The death of feedback…. and what killed it.
Presenting over 100 keynotes a year for different companies and industries (for each keynote I have a detailed briefing with the senior leaders about the challenges they are facing), gives you an amazing insight into what is happening in the workplace.
By far, the two biggest challenges people are facing currently are:
The huge levels of change that are affecting all companies and professions
The staff shortage means leaders and organisations are terrified to give their teams feedback in any way for fear that they will take the feedback poorly and leave
In fact, in a meeting yesterday, the head of a retail group said “We used to be discerning about who we hired. But now if you have a pulse and you can stand upright, we will take you.” Similarly, a school principal said “I am hiring teachers that in years gone by, I would have thrown their CV in the bin at first look. But we can’t we choosy anymore. Putting an average teacher in front of the kids is better than no teacher at all.”
Another leader said to me, “We feel ‘lucky’ to have someone in the position. In fact, we are so desperate for staff that we are tiptoeing around them, so we don’t upset them. They have all the power.”
That last sentence illustrates a huge problem when it comes to the workplace. We see the relationship between employer and employee as a combative one. A team member once said to me, “We (employees) have all the power, if I am unhappy with something I just threaten to walk, and they come around because there are very few people who can do this role”. I even had an employer say, “I just can’t wait for a recession to push up unemployment so we can get the power back.” Think about this for a minute, this guy was so enraged he was hoping for an economic downturn to teach his staff a lesson.
You don’t have to be a psychologist to realise this is a dysfunctional relationship. Nothing good can come from using power to force people into giving you what you want. The relationship between leader and team member should be a collaborative one. Where the leader coaches, challenges, and stretches their team to evolve and become better versions of themselves. However, this can’t happen if a leader is petrified of upsetting their team members.
About 5 years ago, we did a study where we did focus groups with over 2000 people and asked them ‘Who was your best leader? And what were the leadership behaviours they exhibit to make them so good.’ The top 3 were:
Cared about me as a person and had genuine care for my wellbeing.
Challenged me to take on difficult tasks and projects to help me grow and evolve, all the while supporting me through it.
Talked to me about my career and how I could progress my career.
In summary, what we learnt is good leadership is about challenging our teams to grow and improve.
In early 2020, we released a book called ‘Strive’ which explored how in the last 10 years our relationship with struggle and challenge has changed dramatically. Our data shows that human beings need challenge and struggle as it builds self-esteem, it gives us meaning, and allows us to learn. People feel most alive and engaged when they see themselves making progress towards a meaningful goal. However, because of our hyper obsession with positive emotional states (driven by the happiness movement and positive psychology), we see challenge and struggle as a bad thing and something we should avoid.
The problem here is that when you have a mindset of ‘I don’t want to be uncomfortable and stretched’ paired with ‘I have all the power and my leader is fearful of me leaving,’ you have a workforce who are not embracing Striving and personally missing out on opportunities to become a better version of themselves. It will be interesting to see how this affects the workforce when we have a critical mass of people who are not open to getting feedback and don’t want to be challenged.
An essential part of our development is hearing feedback from others, especially feedback that makes us uncomfortable. We want our leaders (in a kind and supportive way) to be able to tell us when we are out of line, when our work is not good enough, when we need to step it up, and when we need to apologise to others for our poor behaviour. We need our leader to do this for us and the other people in our team.
As it has been throughout history, the power balance will shift from one group to another. However, we don’t want to allow that power to drive us into dysfunctional behaviours. Don’t let this be the death of feedback. Ask yourself, are you leveraging your perceived power in a way that stops you accepting feedback as this will massively reduce your self-awareness and evolution.