Can I Offer You Some Feedback? - Episode #114

Show Notes:

Sara sits down with Tom, a director of talent management at an insurance organization, to discuss feedback this week! Tom shares his personal experiences and insights on the challenges of giving and receiving feedback, especially for conflict-averse people. Together, Sara and Tom dig deep into the nuances of feedback as both criticism and recognition, discussing strategies to deliver meaningful feedback to foster growth and improvement. Subscribe to the podcast for new episodes weekly!

Episode #114: Turning Criticism into Growth and Improvement

Sara: Welcome to Can I Offer You Some Feedback? My name is Sara, and this is the podcast for those who have a complicated relationship with feedback and are looking to hear from real people across levels and industries with their ideas, perspectives, and best practices on feedback. Before we dive in, I'd like to introduce our guest for the podcast today, Tom. He's a director of talent management at an insurance organization. Welcome to the conversation today. 

Tom: Happy to be here. Thanks for the invite. 

Sara: Always. Well, let's kick things off with the main question of the podcast. When I say the phrase, can I offer you some feedback? What's your gut reaction when you hear that? 

Tom: So, my gut reaction as a conflict-averse guy is, oh no, what did I do wrong? My reaction tends to be fairly negative, only because I tend to be conflict-averse and don't like to hear negative stuff maybe about what I've done or more importantly, how what I've done or what I've said may have impacted others. And so I tend to be a little more, oh no, what did I do? And so that's kind of tends to be my gut reaction.

Sara: And I think that's probably come from prior experiences when that has been true. I think that most people I would say have that same reaction. As we're thinking about feedback, if you do have to engage with it, would you prefer to be the giver or the receiver of feedback? 

Tom: Well, based on what I just said, I think I'd rather be the giver of feedback as opposed to the receiver. Again, when someone's going to give me some feedback, I kind of like go, oh no, I did something wrong. So, even though I'm conflict-averse and I like people that like me, I tend to probably want to give feedback rather than receive it. 

Sara: I mean, just to be curious, it sounds like you think feedback is always critical. 

Tom: Oh, not always that way. But of course, in my mind, that's where my mind goes. Because I do think that there's a lot of evidence and a lot of research on strength-based feedback. And of course, when you do something great at work and your boss is like, "Hey, that was incredible. Way to go. You're doing..." Of course, that's great feedback. And that's positive feedback. 

I think it's those, and we'll probably talk a little bit about this later is when it's the feedback sandwich. That I'm not a big fan of. I guess because it's been so popular as a methodology for some people that you're always waiting for that other shoe to drop. So when you just get the, "Hey, you did a great job. You're on fire. Just keep doing what you're doing." You're like, "Cool and?" And when you don't get the and you're like, wait, what happened? 

Sara: Well, the way you've described that, I think is really helpful for me to think about, it sounds like, and probably for other people, feedback feels like criticism where positive feedback feels like recognition. So we don't even think about it as feedback. We feel like that person is seeing the effort we put in. And so mentally, I'm guessing a lot of people just reframe positive feedback with recognition or appreciation, which is not necessarily, I mean, again, it's a nuance in the word, but it is a difference of like, "Oh, well, of course." Like they're seeing, and that's technically yes feedback, but I'm hearing it as appreciation or recognition or acknowledgement of the work that I've been doing. How interesting. 

Tom: Yeah, I would agree with that. I agree with your assessment and kind of how you're looking at that, because I would look at the same thing as somebody says, "Oh, that was fantastic. You did great." And I'm like, oh, that's recognition as opposed to, hey, that was great feedback on whether that presentation was or of that great hire you just made. Whatever that is. It's much more about the recognition. Well, is that feedback or recognition? That's a good--

Sara: Yeah, I like that. And so if you do prefer to sit kind of in that giving position, how do you open the conversation? Like you've called the person forward or you've opened the door to give that feedback. How do you prep them? How do you start the conversation? What do you do so that they're not cringing with the feedback that you're about to deliver? 

Tom: Again, if I'm thinking about more of that critical feedback or where I'm trying to help somebody improve based on some feedback I want to give them, I tend to start with questions. And some of that is just trying to really gain a perspective. So, probably more from my coaching background of asking smart questions about, "So can you tell me a little bit more about that situation or what you saw there, or Hey, do you know a little bit more? Can you share the story with me?" 

One of my favorite kind of ways to position things is that there's a story behind that. "So can you tell me the story behind, like how that ended up happening?" So that I can get more perspective. Because I think it's important to have perspective before you give feedback. Because of course, we can observe things, but if we don't really know what the intentions were behind it, we really need to. 

One of my favorite other people to talk to always says, you be curious. Stop being judgmental and be curious. And so, when I'm going to give feedback, I'd rather be curious and truly understand. And then if I can then give feedback based on, "Oh, well, that's really interesting. I saw it this way." There's so many different models. I tend to gravitate toward to the SBI model, the situation, the behavior, and the impact. And so, if I can then really have that perspective, first, by asking a lot of questions, then that behavior piece is much more important, right? Here's the situation. Here's the behavior I observed. And even based on your conversation, I may have observed something that's totally different. At the same time, here's the impact that I observed. So, it tends to, I want to start with questions. I want to get a better perspective before I start just saying, "Hey, I noticed this and you did it wrong."

Sara: And that must be the absolute truth, right? And I think about the concept of the play style or a theater style of Rashomon, where we tell the same story from like the four different perspectives or from three... And I may not be getting it perfect, but again, the tell me a story is tell me your view on the same situation because we may have some of the plot points the same, but the perspective changes. And so I love that you open it up with, tell me a story, tell me what happened.

Tom: Tell me the story about what happened. Or tell me the story about why you decided to go that route. Or tell me the story about why so and so is doing that work instead of you. Like, can you give me some perspective? 

Sara: And it opens it much differently than like, what happened? Because what happened is also like, tell me the story, but it's a different intention, a different motivation. But we still want to understand what transpired that we're here? How did we get here? What was the path? And I love that kind of framing. As you're thinking about feedback, I tend to hear a lot of folks talk about meaningful feedback. How do you define meaningful feedback?

Tom: Well, I guess for meaningful feedback, again, it probably goes back to your kind of observation of this. Well, is it recognition? Is it appreciation? Where is that set? But meaningful feedback is any feedback that I can take to improve myself. That is probably the way I would look at it if somebody was giving me feedback. 

So, giving me feedback to say, "Hey, I observed this and here was the impact." Again, if we kind of go with the situation, behavior, impact kind of concept, I can go, "Oh, well. Let me take that in. That was meaningful feedback, but let me take that in personally and decide for myself," as opposed to you telling me what I should have done. Now, you observe this. This is the impact. Me being able to go, "Oh, well, let me take that feedback" and go, "Is there something I need to change?" Or, "Was that what I intended?" Again, maybe that was the intention. The impact was negative in your vision because you didn't know what my intention was. 

So, I think any of that where we can take that meaningful feedback and go, okay, well, let me take that in and review it and see if there's something I should adjust or was the impact I made what I was intending to make? So it's about improvement. Or just trying to build somebody up. Sometimes the recognition is about, "Hey, I just know that that person needs as much external validation as that they need to continue to build their confidence in their role. So let's keep giving them that meaningful feedback to help build that confidence so that they're going to continue to deliver on whatever their goals are or their productivity. 

Sara: Yeah. I'm wondering if you could share a specific example, it can be anonymous, but a specific example of where either you've seen that feedback delivered, you've experienced receiving that feedback. Tell me a little bit about what it looked like in the wild. 

Tom: Again, I'll try to keep this as anonymous as possible. But there was an opportunity where I saw somebody who they were actually hired into a role to kind of perform multiple duties. But one of the backgrounds that they had was a little bit of a presenter background or learning and development to OD kind of a background where they could facilitate. That's the background they came in with. Now, there was a perception upon that leader that that background was kind of fluid. I'm using fluid and meaning it wasn't structured learning, but that they could facilitate as things were kind of going. 

What I learned afterwards was that that person's background was much more in a structured learning environment where they had not only prepared their slides, they had trainer notes that everything was kind of really structured as opposed to being able to kind of just facilitate and kind of go with where the group was going, where the training was going. 

And so, the feedback for that person was, what the initial reaction to me from the senior leader was, "Oh my! This isn't going as well as I thought." Like, "Oh, well, so tell me more." And then learned that that, 'oh, well,' I expected more of the style that they have where they can be more of a facilitator and that seems to be choppy and I'm not sure they know the material. And so they were ready to give feedback. And at the same time, it was, "Hey, can you have a simple conversation, see what you can learn?" 

And frankly, I just went to the person and said, "So how did you think today went?" And their conversation was, "I'm not sure if I was really ready, I'm not sure if I knew the material enough." And so it was like, "Oh, interesting." So all I had to do was ask the question and confirm when that senior leader was ready to go to that person and say, "Oh, my gosh, you didn't know what you were doing." It was just really a simple question that kind of opened and I was able to go to senior and say, "Hey, here's the feedback I got from her just by asking a simple question." And then I gave some encouragement of, "Oh, I think there was a lot of good, and boy, yeah, it does help knowing the material." I was able to reaffirm as opposed to be...

So that leader was able to then have a little more structured conversation about how they could move forward, as opposed to it being like, "Oh my gosh, I made a mistake in this hire. They can't do this work." So, I guess it's a little bit kind of a story that maybe it was a little bit adverted just by asking questions and learning a little bit more about how they felt it went and having them admit, "Hey, here's some space." "Oh, yeah." "And..." "Yes, that all went well." "And..." It was kind of the back to the improv world. 

Sara: I think what you're sharing is, that person knew that there was area for improvement. They knew that there was something else that could have gone better. And so opening the door for them to kind of share that information with you, I also think it changes the nature of the feedback. Like if you go in guns blazing with the feedback you think you should be delivering, you might miss the mark. Because what if that person instead had responded, "No, I think it went perfectly." And now my feedback is very different. Like, I'm addressing an awareness issue, not a potential knowledge gap. But if I launch in with one presumption about what the feedback is supposed to be without getting the context from the other person, then I'm potentially opening a different can of worms. 

And so I think that I love that opening question and your pause that you put to that leader because we don't know whether they know. And asking them if they knew not "what went wrong", but like--

Tom: How did you feel it went? 

Sara: ...where the opportunity was to do more. But if they're like, nope, everything was perfect. It's the best class I've ever taught. Okay, let's have it... Or if they're like, I did terribly, it was the worst. And that's also not true, right? 

Tom: Correct. 

Sara: It was somewhere in the middle and it's fixable for next time. 

Tom: That's right. 

Sara: Not, "Oh God, it was so bad. We need to pull the plug." 

Tom: Precisely because one was situation would have been, hey, they're weak at facilitation. The other situation was there's a weakness of awareness of ability and who they are, what they do. And so that feedback would be totally different for those two. And so, understanding that just by asking a simple question, opening up the dialogue to make sure that there's feedback that can be presented because you may find that they're not open to it. And well, again, another situation altogether. And so, starting with questions, I think just opens up a conversation so that the feedback can happen.

Sara: Absolutely. And I think that, and I'm sure you've seen this. It also shares, they may be aware of it, but maybe you're not the person to deliver it, right? 

Tom: Yes. 

Sara: They're like, if there's any feedback, I'll hear it from the dean, or I'll hear it from... Because we assume, well, I'm the one delivering it, I must be the right person, but you're maybe not the right person to deliver it. Or yeah, they'll hear it, but they're not going to change anything if they're maybe motivated by their boss differently or by the students or whoever's in the audience. We all have different levers that get moved. And so again, the assumption of, yeah, I need to tell them they didn't do well, that may not be it. We can get a lot of data just by asking, as you said, simple questions.

Tom: Yep, absolutely. And again, that probably comes from my coaching background of really understanding perspective before you just lay into something. 

Sara: Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm curious, pretending I'm out here giving wishes, feedback-related wishes. 

Tom: Dang it. I had ideas in my head. 

Sara: If I could just make it happen that people could do one thing better regarding feedback, what would it be? 

Tom: Here we go with the sandwich thing. Stop the feedback sandwich. We know it doesn't work. I also think that I've done a really focused, intentional job trying everything I can to remove the word but from my vocabulary. I hear it so often that I notice it now more in others because I stopped using it as often as I used to. The, 'hey, everything, but', 'everything, however,' either one of those. You just eliminate to everything you had to say. And if you're putting some direct feedback in the sandwich, in the middle between two great pieces of information, whether it's recognition or appreciation and you're sticking this, nobody is going to remember what the good stuff was, or you're going to lose the impact of that direct feedback.

And so I do think that there's options to be able to build, 'hey, here are four fantastic things that you did in that presentation,' or 'here's four fantastic things that are part of that report. And I would like you to look at this section to get a little bit deeper and be a little more clear.' Not, but. And I've really done, again, a very intentional focus on getting rid of the word, but and however, and not using the sandwich. The sandwich is just not effective. We all know that's not effective because nobody wants it from us either. 

Sara: I think nobody wants to receive the sandwich. What the sandwich does well, is it makes it safe for the deliverer. And it makes the deliverer feel good that well, I said two nice things and whatnot. It's great for an inexperienced person or someone who feels uncomfortable. I can see how it got popular. I think it's also, if the activity alone was like, hey, manager, who's about to give some critical feedback, take a step back and think about two good things this person did. Okay. I'll run with that. Like, you don't have to deliver the sandwich, but think about the two good things and one critical thing.

But, in the delivery, again, it creates a negative cycle and it only benefits the giver. And that can really be damaging all around because it doesn't teach the giver how to actually do a corrective conversation and it doesn't teach the receiver to trust anything that this giver is giving going forward. Again, I know a lot of people who love the sandwich and I just have to say, I get it. It's really nice and it feels good. It feels good for the person doing it. Like, well, I said nice things to them at the end. That helps you. That doesn't help the person. 

Tom: That's right. And your message probably got lost. That's the issue. 

Sara: But if you don't care whether it got lost, then sure, it's super effective. Like, let's do it all day. I'm thinking about, now you're in this role of talent management, and typically, folks when they think of HR, it's, let me come tell HR my problems and make them do the feedback, and make them have the conversation. And you've got talent management in your title, go manage the talent. And I'm curious, how do you encourage or enable or set up the culture so that other people give feedback to each other? Not just you doing... Like, how do you be like, "Yeah, great. And now you can give each other feedback?" How do you set that up? 

Tom: Wow. It's unfair for maybe us. Our organization happens to be an employee-owned firm. There's a famous book called 'It's Your Ship'. And I'm trying to remember the author's name, Michael, I can't remember. He was an Admiral in the Navy, ran a ship in the Pacific. And during his 21 months that he gets on that ship, it was the worst ship in the Pacific. And by the time his 21 months were over, it was the best ship in the Navy. And part of his message was, it's your ship. 

And so for us, we kind of look at that as, it's your company. So, we all have the benefits of improving our company. Not just that company, our company. And so, the idea of having a meeting after the meeting, you could have a meeting after the meeting and you complain about something and that's fine. Or you're afraid to give somebody some feedback at the same time, you can look at that other person say, it's your ship. What do you want to do about it? So here, I'm going to offer you some feedback because it's going to help us improve as an organization, and if it improves the whole organization, then we all benefit because we're an employee-owned. 

And so, I think from a culture standpoint, we have that culture of just from our employee ownership. At the same time, we're core value-based. The organization has three core values that have been around since 2013. It's 11 years. It's not, "Hey, here's our new culture words." And we have what we call our VBO, our values, behaviors, and outcomes. And so, things are driven that way and we award. There's some nominations and awards that go out on that. So, I think you build that by building those trust and those relationships. If one of our core values is building enduring relationships, this is how we do it. Is by being able to give people feedback that helps them improve and continues, of course, to motivate them. 

Sara: Yeah. Absolutely. And I really love that you've integrated in that way. Whether or not, I mean, especially when you're employee-owned, you have the benefit of thinking about it's our ship. I think that there's an application for that, even if you're not employee-owned. 

Tom: Yeah, absolutely.

Sara: Obviously it's easier when you're employee-owned. But is this how you want to live? Is this the environment you want to be in? I mean, if you're unhappy and you're choosing to be here, that's you. And I appreciate that not everyone has the privilege or the ability of the mobility in their environment in the community to just like move jobs, but what do you want to make of it? What do you want to do with it? What do you want to take forward? And again, appreciate that not everyone has the same mobility and options, but I do think it's an opportunity. What could you take? What is the opportunity here and how could you make it work? Which again is different for different people. But I love that you've really integrated that into the org and hopefully, everyone else feels as excited about it as you do. 

Tom: Truly. And I think that there's such a focus on mental health. We could put mental health as part of the feedback process. There's such a focus on mental health, both mental, physical health, and emotional health in the workplace. And if you are not able to create an environment where people feel like they belong and can feel comfortable being able to give and receive feedback, you've kind of created an environment that may be "toxic", or at least isn't supporting their mental, physical, and emotional health. We do have a focus on wellness. There's things that we do here at the organization that are wellness-oriented. And I think those things help lead to that. And open feedback and open discussion should be part of that. And it does start at the top, we all know that, right? 

Sara: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, for the last question in our time together, Tom, can I offer you some feedback? 

Tom: You're scaring me, but yes, I'm of course open to some feedback. 

Sara: Well, and we've known each other for many years, and for bulk of our time, you were in an academic institution running a program and quasi admissions, quasi operations from my lens. And in that context, I was so refreshingly surprised at how transparent you were. And I think that that is a quality that has been consistent throughout. When I ask you about a program, typically when you think of admissions or academia, it's about sales, right? Get the student enrolled, worry about their fit later. Or if it's about a conference or attending an event or working with a customer, I know that anytime I talk to you, you're just going to say it. 

And it's not that it's going to be rude or cruel or unkind, like you're going to do it kindly, but it's going to be honest and like, that's just it. And there's no subtext. There's no layer. I don't have to do an interpretive reading with a decoder ring. Like, it's very clear. And I know that you're saying it for our mutual benefit. That is so refreshing and I wish more folks could operate with that, but that is not common. 

And I really appreciate that and I hope your team sees that, and I know the folks that we share in common know that about you. That you'll just say it like it is. And that's where the trust comes from. That's where the relationship development comes from. And so much of your job is that connection. And so, in either role that I've seen you hold. And so I just wanted to acknowledge that and really thank you for that. And perhaps this isn't feedback, it's recognition, I'm going back to the beginning. But I really do think that I really appreciate that and I hope that other folks get to see that with you as well. 

Tom: Well, thank you. I do genuinely appreciate that, and we'll recognize it as feedback as opposed to recognition. I like to pride myself frankly on that transparency and I jokingly say it as a non-confrontational person or a conflict-averse person, I'd rather just be honest and straight up front with you about that because I don't want to find out in the back end that you're going to hate me because you're going to find out the truth on that. 

And so, let me just put it all out there and let you decide what is best for you. And even doing that in a recruiting role in my current organization, which is a heavy focus because of our growth is that same plain, here it all is. So thank you. I appreciate the feedback. 

Sara: Well, Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. And thanks to you for joining us in another episode of Can I Offer You Some Feedback? You can reach me at podcast@mod.network, and we would love to hear from you on your thoughts on feedback or any other perspectives you'd like to hear from next. As always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. And I'm hoping that tomorrow you take a chance and offer some feedback when it's needed most.