How to make your feedback sessions effective

This blog is a continuation of one of my previous blog titled ‘1% technique for taking feedback’. Further to that in this blog I would like to share my thoughts on how to effectively give a feedback.

Many times, we see different management activities as individual activities with our realizing the correlationbetween them. Here I am going to explain you how such two activities are interlinked. Have you ever thought mentoring and giving feedbacks can be interlinked?

The simple way to put it is “the more you mentor, less you need to give explicit feedback sessions”

Though feedback by itself is essential and ‘Feedback sessions’ are perceived to be a good way of doing it, it is not healthy always. The reason is the success of feedback session depends on how well the direct feedback is given and how well it is received. Both are highly subject to the manager’s and sub ordinate’s undrstanding with each other.

In most cases there can be conflict of interests and the effect of which is just another meeting for opinion expression and subsequent walk out.

The opinion expression happenes in 2 ways - ‘Explicit’ and ‘not so explicit’

‘Explicit’ is when two people of same cader (e.g. peers in the organization, business partners etc..) share feedback. In this case when one person comes up with a feedback, the other person inherently has a tendancy to defend it as his believes doesn’t concur with the feedback given.

Also most of the time, the feedbacks are given with out knowing the position in which the other person has taken certain actions.

‘Non Explicit’ is in scenarios when a manager is giving feedback to the sub ordinate. Here there can be 2 scenarios.

1.      Feedback given with baggages of ego and personal agenda’s.

2.      The feedback given in a dispassionate manner keeping only the betterment of the candidate

In case of feedback with personal agenda’s and ego, there is a high possibility of the candidate not accepting the feedback the way it should ideally be. Simply because there is a history of tussle between them or because the interest of the person is not safeguarded properly. In this case feedback session fails and it only becomes a forum to express opinion and aggression.

In the  second scenario, there is a high possibility of the feedback being successful, but it has a demerrit if similar multiple sessions happen. The demerrit is that, every time the feedback is given, it also sends a signal to his subconscious mind that he is not the best and that he lacks some thing. For the first time, the feedback session will work perfectly well. In the second session, it will not be as effective as the first time as the person either will start getting bored of feedback sessions or his subconscious mind will start losing the confidence on his abilities to scale up.

On a different note, ad-hoc feedback sessions will work well with people with good level of adaptability and attitude. And to get a team with such majority people will be a dream come true.

So what is the best way out?

Simple! Start mentorng your team. Mentoring is a more stremlined and matured way of scaling up a person that adhoc feedback sessions. Feedback sessions are like medicines that ou give when the desease has gripped the person. Mentoring is like feeding the person with highly hyginic and nutricious food so that his body gets the immunity to fight desease and thus avoid the same.

if you have a feedback, package the same as a mentoring item than an explicit feedback session. When you  try to scale up the people through various mentoring session, it  gives the same result with out needing to send any strong signals to his mind.

1.      In mentoring, the beauty is that both parties recognizes the effort and need for scale up equally well.

2.      The acceptance level of the candidate for the manager as a mentor will be very high and he will look forward to his manager for his next input

3.      No casualities of a typical feedback session

Thus mentoring is a suble way of giving feedback and hence this is a smarter way of managing people.

I will come up with a separate blog on how to do effective mentoring. Till then, thik over the above technique and start mentoring yourself to be a good mentor.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

"Mirror" technique to adopt best practices

All of us have come across good practices around us and in corporate world especially, we come across the the term ‘best practice’ often.

Like all of my blogs which says not only about what needs to be done, but also, the technique as to how to do it; this also has a technique to it.

This technique which is called mirroring technique, is simple and extremely effective in case you are finding it difficult to adopt a good practice.

In general, people expect things to happen in certain way. For it to happen, we expects that people around us to do things perfectly, so that situations align by itself in the most positive way for us, ensuring we get the expected result.

For example, when we call some one for a meeting, we expect them to come to the meeting on time. Till now it is perfectly fine. There is no harm in expecting things to go the way you need.

Now let us see the irony.

When your colleague calls you for a meeting for his purpose, how much weightage you give for that? In all probability, you will end up being late for the meeting or some times not even turning up.

This is where we need to correct things. We end up doing this mistake because we find reasons to support your mistake not realizing that tomorrow you will end up being the victim.

Being a manager, one of the principles that you should follow is to ensure you do things exactly the same way as you expect others to do for you. This by itself is the technique which I wanted to share with you.

1.      If you expect others to be on time in your meetings only if you show up in meetings on time.

2.      If you expect others to listen to you, ensure you are a good listener of their concerns

3.      If you want to give feedback to your team, be prepared to accept feedback from them as well

4.      If you want others to trust you, make sure you maintain your trust and intergrity with them equally well

5.      If you expect respect from the team, start respecting them and acknowledging their good works

This is nothing but adopting the best practices which you believe others should adopt. That is why this is called as mirror technique. You are mirroring your expectation with others to your self.

Last but not the least, being a leader, if you want to lead them from the front, be ready to go behind them and empower them – This again is a mirroring techinique.

Simple techniques like this doesn’t involve investments, but have very high returns.

Happy practicing this technique

1 % technique for taking feedbacks

It is probably for the first time in my blogs that I am narrating a management concept giving the preface of my experience. '1 % technique - a  technique to take feedback'  is a part of one of the my major learning in my career. And I thought this technique deserves much more weightage than any other blogs I have written till date - simply because most of my blogs till date is all about what needs to be done to improve yourself, and this is all about how to improve yourselves.

This is the easiest and most effective way I have ever learned to take feedbacks.

Managers - Dont mix up and mess up!

In continuation with my earlier blog on the need to delinking thoughts from words and action, in this blog, I want to stress the importance of seeing various incidents, people and situation as separate instances. This is one of the most important qualities a manager should possess.

What happens in general is, when a manager encounters a specific situation involving a person, he starts labelling that person as with specific character. When the same person is involved in a different situation, the manager starts seeing the person with the label already attached. Then the new situation becomes a different composition and any effort from you to resolve any issue will be in vein.

Manager's thoughts, words & action needs strategizing

Manager's thoughts, words & action needs strategizing. A Manager’s thoughts don’t necessarily define him, but his words and action does.

It is high time for you to start delinking your action and words from your thoughts in your professional life. First of all it is extremely important for you to know why the delinking is required.



Strategizing



As a manager, you will come across several instances or issues where emotional outbursts happen among the people you interact. At this point, as a natural gesture, it is quite possible to get carried away by your emotions and get hyper. You have a delicate situation where the stake holders who are involved can be of different nature – client, team, managers, organization, peers, delivery etc.

Remember, you cannot compromise your delivery for any of these stakeholders, because it is a proper delivery that keeps all

Matured manager - Think positive and let success follow

We say “Managers need to be matured to handle situations”. But what does it mean? Let’s analyse.

For Maturity to come, 3 factors have to combine together – experience, exposure and your interpretation on those two. You can make good times out of your bad experience and vice versa. It depends on how you see things. During tough time, it is easy to flip towards either positive or negative outlook. Let’s see how we can tune our mind to think only positive.

In Bhagavad Gita, there is a verse which says “Every that has happened, which is happening and which is going to happen is for good”. Believing in this is a good start for a successful career. But don’t stop there. Take it to next level as follows.

Keeping the belief that everything happens for good, If a seemingly bad incident happened or is happening to you, try to make sense of what good it is going to lead to. Many times you will get answer and it will help you to see your bright future and open a new world of confidence and positive outlook before you.

This practice if done often, will exercise your mind to think positive and you will end up looking forward always. The fact is that there is hardly any human being who has made it big without going through tough time and the good thing is that there is always a way out!

Smart people will find the way out and this is the simple secret on how they make it.

For example, if a senior resource in your team is moving out quickly from your team and your delivery is

Goal - not just about achieving it, but is about how well u achieve it

Have u ever wondered why we do not get the results even when u feel you have put in your full effort? For example, you have been giving your 100% commitment, but still the productivity is not up to the mark.

Your efforts always have to be in line with your expected end result. Many times people spent a lot of time and effort to get something right, but irony is that the action taken will end up yielding a different result. This gap between your efforts and end result will yield to leakage in productivity, quality and satisfaction, and most importantly your precious time.

Three qualities a Manager should possess

Everyone will have one or more traits prominent in his/her character. Some are emotional, some short tempered, some caring, some very centred etc. As a part of gearing up to take up a certain role in his career, one has to tune his character to suit the role he assumes. Here in this blog we will try to understand what are the prominent characters a manager should nourish to handle his role properly.

Before going in to it in details, I am giving an example here below to give more clarity on what I mean. If a person with soft nature has taken strong decision to be a police officer, he has to imbibe a tough nature in him or else he might not be able to handle tough situations resulting from his role. So even before he goes ahead and assumes the new role, only 2 options are left for the person

Turn your negatives to positives

Have you ever wondered, “How I will live with your so called negative traits and yet excel in your career?” Take my word for it that you can not only live with it, but also use it to get positive results.

For that first you need to realize the ground at which you stand.
1. The first step is to know your own limitations – This helps you to know what you want to improve.
a. Write down the things that you need to improve. For example: Short temperedness, over aggressiveness, cribbing nature, poor people management capability etc.
2. The second step is to know your own strengths. Each one of us is gifted with a unique strength. But unless you know how/when to sell/use your strong points, it is of limited use.
a. Write down your own strong points. For example: High level of awareness, Meticulous and methodical, commitment, hardworking etc.

Now starts the game!

The Art Of Mind Management

Management has various facets. At gross level as we all know, it is about managing deliveries – Time, cost and quality. Volumes of books are available off the shelf on this topic which I do not intend to even remotely refer to or repeat.

Mind Management!!

What I really want to share is my thoughts on management of something at much subtler level - Mind Management!! This is for all those ‘On the job Managers’ and ‘Aspiring managers'. The first thing that we need to learn to tackle is not the delivery, team or client, but our own mind, and the mind of the team.

Yes!, this might seem a little off the track but this is a fact. And before you even step in as a manager, these are the ground areas which need to be worked up on. This is as basic as learning the alphabets before you join them together to make sense for others. Let us check out the following few queries