TRANSCRIPT

Leaders Journal EP05: To Give or Not To Give Feedback?


INTRODUCTION:
Hello everyone, I am Coach Jason Ho! We are here with another episode of the Leaders Journal.

The Leaders Journal began as a source for MNC leaders, directors and SME business owners to discover practical leadership stories and coaching insights.

(00:36) RECAP:
In the previous episodes, we covered 3 of the 4Ds that are the key to Perfect Performance — Dominance, Deployment and Development. Today, we explore the final D — Directness.

Directness is all about feedback — knowing when and how to give feedback.

Do you find yourself stuck because you don’t know how to give feedback to your team?

Have you ever wondered, “Why isn’t my feedback well received?”

If you found yourself nodding to those questions, keep tuning in as I share practical tips on how you can give effective feedback and master this final D, Directness, that unlocks Perfect Performance.

(01:22) THE NEED FOR DIRECTNESS:
So why is Directness, or feedback, important?

Feedback is linked to engagement.

And engagement is linked to performance.

What this means is that if you master the art of giving effective feedback, you increase the level of engagement in your team.

When engagement increases, performance increases.

Let me give you a scenario.

Your team meeting is starting and as it goes on, you realise that one of your team members does something that disrupts the discussions taking place.

You notice that the rest of your team is a little frustrated.

At this point, as a leader, what do you do?

I've coached many top executives and I’ve come across different ways their leaders manage and respond to these situations.

There are 3 responses I’ve observed.

The first response: they don’t do anything.

And this is what these top level Senior Directors tell me — they say, “It’s just a small thing, there’s no need to do anything”.

Or they say, “Why do anything? Shouldn’t that team member realise it on their own?”

The second response: they call out that team member in front of the entire team for disrupting the discussions.

They are indifferent when correcting anyone’s weaknesses publicly, even without setting the stage for the feedback to be given.

The third response: they decide to give feedback to the team member.

And they normally go about in two ways.

Either they keep a mental note of it and bring it up during an annual performance review, or they try to find a good time to bring it up to that team member, only to realise that the team member is not open to receiving it.

(03:17) YOUR APPROACH TO FEEDBACK IMPACTS ENGAGEMENT:
Now, let’s go through these responses, or what is also, the different approaches to feedback.

I will expound on this by sharing a research done by Gallup that revealed how 3 different approaches of feedback impacted the level of engagement of team members.

The 3 different approaches are:

No feedback — that means whatever they do, we ignore.

Negative feedback — where they focus only on the weaknesses.

Positive feedback — where the focus is on strengths.

What we really want to understand here is the scientific impact of feedback on engagement — what percentage of your team will be engaged, not engaged or actively disengaged.

Here are the results.

We can see that when no feedback is given, only 2% of the people are engaged and 58% are not engaged.

This leaves 40% who are actively disengaged.

Let me break this down for you.

Imagine you are leading a team and there are 100 people under you.

What this might look like is you only have 2 people who are looking forward to coming to work, 58 of them who drag their feet to work, and 40 of them display behaviour that disrupt the team dynamics.

The thing is, active disengagement is the most toxic.

What do you think will happen if we adopt the second approach of negative feedback — where you focus solely on weaknesses instead of ignoring them?

What do you think happens to the level of active disengagement?

Very interestingly, research shows that the active disengagement went down!

You must be thinking, “Why?! How is that even possible?”

(05:16) THE REPORT CARD ANALOGY:
Now think about this.

Take yourself back when you were younger, and imagine you received a report card with the results, A,B,B and F.

You go to your father who is sitting on the couch watching TV.

And you are so fearful of what he is going to say.

Now imagine this scenario.

Your father looks at you, takes the report card, puts it down and goes back to watching TV.

He completely ignores you.

Let’s imagine a second scenario.

Your father looks at you, takes the report card, he stands up and starts scolding you and telling you that you are grounded.

Or in my time, we get caned.

After all that scolding, he goes back to watching TV.

Now I want you to consider this.

Which father loves you more?

I’ve shared this analogy to many leaders and the unanimous answer is 2!

The father who scolds you.

(06:15) APPLICATION OF ANALOGY:
What have we shown here?

We have shown that even if we talk about the negative, it’s still better than ignoring it.

Because even though the expression of it can improve, it still shows that you care.

Now that you know this, you have the responsibility to choose the better approach.

It’s better off that you talk to your team member and give them the feedback, because it shows them you care.

Don’t ever think that “it’s just a small thing”, because it all begins in the small things.

It’s the small things that add up.

And one day, these small things become a “mountain”.

For you, this mountain might look like a detrimental impact on your team’s performance, or tensions that completely sever relationships in your team.

So here’s the deal.

Always choose to give feedback.

Never sweep past the incident.

Never assume that they will realise it on their own.

If you only focus on the weaknesses, that’s better than ignoring.

But the optimal approach of giving feedback is when you can focus on strengths — giving positive feedback.

Going back to the research, the results show that if you adopt the positive feedback approach, 61% of your people will be engaged!

What’s even better is that, active disengagement actually goes down to 1%!

As leaders, this is a crucial takeaway.

We must be aware that we can influence engagement or disengagement based on our approach to feedback.

(08:03) MASTERING DIRECTNESS — THE ART OF FEEDBACK:
How should we master this concept of Directness?

How do you give positive feedback in an effective way?

And how do you give feedback in a way that will be well received?

The thing we must realise is that humans are emotional beings.

When we give feedback, we are working with extremely sensitive emotional beings.

One wrong word can be all it takes for their walls to come up, and for them to shut your feedback out completely.

The first practical tip for you to note on how you can shift from negative feedback to positive feedback, is that LANGUAGE IS KEY.

It’s this whole idea about reframing.

So instead of going down the route of “what went wrong”, I will ask — and I do this a lot with my team at the end of a project or task — “What is great?” and “What is growth?”.

My focus is on what went well and on what are areas where we can grow in.

When we do that, we are able to communicate the same thing differently and get a positive reaction instead.

If we focus only on the weaknesses, we risk putting people down to the point where they are defeated.

We don’t want that.

We always want to give people hope that change is possible, growth is possible.

Another tip about giving feedback is to BE AS SPECIFIC AS POSSIBLE.

Vague and ambiguous feedback is not helpful to your team members at all.

Telling them, “This is not good enough. Can you come back with another version?” will leave them more confused than before.

You want to be able to pinpoint for them where and how they can grow in the way they execute a particular task.

One final tip I have on giving feedback is to DO IT OFTEN.

If an incident occurs where you need to give feedback, don’t wait until the annual performance review before you tell the person.

If you do that, your team member might not remember the context or the intentions behind why they did what they did.

The worst thing is, when you wait for an extended period of time before hashing it out again, it might come across to your team member that you have “held that grudge” for a very long while.

And that is not something that you want them to feel.

(10:42) CLOSING:
The art of giving effective feedback does not come naturally and leaders of influence are ones who constantly seek to grow in this area to the point where a culture is built in their team where they embrace and welcome feedback.

For anyone who wants to master this whole idea of Directness and to learn how to give great feedback to your team — go to perfectperformance.org/leadersofinfluence — the link is in the description below.

Till then, this is Coach Jason Ho. Let’s bring out the best in our teams.

(key words: leadership, leadershiptips, feedback, engagement)