better.

Unsolicited Feedback, or the Blindside Event

If we’re lucky, every once in a while something or someone comes along who opens our eyes to our faults—and helps us strip away a delusion or two about ourselves. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, we should consider ourselves lucky and grateful.

Psychologists have all sorts of schemata to explain us to ourselves. One of the more interesting ones is a simple four-pane grid known as the Johari Window (named after two real characters, Joe and Harry). It divides our self-awareness into four parts, based on what is known and unknown about us to other people and what is known and unknown about us to ourselves.

As you can see from the illustration on the following page, the stuff that is known about us to others is public knowledge. What’s known to us and unknown to others is private. What’s unknown to ourselves and others is, well . . . unknowable and, therefore, not relevant.