feedback

February 8, 2018 by AnnaPatrick

3 Most Productive Ways To Use Feedback

Have you gotten feedback lately? How did you respond?

People fall into a number of pitfalls when it comes to feedback: They take it too personally. They get too defensive. They rationalize it and reject it.

None of this is helpful, to you or your career.

Your willingness to listen, learn, and improve will do more for your perception as a committed leader than anything else. A few simple steps on your part, in addition to getting the feedback, will make the process pay off.

A great first step is to come into feedback with an open mind. A common response is to defensiveness. When you shut down, you don’t take in the feedback at all. Now you are not only ignoring what you might need to change or improve but you are also closing off all possibilities of getting the insights you need to learn to do things differently.

Next, treat feedback as exactly what it is: Information. Before you discount any kind of feedback, at least make the effort to understand it and either validate or invalidate it. Feedback is just information; it is not the gospel truth. Feedback is someone opinion of you, wrapped in their personal experiences, bias, and observations. Some of it will be valuable and some will not.

Follow through. You have a choice on how you want to approach feedback—you can ignore it, or you can accept it. Once you have the feedback, you have to actually do something with it – including reflecting on the results, creating a plan of actions based on the information, and following through with the people who gave you the feedback. When asking for feedback, try the following suggestions to make sure you have a positive experience: thanking your participants, sharing what you have learned, describing what you will do now, asking for further suggestions, and following up periodically.

Taking these steps will communicate to everyone around you that you are a person who listens and who wants to be your best. The number one predictor of perceived effectiveness is your commitments to your own self-improvement. It is only part of the process to be committed. You need to show you are committed. Otherwise, no one will know. If they don’t know you have received the feedback, what would make them think it was worth giving in the first place?

One last thing. Now that you’re staying open to feedback, ask yourself whether you’re getting enough feedback, and the right kind to advance your career. Feedback, well-done, is one of the secrets of High Performing Leaders. To discover how you can get yourself high-quality feedback to improve your results, be sure to check out The 360 Investment – a self-study course that uses techniques of today’s best executive coaches to get you the feedback you need.

This article was originally posted as an Inc Column on Inc.com.

February 24, 2017 by AnnaPatrick

Feedback Is Different For Men And Women Leaders, Here’s Why

Have you ever been blindsided by feedback, or thrown off course because no one gave you feedback you needed?

Feedback is the ongoing formal and informal input you get from the sources all around you. It includes the explicit messages you get from the people with whom you work, but feedback can also come from your own observations, the way others react to you, and your results. It’s helpful in many ways, but it can be troublesome when it’s absent, misleading, incomplete, or poorly received.

Many of the women leaders I’ve worked with over the years have complained to me that the feedback they receive from superiors or peers is frequently contradictory, vague, or secret, so they can’t respond to it, and as a result they can’t gauge how they’re doing or improve.

That happens far more than we’d like, which is why so many organizations are revisiting their performance review processes and trying to get it right. Meanwhile, feedback remains treacherous for women. The Center for Talent Innovation reports:

Women are 32 percent less likely to receive any feedback from male superiors.
When they do get feedback, 81 percent of women say they have trouble responding to it, because it’s so “distressingly contradictory.”
When women make up less than 25 percent of an applicant pool, they are more likely to be negatively evaluated.

In addition, we have observed at the Leadership Research Institute that, compared to men:

Women tend to be harder on themselves when receiving feedback from others.
Women are also hard on themselves when they self-assess, tending to underrate their own abilities.
Women can feel overwhelmed or crushed by feedback.
Women tend to get softer feedback from others – despite the fact that rigorous feedback is one of the ways leaders strengthen their capabilities

In other words, more so for women than for men, feedback – meant to be a helpful vehicle to move leaders forward through self-improvement – can hold them back. It’s up to you to seek out mentors or peers that can help give you the feedback your looking for, and don’t be afraid to be specific with that you’re asking for.

So whether your company has good feedback structures or not, you can take advantage of the wealth of information available through feedback – both positive and negative – that will boost your confidence and the constructive criticism that can save or propel your career. Ask yourself: What feedback do you need to let go? Where do you need to know more? How will you stay open to the feedback you receive?

For more ways to set and achieve your goals, see my services page.

The previous article appeared on Inc.com as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!

April 7, 2015 by sereynolds

Senior Vice President at MGM Resorts Gives 3 Life-changing Ways to use Feedback

The following article appeared on Inc.com today as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!

We’ve all encountered organizations that are going through a lot of change. I recently worked with an organization going through a transitional phase – they had a new division and even that division had gone through a major overhaul so they could be higher functioning within the whole of the company. All of that change can be hard on a team. Fast-forward a year later, I talked to one of the senior leaders on the team and found out that things had dramatically improved. The team was functioning productively, communicating with each other, making positive changes, and they were really on the right track.

I interviewed the Senior Vice President at MGM Resorts, Kelly Litster, to find out the strategy they used to make the difference. She said one word that stood out to me: feedback.

These are the three things Litster’s team learned about feedback:

We learned how to give feedback. One important step this team took to improve its performance was to create a sort of social contract. They agreed to a number of behaviors they wanted to hold themselves accountable for. The team started practicing a “scoring” technique to track how well they practiced the behaviors individually, and learned how to give feedback to explain their scores for each other.

Teams like Litster’s often include a number of common elements in their “operating agreements.” Some items might include avoiding blame, looking for the root cause of a problem, communicating messages even when they’re hard to say, and receiving messages without defensiveness even when they’re hard to hear.

Litster’s team held themselves accountable to scoring each other on those behaviors – a technique that made it possible for each of them to see how they score numerically, quantifying their behavior. Each individual team member can see the items they need to work on, try to remedy it and watch their score go up. It allows them to keep track of how they’re doing and provides a vehicle for how to communicate those messages and transform their culture.

We learned how to take feedback. Litster observed that on her team, members grew in their ability to listen and open their minds to feedback, learning how to do things differently instead of being closed off.

“We had to build trust,” Litster said, “The contract (or promise to behave a certain way) started us off – we joked about it before we could live by it. Then we had some serious trust building to do. Once there was a tiny bit of trust and someone was vulnerable – the team started to come together.”

They say a breaking point either leads to a breakdown or a breakthrough. In Litster’s case, it led to a breakthrough. They made it safe to give feedback within their team culture, so important messages could be both delivered and received. Taking hard feedback may not always been easy for a team member. It may not be pleasant. But it is helpful, and essential to elevate the team.

We learned how to use feedback to make improvements. Litster noticed that her team learned to assert themselves, to be necessary for the service of the greater goal even if the feedback made them uncomfortable initially, and they learned how to help each other. They also learned how to ask for help. Then they tracked their results and watched as the whole team came together in a more effective way. They also became open about giving compliments and offering help. The whole atmosphere became more congenial and productive. Perhaps most importantly, they were able to start demonstrating that they genuinely cared about one another and helped each other succeed.

If you lead a team, consider how you can use these same strategies for transforming the culture in an equally positive way.

Is your team comfortable giving and receiving feedback?
Do you have a system for communicating what’s important and how people are performing?
Do you have an agreement about how to improve based on the feedback?

With these three practices on using feedback that were so successful on Litster’s team at MGM Resorts, you can tackle a changing corporate landscape productively, and you’ll learn a lot about yourself and your colleagues along the way.