Feedback with a stroke not a poke.

The other day a colleague took me to one side and said “You were very distracted during that session. What’s on your mind?”

His feedback was genuinely intended to be constructive but it took me back a bit as I had no idea why he would think that. I was fairly sure that I hadn’t been distracted. I was however very focused on one thing and this may have led him to think I was distracted.

I felt a little irritated by his comment and, as I tried to think through why it had annoyed me, I remembered a golden feedback rule I was once given.

Back in the 1980s I had what I jokingly refer to as a “proper job”. (By which I mean it was salaried, 5 days a week and came with medical insurance, holidays, weekends and stress as opposed to now where what I do comes with fun, empowerment, liberation, a genuine sense of achievement and reasons to leap out of bed in the morning)

My boss at the time was a very inspirational trainer and he gave me this fabulous rule for how to give feedback:

I can’t tell you how you are; you can’t tell me what I see

It’s a bit of a mouthful but I’ve used it time and time again in coaching and feedback sessions ever since. This is what he meant:

I can’t tell you how you are…..

In other words it is inappropriate for me to tell you that you are lazy, judgmental, arrogant, unhappy, intrusive, overbearing, (I know – these are extreme but bear with me;  I’m just making a point)

I don’t know whether you are any of these things and I don’t have the right to assume that I do know. I simply cannot tell you how you are. This was what my colleague had done. By telling me I was distracted he was telling me how I was; and he was wrong!

In the training room we have to be equally careful. Let’s assume I have been invited to give some feedback on someone’s facilitation skills. This is something Ally and I regularly get asked to do so we have some first hand experience of this situation.

I have observed them with a group and I have noticed that they appear to be a little nervous at the start of their session.

I might be tempted to say something like:

You were nervous at the start of that session weren’t you? What do you think you could do about that?

This would be wrong because I have just told them how they are and they may well feel the same sense of irritation that I had felt when my colleague told me I was distracted. They could, quite rightly, challenge me and this could easily end up in a debate about whether or not they were nervous while the whole point of the feedback was lost.

You can’t tell me what I see……

I cannot know whether they were nervous or not but what I can say what I saw. So I might say:

“I noticed that your voice got stronger as the session went along. Why do you think that was?”

“I can’t tell you how you are; you can’t tell me what I see” gives us a simple framework to ensure that when we give feedback, we stick to the facts and not get deflected by opinions.

Dealing with facts reduces the possibility of people becoming irritated and defensive enabling both people to focus on the feedback.

So our call to action this week is very simple :

When you give people feedback focus on what you see not how you think they are.

reflection image by lrargerich

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