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Managers
need feedback, even if it’s biased, rude, off the mark
or irrelevant—and much of it is. The trick is learning
to extract and decode the meaningful stuff and turn it
into something usable.
Through
our work with hundreds of executives, we have uncovered
a number of “alchemists”: rare individuals who are adept
at transforming the base minerals of low-quality
feedback into pure gold. Their behavior follows a few
patterns that other managers can learn from.
Whether
it’s personally offensive, unclear, incomplete,
pointless, exaggerated or nonactionable—and whether it
comes from superiors or subordinates—low-quality
feedback can be toxic if it’s taken to heart. It can be
powerfully demotivating, damaging to managers’
confidence and paralyzing. It can prompt managers to
waste time on the wrong issues by, for example,
addressing weaknesses that are unimportant in their
current roles. Feedback almost seems to hypnotize some
people. They become obsessed with it.
Other
managers deal with low-quality feedback by ignoring it
or becoming defensive. Ignoring it can lead them to
dismiss all negative opinions about themselves;
ultimately, they become cut off from what people around
them really think and feel. Defensiveness can be even
more dangerous because it angers and alienates those who
would give feedback and reinforces their negative views.
Alchemists are able to avoid those traps and learn from
even the most noxious or apparently useless comments.
Their method has an emotional component that enables
them to be aware of and manage their visceral reactions
and a cognitive component that allows them to extract
the useful information intelligently. They neither
become obsessed with the feedback nor ignore it.
The
result is that they distinguish the message from the
medium and focus on the information they need for the
problems they face. They are able to look beyond the
literal meaning and find valuable second- and
third-order data about people’s perceptions, assumptions
and attitudes. They are able to focus on their strengths
and place negative messages in the context of the
positive feedback they have received in the past.
One such
alchemist—we’ll call him Tom—is the customer service
director of a large US-based electronics firm. A
subordinate repeatedly complained about Tom’s apparent
blindness to another direct report’s poor performance,
eventually telling him that “some people” considered his
inaction to be a sign that he didn’t “have the guts to
confront tough situations.” The feedback, Tom says, “was
an insult to my leadership.”
Tom, in
fact, was working behind the scenes to coach the
underperformer, who required special handling because of
his connections to the board. “Despite all that,” Tom
notes, “the feedback really helped me.” He says it
taught him to examine more carefully the potentially
negative effects of actions he didn’t take.
Although
he was upset by the accusations, Tom mastered his
feelings and didn’t react defensively. The feedback
contained important information about other people’s
perceptions of his actions. He extracted the usable
message and was able to change his
behavior.
Fernando Bartolome is a professor of management at the
Instituto de Empresa Business School in Madrid and an
adjunct professor of organizational behavior at Insead
in Fontainebleau, France. John Weeks is an assistant
professor of organizational behavior at Insead. |
