How Valuable Is Giving and Seeking Feedback in the Workplace?
Over the past two decades, we have implemented feedback processes in thousands of organizations with millions of people at every organizational level in countries around the world. The experience has taught us invaluable lessons about the extraordinary power associated with giving and seeking feedback.
Here are a few of them:
| • | Feedback doesn’t happen unless you make it happen. | |
| • | It’s easier to ofter feedback than it is to accept it. | |
| • | People don’t usually act on feedback without some sort of follow-up. | |
| • | Feedback declines after people improve because they inevitably assume it’s no longer necessary. | |
| • | Organizations underestimate the difficulty involved in getting people to give and receive feedback. | |
| • | People appreciate the feedback they receive only after they have applied it and seen its impact on their results. |
When we regularly offer and seek feedback with the intent to improve individual and organizational performance, we not only demonstrate genuine respect for each other, but we also achieve consistently better results. That’s the value of feedback.
Most successful leaders realize that honest feedback—received and given, appreciative and constructive—is essential to sustainable success. So why don’t leaders and managers exchange feedback more often? One business leader, determined to change his organization’s culture, began asking his direct reports whether they thought seeking or giving feedback to someone else was effective. Then he ask them whether they thought going around someone to his or her boss or going to a peer in hope that he or she would say something to someone else was effective. Finally, he asked them whether they thought not telling the truth or not hearing the truth, as someone else sees it, was effective. Within a few months, his direct reports got the message and started exchanging feedback more honestly and more frequently. And, yes, the culture of the team and the organization changed for the better.
To learn more about how giving and seeking feedback can help you create a Culture of Accountability for achieving desired results in your organization, we invite you to join the Accountability Community at www.partnersinleadership.com, where you can review actual client case studies.
Sign up for one of our upcoming webinars to learn how you can use accountability to become an even stronger leader.
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