The Communication Cycle Step 4 – Feedback

It is.

Of course, it can sometimes be hard to accept feedback, especially when people are telling us “home truths” that we may not want to hear. But we should always listen to feedback.

You need to accept that occasionally people are using the opportunity of having your undivided attention to vent their spleen or poison the water for others. But don’t use that as an excuse for never listening to feedback.

Feedback is an essential element of The Communication Cycle. It is how you find out what impact you are making, what people really think and what they want of you.

They lived in cloud cookoo land

Early this year I heard of two separate incidences where corporations used 360º feedback. In both cases the programmes were not introduced in a sensible or sensitive way.

The results of simply allowing people to state their opinions of others without having to take responsibility for the consequences were devastating. The recipients of the feedback were totally unprepared for the rush of bad feeling that was released against them.

Now you could blame the organisers of the feedback for not briefing the givers of the feedback properly and for not preparing the recipients of the feedback for what might be said about them.

But the fact is that if the recipients of the feedback were caught unprepared by what was said about them it shows that they were badly out of touch with the real feelings of those around them.

That lack of awareness is an inditement of the leadership of the recipients. It clearly shows that they had not proper feedback procedures in operation.

All leaders should, as the Boy Scouts motto advises, be prepared. Or perhaps more appositely they should be AWARE.

The reason why we use stakeholders

At the start of our Transformational Leadership Coaching Programme we ask our clients to appoint stakeholders for each candidate we will be coaching.

The role of the stakeholder is to help us decide what leadership quality they would like the candidate to develop. They then tell us the level at which the candidate performs prior to the coaching. This is on a scale of minus 3 to plus three. Normally, prior to the coaching a stakeholder will rate a candidate at about minus 2 or 3.

As the coaching progresses the stakeholder is asked to reassess the candidate so that we have an independent measure of how well the candidate is progressing.

This feedback is invaluable for both the coach and the candidate.

This is just one example of how, as a leadership coach I use feedback to prevent self-delusion and keep leaders properly informed.

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