The situation:
I was just invited by the folks at LinkedIn to write a brief article on how to give team members corrective feedback without demoralizing them. This subject is close to my heart and I was happy to try to sum up my approach in a few words. Here is the piece I passed on to LinkedIn’s education portal…
“When providing corrective feedback be clear on your purpose – in this case to solve the immediate problem and prevent its recurrence without demotivating your team member. Defensiveness is often a key challenge. You can pre-empt defensiveness by using what I call ‘no-fault problem-solving.’ Start by taking responsibility for your part in allowing the problem to occur (e.g. were you guilty of ‘drive-by delegation?’) and by asking for your team member’s help in solving it. (It’s hard to be defensive when you’re asked for help.) The idea is to attack the problem, not the person. This enables you to engage them fully in collaborative problem-solving – so they own the solution and are likely to follow through – while strengthening rather than weakening the relationship.”
Obviously there is much more to this topic but for this week let’s focus on defensiveness – the #1 challenge in providing corrective feedback. (If defensiveness isn’t an issue for you, you’re among a very fortunate few.)
Dealing with defensiveness: The origin story
I’ll open by sharing a bit of the origin story behind this approach. In my many years of doing turn-around work with small to mid-size companies and non-profits facing bankruptcy, I was on a constant search for ways to help my clients cut conflict and work together more effectively. People feuding had to bury the axe. Now. Cheap shots and sarcasm? No more. Owners and bosses fault-finding, blaming and criticizing when mistakes were made. Done. (But not easily).
We were working at the hard edge of the real world in these turnaround projects and we always had to move quickly. There was no time or budget for traditional leadership training. Our approach: Let’s just figure out what drives destructive conflict – and takes our eye off the ball – and figure out how to prevent it – so we can focus all our time and energy on achieving a turnaround.
The insights and strategies I share in this post are a compilation of insights and lessons learned in doing this work. Here we go…
If you don’t want me to defend, don’t attack
Defensiveness is like body armor for the mind. It protects us when we’re attacked – and ‘attack’ is the key word. We (my clients and I) learned early on that all criticism – no matter how well-intentioned – is received as an attack by the other person. And, of course, it’s human nature – the drive to survive – to defend when attacked. Criticism can bring up bad childhood memories. We (almost) all have memories of being blamed, shamed and criticized as children. How did we react? Typically by defending – avoiding, denying, blaming others (or circumstances beyond our control.) If we were lectured again and again, we tended to tune out. (Do adults do that at work?)
Fault-finding, blame and criticism are almost always received as attacks because we can’t criticize without first sitting in judgment and making a negative assumption about the ‘offenders’ intention – and their level of care, competence or commitment. And, in my experience, most of us tend to let that negative judgment show in the way we approach.
Even a gentle, ‘nurturing’ approach can be received as an attack that triggers the fight, flight, (or submit) response. For example, “Pat, let’s go over this again and this time I want you to pay just a little more attention to this piece…okay?” This approach can be ineffective because it’s presumptuous. It assumes Pat wasn’t paying full attention. But, if Pat were a keen new recruit they may have been paying very close attention, yet are now being (gently) accused of not doing so. Worse, if Pat was making notes, and can’t find any reference to the issue they’re dealing with, this could indicate that the leader may actually be at fault – in this case for having skipped over that part of their instruction (perhaps they were called away?). If this happens the trainee may feel injured and resentful (but is not in a position to defend). Ouch. The beginning of the end of what could have been a great relationship?
Why not just tackle the problem?
How simple. Knowing these dynamics at a conscious level all we had to do was brainstorm how to approach ‘safely’ when we needed to provide corrective feedback. Over time, a simple mantra emerged: “Attack the problem, not the person.” Was this approach permissive or laissez-faire? Hardly. We were tough, tenacious, relentless – in attacking problems without damaging relationships and demoralizing people.
A key aspect of this approach involves taking responsibility. If we rush to judgment and blame we don’t allow space to look for our own responsibility for what has happened. If we are able to identify even a grain of self-responsibility it will be relatively easy to approach with a little humility – without feeling blameful and letting it show. For example, were we guilty of drive-by delegation? Or hit and run coaching and problem-solving? Did we fail to provide the time and/or other supports needed? Was the ‘offender’ pulled in other directions?
Fault-finding, blame and criticism destroy engagement
One key consequence of the fault-finding approach is that it destroys employee engagement – an essential ingredient for success in these turnaround cases (and I would argue, an essential ingredient for success in any team endeavor.)
Revealing the scope of the problem, the Gallup organization has been surveying hundreds of thousands of employees across North America every year since 2005, to measure their level of engagement at work. Their, findings are horrific. Here is an edited excerpt from their latest survey report:
About one-third of all employees are engaged at work. They love their jobs; they feel respected, and they actively contribute to the betterment of the organization. At the other end, 16% of employees are “actively disengaged” — they are miserable at work and seek to destroy what the most engaged employees contribute. The remaining 51% of employees are not engaged, “they’re just there” (just trading time for money as I put it).
Your call to action
The Gallup findings are alarming – particularly because they haven’t shown any improvement over the years. But do their findings hold true for you and your organization? No matter what role you play, this week I encourage you to think about how corrective feedback is handled by owners, managers and supervisors in your own business or organization. Conduct a mental survey. Think about each person who plays a leadership role – including yourself if applicable – and how you would rate their performance in terms of delivering corrective feedback. This is a consciousness-raising exercise…a warm-up to next week’s post where we’ll talk about how-to’s, step by step.