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.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Think and act ‘Beyond The Obvious’

One of the finest qualities of a manager is his ability to 'Not to get emotionally dragged'. The ability of seeing things objectively will highly enhance the management quality in us.

Being in this stage, dealing with 100 different issues at the same time becomes so natural. You will never miss out on reading important mails, on mail reverts, and even attending an evening party while a crucial delivery is happening in parallel on the other end.

Keeping one or more focus in your career is extremely

important to attain this stage. You can decide the number of focus points depending on your multi tasking capability. But it is advised to start with minimum.

It can be things like;

• Achieving you project/unit/company goal in terms of revenue, number of employs
• Achieving client delivery excellence etc
• Achieving your personal goals (But make sure your personal goals are aligned with company goals)
• Achieving a high level of employee satisfaction in your team

Once you have this goal, you are all set to tackle many issues that you will come across on a day to day basis. Having set the background for the topic, let me come back to my topic - 'Think and act beyond the obvious'. Among the many of the issues that you may come across, I am interested in applying the above logic in ‘Team handling' and related issues'.

While handling the team all managers will come invariably deal with - appraisal sessions and related activities.

Going by the guidelines set by the organization without any deviation during appraisal sessions is one way of doing it. It doesn’t require much skill and can be done easily.

But being intelligent and applying logics along with the above will take it one step further and will really help the team perform in future.

At this point you should start 'Think and act beyond the obvious'. There are certain acts which falls in 'beyond the obvious' category - which I would categorize as 'Value adds' while managing. Which means, it doesnt necessarily fall in to the standard guidlines set by the organization.
To make it clear, please see the below chart.

The moment we add more dimensions to the obvious category tasks, the quality of thinking pattern in the team changes. This changes the dynamics of the team. And when team’s thinking pattern is focused and matured, it becomes collective consciousness.

Yes!.. This is the level at which a manager should operate.

It is your capability to make your team think beyond the call of their duty, that makes the difference, ultimately it will lead to a dynamic team.

As a Manager, you should know the depth of your teams capability. If you don’t know where you stand at the moment, you can’t take your ship to the next required port. This is a world that moves on theory of relativity.

The team is as good as the team's manager.