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Focused feedback is better

Posted by John Foster on June 6th, 2011

There’s one thing I’ve found that separates good feedback from bad. Really! Just one: more focused questions generate higher quality responses. Usually you get dead air and blank stares when you ask a generic question like, “Does anyone have any feedback for me?” The typical response, “Uh, fine… uh, really great… yeah, good job!”

Typical response to a generic request for feedback. From: photo.net/photos/zbbrox

It’s a lot of work to give someone good feedback, and most people simply aren’t prepared when you spring it on them like that. Remember, the burden of gathering feedback falls on you, not the provider. So make it easier for others to help you out by asking more focused questions. After you ask a focused question, behave like a curious four-year-old and ask, “Why, why, why, why?” to get underneath surface level generalities to real opinions that help you grow.

Of course if you really don’t want to know how you can grow, and are just asking so you can say you did, you need to return to GO (do not collect your $200) and start over with why it’s important to get feedback in the first place. See more on that in my post Get Some Grit. Don’t waste your time (or other people’s energy) by asking generic, open ended questions. They don’t work. For more on why, see my post Ambiguity kills feedback.

Here are some tips for getting focused feedback:

Focused questions generate more complex (valuable) answers

1. Use good manners:
Be curious, persistent, patient, and grateful. Feedback is a gift, but you have to wrap it yourself. When you ask one question, follow it up with a deeper, probing question to help the person in his/her thinking. Something like: “Thanks for that. Do you think if I try that next time I’ll get better results?” Followed by, “Okay, sounds good. Has that worked for you?”

2. Focus on priority and purpose:
Ask high level questions that help you determine if you are working on the right things. For example: “If I do these three things well, do you think I’ll be successful? Or: “Which of these five things would you do first?”

3. Seek advice before you act:
Sometimes it’s easier to give an opinion before an action has occurred because there’s no implication of judgment. Use questions like, “How would you approach this project?” After you gather advice from several perspectives, review for patterns of agreement and disagreement. Follow up with another round of questions to get advice on the patterns you’ve found. ”I have two opposing ideas on how to approach this. Which one do you like better?”

4. Invite critique on approach and impact:
Cue feedback by asking for direct opinions that leave no room for one word replies. Bad: Do you like this? Better: How could this presentation be more clear? Best: On slide three, how could I present this concept better? For critique on the value of your efforts, ask about your impact on the person, team, or organization. Questions like: “Was my contribution what you expected?” ”How could I have helped our team accomplish more?” Or, “What could I have done to increase our results by 10%”

5. Cross-pollinate good ideas: Share what someone else has told you to jump-start their thinking and generate discussion. ”I was talking with Dave about this and he said…” This helps the person you ask learn something about another colleague too.

Final thought: even when you ask a very precise opening question, you are still likely to get a simple answer. Successful learners ask several polite follow up questions to help those around them warm up to their situation and be more helpful. Don’t be satisfied with someone’s first answer.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Tags: Feedback, growth, learning, success

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Goals are a natural part of work

Posted by John Foster on April 28th, 2011

You can’t score without a goal. But, compared to other high performance environments (like sports), typical work environments don’t provide enough clarity or focus. This ambiguity causes people to conserve effort and/or waste energy on the wrong things, leading to lower engagement and lower performance.

GOAL! (from wikimedia commons)

Psychologists have discovered much about how our brain handles goals. One of the defining traits of the human species is our ability to choose what we will do and how we will do it… that is, to create goals. Goals are central to grit, which leads to greater happiness, which in turn is a source of high performance.

Goals are simply a way to clarify expectations and keep track of agreements about your work, and can help answer these critical performance questions:

Am I doing the right work?
Is the work I’m doing good enough?

You should use goals to discuss the potential of your work and the progress you are making (or not) towards them. In their best form, goals are not administrative or bureaucratic processes. Rather, they are vehicles that help you carry work forward. An individual or a leader may initiate a goal, but in either case, both people should be invited into the discussion. In fact, goals can serve as a “boundary object” to engage several people with different perspectives as your advisors, creating the basis for a continual 360 degree dialog.

You can increase transparency and efficiency in your organization by sharing goals, and you might gather them together for a “roll-up” to create a big picture of how everyone is working together. But keep them lightweight and flexible, as they are most useful in the form of a natural conversation about what you are doing and how you are doing it.

Don’t let goal processes and templates (like SMART goals) overcome the natural simplicity of goals. They can be written on post-its, scribbled on a napkin, or entered into a web service like Rypple. The key is that you think about and discuss what’s important in your work and capture it in a very simple statement that has meaning to you.

Key questions for generating goals:

What is needed by the business/client?
What am I prepared (ready and able) to do?
What will I need to accomplish this work properly?
Who is impacted by this work and what are their needs?
How will I know it is complete?

Goals make it easier to gather feedback:

Think of goals as a “prototype” of the future you can use to gather feedback. You can ask three kinds of questions about a goal to help you deliver high quality work that others value:

1. Focus- use one or more goals to ask your boss, client, and colleagues if they think you are working on the right things. Compare them to expectations set out for you by company level mission/vision statements and job level requirements like a job description.

2. Advice- use a goal to ask others for input on how they would approach the task. When you do this before you act, you make it easier for others to give their full opinion about the “right way” to do something.

2. Critique- use a goal to ask others their opinion on your results. It’s easier to get feedback if you show what you were hoping to accomplish (with a goal), as it allows people to focus their opinions on the gaps between your intent and the actual results.

For more on this topic see my post Set homerun goals.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Tags: Feedback, goals, high performance

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It’s a thin line

Posted by John Foster on March 9th, 2011

It’s a thin line between love and hate. This is a great quote to underscore the inherent challenge of delivering excellence or managing to very high quality standards. Recall this great song by Annie Lennox in case you need a soundtrack in your head while reading this. It’s easy to point out what’s wrong with something, but a much bigger challenge to make it better.

Walking the Tightrope, source: unknown

It’s like walking a tight rope… if you believe high quality is essential to achieving your goal. On the one hand, you can take the demanding boss or snooty patron approach and simply demand better/more. This might get you an immediate response, but often elicits such a negative reaction from the people around you that you lose their authentic trust, loyalty, and commitment.

One the other hand, if you tip towards forgiveness and understanding, you actually get less in the moment and hope that next time things will be better. This might engender fonder feelings from those around you, but fails to set a higher bar, push the envelope, surprise and delight. It is simply fine (given the circumstances). Unfortunately, over time, “simply fine” leads to mediocrity. Eeew.

It’s a difficult competing commitment: be a kind generous human being (like Jesus Christ) or be an innovative bearer of high standards (like Steve Jobs). Can’t you be both? Sure, and to do so, vision, vigilance, and veracity come to mind. Introducing the V-3 method of leading for quality! It helps you walk the line of pushing for mo’ betta, while accepting the inevitable influence of variables, unexpected interruptions, and, well reality taking things back to the lowest common denominator.

Vision: paint a compelling picture of what could be, so others are inspired to act. In fact, paint is insufficient, you must craft it in Technicolor, no THX. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Powerful imagery has proven impact on individual motivation by “priming” people with impressions about what is possible and how it will make a difference. More importantly, a great vision helps clarify a choice and “allows” others to achieve versus forcing them to respond to a command. A clear and compelling vision attracts people who desire the same things as you, making achievement at very high levels of quality more sustainable.
Vigilance: don’t let there be exceptions and don’t let there be distractions from the highest priority aspects of your quality mission. Allowing exceptions and distractions lets people off the hook before they achieve mastery, and may negatively effect their desire to try next time. See more on this concept in Why Chinese Mothers are Superior by Amy Chua.
Veracity: use facts and present them in ways that inspire continued efforts to try harder. Providing feedback on progress is essential in support of persistance and high achievement. But the facts must be relevant and presented in appropriate scales. One study on goal achievement compared weight loss on a wide scale of 25 pounds versus a narrow scale of 5 pounds and found that participants needing to lose 4 pounds were more likely to slack off in the wide scale (because 4 is small compared to 25 while it’s huge compared to 5).

It’s a thin line between engagement and overwhelm. One last tip: if you tell someone something is “not good enough” the next action on your part is to pitch in and help make the situation better. This is a doubly-good thing because mimicry is a powerful social motivator and it’s energizing to have fresh legs in the face of a difficult challenge!

Popularity: 14% [?]