Bang on the money

I was struck just before Christmas with how easy it is for managers to fall into the trap of giving negative feedback. I asked a group of managers to split into groups and carry out some tasks. One person in the group was assigned to lead and another to watch how they did this and give some feedback. Before they began I briefed the observer to look out for what the leader did well.Guess what? When invited to give their feedback, most observers went straight to the negative. It was so habitual for them to see what was wrong, what needed fixing and what was not working, that they stayed on auto-pilot, delivering the bad news, even when expressly asked to do something different.I have noticed that organisations are very smart at dressing up this negative bias. They use words and phrases such as 'developmental feedback', 'personal development' and 'areas for action'. Some Human Resources professionals I have worked with physically squirm if the word 'negative' or 'weakness' is used and yet, undeniably, it is the weaker and negative aspects of behaviour that they come back to time and again when they talk about their organisations and their managers

.In 2008, Tim Rath and Barry Conchie did some research for Gallup into the impact of this tendency towards negative feedback. They found that when organisational leaders focus on the strengths of their people, the engagement of their staff bounces up to a whopping 73%, (that is 3 in 4 people report feeling engaged) from 9% (1 in 11).  In other words, engagement increases eightfold.That’s an impressive statistic and you can find out more about how they came to it in their book Strength Based Leadership. 

It is a particularly important statistic when you bear in mind that every scrap of research says that engagement is directly and unequivocally linked to productivity and performance.So what implications does this have for managers? Well, Rath and Conchie also say, “While the best leaders are not well-rounded, the best teams are”.  All of us have some really well defined strengths, some potential strengths and some less resilient strengths. Feedback about these is really useful. It helps us recognise, reinforce and replicate them consistently and in a variety of different situations. Bringing them into our awareness is the first step to helping us transfer them to the new, unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations that we are likely to come across. Deconstructing what we do, so that we know how to do it again, consciously, is a skill and a manager who can help us do this is gold dust.As managers, we can pay attention to limitations and if we do, we have to think again about our assumptions about weakness.  If we can work out together, in conversation and dialogue with the people we manage, what areas of theirs and ours will never be great strengths, we can decide how to plug the gap, who to work with, whose skills are complementary and what teams to put together where all bases are covered. If we accept that we will all have behaviours and skills that will always resist development, then we can spend more useful, energising, and rewarding time working on those areas where we, and others, shine, have potential or with conscious attention can become consistent.

If you have never watched it, take a look at Brad Pitt playing the manager of Oakland Athletics baseball team in the film Moneyball. It is pure Hollywood and based on a true story of Billy Beane who, against the odds, put together a team of players that other would have considered 'losers'. Using statistical data, he focuses only on each person’s unique strengths and uses them only where they will shine. He is bang on the money.