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ОглавлениеEditor: Let me see if I’ve got this: this chapter will cover all the communication skills our readers will need if they’re going to develop others—that is, ignite the Third Factor in their charges. These are important skills for parents, teachers, managers, coaches, or leaders of any type.
Author: The last sentence is accurate. These skills are like the laws of physics— they apply everywhere. The sentence before it is a bit misleading, though, in that this is not meant to be the complete primer on effective communication. Some excellent books have already been written on this topic, and I’ll be referring to a few of them as the chapter unfolds. What we are going to cover here are three basic communication skills central to effectively coaching anyone in any environment.
Editor: Don’t you think communication is critical in developing others? Shouldn’t we be spending a bit more time on this?
Author: It is important, but we have to pick and choose, and because others have done an excellent job in this realm we’re going to cover three key skills: asking effective questions, listening actively, and giving competent, relevant feedback.
Most of us don’t need the same skill level as, for example, a counselor or therapist. It may sound corny, but first and foremost your heart needs to be in the right place; in other words, you need a strong developmental bias, because the person you’re coaching needs to know that you care and are profoundly interested in developing them. If that assurance is present, if they know you are in their corner, then being able to employ some basic communication skills will more than suffice.
Editor: Okay . . . that’s somewhat nebulous, but let’s proceed and see what comes out of this. I am a bit of a perfectionist and don’t like attempting things until I have all the information or am fairly good at it.
Author: You’re not alone in that regard. I’ve caught myself waiting until I’m pretty good at something before I get started. Now, I’m not suggesting you blindly dive into things, but if you wait until you’re perfect at something before you start doing it, you’ll never start because you will never be perfect! I’m all for learning the basics and then getting things underway. In the past this has led me to further development once I understand the problems I encounter and for which I’ll need to find solutions.
This is really connected to the concept of progression, which we will discuss in the Build Trust chapter. I remember teaching volleyball skills to high school physical education classes many years ago. Tradition at the time was to start with the teaching of the serve and move to the overhead volley and finally the bump, a skill used most often when receiving a serve. Later on, the set and spike were taught. The trouble was that you could never play a game until the first three skills were mastered. One day I started by teaching the bump and then having the class play a game where a throw over the net replaced the serve and where, if they wished, they could let the ball bounce once before they bumped it. On the first day of learning volleyball they were engaged in the wonderful game of one-bounce volleyball. Not only did it make the teaching easier, but the students almost demanded to learn the other skills, which I introduced one-per-week over the next month. If I had waited until they perfected all the skills before playing, we probably never would have gotten as far as we did. The early engagement led to a greater interest and desire on the part of the students to learn additional skills. I’m not sure how this fits here, but I just wanted to tell the story.
Editor: I’m also not sure if it fits, but it does seem to add something. Let’s move on.
Because I have been a coach in many phases of my life—in sport and even more so as a leader and as a parent of four now-adult children—I tend to think in terms of how people learn and how they will use what is offered. The preceding chapters introduce new possibilities and some exciting concepts. Now we’ll talk of communication skills, because this is the foundation for all that follows. There is really only one way to ply your trade as a coach and engage the Third Factor in those you are developing: through your ability to communicate.
All good leaders, teachers or parents would agree that the three skills outlined in this chapter are essential and very, very easy to understand. You no doubt will also grasp the considerable importance of acquiring these skills if you are going to be an effective “Igniter.” Grasping is the easy part. I teach these skills numerous times every year and still fail to access them to any meaningful degree in some of my own challenging situations—especially in dealing with difficult people! I am so much better than I used to be, but I still have a way to go. It’s important here not to equate “simple to grasp” with “easy to do.” The good news is that there are only a few key skills to be learned, and I know you can do it. I am getting much better and so will you, but to be successful you must make learning and practicing them a priority.
What I’m referring to in this chapter are the fundamentals of communication. These are the workhorses of communication skills. The very best coaches communicate effectively because they have mastered the fundamentals. You can too.
Here is more good news: These communication skills apply in all situations. If you develop them, you can do anything.
It is my not-so-humble belief that much of the coaching/management literature unnecessarily complicates the whole area of communication. It makes much of the styles of communication—mentoring, teaching, confronting and consulting—but much more important than those labels are the skills underlying each of the styles. If you learn to ask good questions, be an effective listener, give really good feedback and know how to confront your performers when things are not going well, you can do most anything. In this chapter we focus on the first three skills and leave confronting to Appendix B: When All Else Fails.
Core Skills in Coaching
There are two core skills in the consulting style of coaching: asking effective questions and listening actively. I will speak mainly about generating self-awareness and self-responsibility—the “to dos” of the Third Factor. These dynamics lead to engaging the other person and motivating them to evolve to a higher level. It’s obvious how these skills connect to igniting the Third Factor.
Ask Effective Questions
A question is much more developmental than a command because it leads to reflection and awareness and eventually to self-responsibility and commitment. This is not new. Plato and Socrates taught extensively using questions, as do all the Zen masters. Self-realization is developmental, and to discover is superior to being told, because it engages the Third Factor. Self-realization generates in the person the desire to get better and to take personal responsibility for moving to the next level.
The information in this section is freely drawn from the exceptional work of Sir John Whitmore, a colleague of mine, and David Hemery, an Olympic gold medalist. John Whitmore’s excellent book Coaching for Performance, written some 15 years ago, covers in much more detail some of what I summarize here. David Hemery has recently put together an extremely useful book entitled How to Help Children Find the Champion Within Themselves. It is written for parents, teachers and coaches who want to learn how to ask better questions and grow and develop the children under their care. Another excellent book is Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations.
Consulting is a style of communicating that did not come easily to me. Trained as a schoolteacher, I had learned how to do a lot of lecturing and telling, and only listened when it was absolutely necessary or when the other person insisted. It’s really amazing that I have been as well received as a coach as I have, given this gaping hole in my communication skills. It says something about learning environments that many organizations still welcome someone, usually a so-called expert, who comes in and “tells.” John Whitmore was the first to awaken me to the incredible potential for developing others through consulting, that I, with my dominant-speaker style, had missed.
The idea outlined in Coaching for Performance—that you could trigger self-awareness and self-responsibility in the other person simply by asking effective questions and listening actively—was merely intriguing at first. But it moved quite quickly out of the intellectual realm and into the practical one when I was suddenly and unexpectedly called on to participate at the World Synchronized Swimming Championship in Zurich, Switzerland, as a performance coach in sport psychology with the Canadian team. I was at home packing my bags in preparation for the trip when the phone rang. Sheilagh Croxon, former Olympic coach, informed me that neither assistant coach would be on the flight that day due to medical issues, and that I was to tell the head coach, Biz Price, when I got to the airport. When I gave Biz the news, she said to me, “I guess you’re it!” Was my skinny, six-foot-three, 160-pound frame, which had little synchronized swimming experience (as a swimmer, at least), ready for this?
Fortunately for me, synchronized swimmers spend a fair amount of time underwater, and while they were down there, Biz would turn to me and say things like “Jessica is on her nose.” I took that to mean she wasn’t straight up and down in her spiral, but to be on the safe side I simply said to Jessica, “You’re on your nose,” and when she agreed, “Yes, I felt that,” I would ask a question like “What normally causes you to be on your nose?” And after the explanation, I would ask, “What sorts of things might you do to correct that?” Jessica would self-correct, Biz would glance over and comment that it was much better, and when Jessica came up for air I would tell her, “That’s a lot better!”
This went on for a few practices until reinforcement assistant coaches arrived. I might add that for the first few practices the swimmers were amazed at how much I knew about synchronized swimming! My cover was blown when one of the swimmers was above water and heard Biz give me the correction. But that didn’t matter, because in the meantime I had made the discovery that asking them how they thought they had performed a particular action and, if it wasn’t to their satisfaction, how they would improve on it, was an amazingly effective style of coaching. There is tremendous power in asking effective questions and then being fully present—actively listening—for the response.
Nothing focuses attention like a question. I first learned this when I was teaching tennis. For 10 years I ran a tennis school in Toronto, and like most tennis instructors I was constantly telling people to watch the ball. It wasn’t until I attended a workshop with Timothy Gallwey, who wrote The Inner Game of Tennis, that I clued in to the fact that if I wanted the students to focus on the ball it was better to ask questions about the ball than simply to give them the command to “watch the ball.” When I started asking questions like “Which way is the ball spinning when it hits the ground?” or “What type of ball are you hitting?” I made the startling discovery that in order to answer my questions, they had to watch the ball! It wasn’t the command “watch the ball” that focused attention, it was a question—and as long as I kept good questions coming, they stayed focused on the ball.
This is as true in business as it is in sport. Questions such as “What were the figures on that last report?” “What could we do to further improve the service here?” “Where could we simplify this process?” “What do you think the impact of that will be?” “Where do you think we could focus our energies?” uncover new awareness and bring greater clarity to the issue. When you ask questions such as these you immediately begin to build awareness. Seeing things with greater clarity is often enough to motivate people to take more timely and effective action.
The other advantage of questioning is that it builds responsibility. If my only goal is to assign responsibility to get the job done, I could just say, “You are responsible for this.” “You do that.” But much better and many more purposes are served if I say, “Who will take this one on?” “How confident are you that you can complete this on time?” “Is there any element you are unsure of?” “What obstacles might present themselves?” “When can you have it done?”
When the primary interaction is through questions, it helps you, as the coach, to find out if the people you are coaching have clarity and are on track. The questions and their answers also give them influence over their own actions and ownership of the issue at hand. By asking questions rather than offering solutions you are also giving them a form of recognition, which can be much more meaningful than praise.
Because you are trying to develop self-responsibility and awareness in this other person, the words you choose and the tone and body language with which you deliver them will be important. The most effective questions begin with words that seek to quantify—what, when, where, who, and how—which you generally qualify into phrases like how much, how many, how often. When you are trying to uncover a block, solve a problem or implement a solution, the one word to avoid using is why. “Why” is ineffective in these situations because it pushes the person into defensiveness and analysis—two states that are counterproductive to what you’re trying to accomplish. Instead of saying, for example, “Why did you produce a month-end summary like this?” use phrases such as “What were the reasons for producing the month-end summary in this new format?” By rephrasing the question you get some understanding of the thinking and reasoning behind what they did. You will see how they organize their thoughts. For a coach with a strong developmental bias, this insight into their inner world is invaluable.
Generally speaking, when using this more consultative style in developing another person, you follow their train of thought. If you think they are off course you simply ask another question: “In what way is this connected to what we are talking about?” You may discover from their answer that this actually is connected to the issue at hand. You may get some valuable clarity on steps that need to be completed before they can tackle the end goal. On other occasions when you ask the question, they may become aware that they are off course and get redirected back on course.
There will be other times when, to you at least, there is an obvious solution they have not mentioned. Again, because you are being developmental and trying to build self-responsibility and self-awareness in the other person, don’t jump in and immediately tell them what they should do. Instead, choose to ask a question. “I noticed that you didn’t mention X as a possible solution; are there reasons for that?” I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve asked that question only to discover that my “solution”—the one I thought of in the first 10 minutes of speaking to them—turned out to be one they had tried much earlier and found did not work. (In these instances I was always glad I had phrased it as a question rather than just blurting out my idea. Otherwise, they might well have thought, “Does he think I’m an idiot? If he could think of that in the first 10 minutes of our meeting, doesn’t he realize I thought of it long ago?” and I would have lost their trust as well as credibility as a coach.)
Questions can be powerful, but use them wisely. Some common mistakes in asking questions are:
• asking a question when you already know the answer
• asking a question so simple that it’s insulting
• sounding like a cross-examiner (tone of voice is critical)
• not really listening to the answer
Use questions to:
• seek understanding
• clarify for yourself someone’s position or level of knowledge
• guide people in a certain direction
• build confidence, awareness and self-responsibility
I’m not suggesting that you never give a command or tell someone what to do. There are times when that is the most efficient way to communicate with someone, especially concerning a simple task. But asking effective questions is the primary skill employed by exceptional coaches with a strong developmental bias. This is how they develop people. Good coaches use this style of communication most of the time. In the chapters that follow, the skill of asking effective questions comes up time and time again.
Listen Actively
Once you ask a question, you need to listen well. Listening is a simple skill that is very hard to execute. This may be because we equate being in charge with talking. There is an illusion that if you are talking, you are in control. The only thing you are controlling, however, is airtime. If you really want to coach well, you need to know the person you are coaching, the issue they are dealing with and their ideas on possible solutions. The only way to get to know all this is to listen and observe.
If we respond to employees without listening, what we are doing is prescribing without having all the information needed to properly diagnose, and they may end up having very little faith in the solution. Let me explain. If I go to a doctor and start describing how I am feeling and outlining my symptoms, but I feel the doctor isn’t really listening or doesn’t really understand the situation, how much confidence will I have in the diagnosis? How comfortable will I be with the solution he prescribes?
Many of us tend to want to rush right into things and fix them without taking the time to diagnose and understand. Part of this deeper understanding relates to having real knowledge of the person, their idiosyncrasies and how they learn. Wally Kozak, former Canadian national women’s hockey coach and current scout, has a quote on his office wall at Hockey Canada that reads, “Coaching and teaching require one to find out how the player is smart, not how smart the player is.”
In a “normal” conversation, when one person is speaking, the other ought to be listening and focusing on what is being said. Each person, ideally, takes a turn, alternately listening and speaking. The whole process works well when this occurs. Unfortunately, many people aren’t particularly good in the listening role—those who have a need to control, for example, or are in a rush, or have a high opinion of their own knowledge or intellect, or quite simply don’t care what you think or have to say. These are people who do not possess a “toggle switch” for alternating between speaking and listening. Over the years their switch has become stuck in a more limited, self-serving range that alternates between speaking and waiting to speak.
These people—and some of them may have quite positive, pleasant personalities—will never effectively ignite the Third Factor in anyone. Listening—the act of being present to another human being with the intent of truly understanding what they are saying—is an incredibly powerful act, and it’s a skill mastered by effective coaches. Passive listening— paying attention and nodding—may be helpful in some instances, but active listening is the skill of choice if you really want to take on the role of developing others.
The “Activity” in Active Listening
Active listening is not only about truly paying attention to what others are saying, but also—and this is the active part—about letting them know that you understand them. According to leadership expert and author Stephen Covey, seeking to understand the other person is the first order of business in active listening. A really effective way to do this is to stop the other person every once in a while and let them know that you “get” what they are saying by relating back to them, in your own words, your understanding of what they have just told you.
Active listening performs the following functions:
• communicates respect
• gives you insight into another person’s thinking processes, blocks and ideas
• increases their self-esteem and confidence
• guides you in assessing what the next step should be for their development
Listening takes three forms:
• Simple passive listening: eye contact, nodding, acknowledging.
• Active listening: clarifying, probing, checking out that your understanding of what they are saying is accurate, seeking to understand. There are many blocks to understanding the message, which may include:
• people not feeling free to say what they really mean
• feelings being difficult to put into words
• the same words having different meanings for different people
• Keen observation of nonverbal cues: Observation involves not only using auditory skills but also watching for visual and kinesthetic cues. Often what you’re hearing does not match up with what you see and feel as you interact with the other person. Making that distinction and feeding it back to the individual can be very helpful to their development. For example: “Your words are indicating confidence, but I sense some concern or reluctance to commit fully.”
Often, all you have to work with when trying to help someone develop is what you see and hear. Your ability to observe well and articulate to the individual those observations is critical. The most common errors occur due to “mis-hearing” or “mis-reading” what someone is trying to communicate. Their words confuse rather than clarify because they do not match what you are seeing, or they are inappropriate, out of place, or over the top. Keen observation and active listening—combined—are the most useful ways in which to ensure that
• what you think you heard is in fact what the person intended to say, and
• you are dealing with the real issue or needs and not some symptom or false front.
What follows illustrates how anyone can become an active listener.
I met Robert in a leadership program at Queen’s University. Let me describe Robert by way of his results on the TAIS instrument, a tool we use with executives and elite athletes that, among other things, gauges how they pay attention and in what ways they are distracted. On the interpersonal scales, Robert scored 98 percent on his need for control (just behind Attila the Hun!), 99 percent for self-esteem (“I’m right and I know I’m right”), and also extremely high in extroversion (97th percentile). On all three communication scales (intellectual, negative/critical, positive/support) he scored above 85 percent. I don’t think you’ll be shocked to learn that everyone from all levels of his organization indicated on his 360 feedback* that he needed to learn to listen!
I should point out that Robert was an engaging fellow and wellliked by his colleagues and superiors despite his listening deficiency. I met with him for a 40-minute coaching session and asked him what he wanted to work on. He mentioned a small, obscure behavior from his 360 feedback. I let him know that I was more than willing to coach him in that area but asked, “What about listening?”
“I’ve never been a good listener,” he replied with a laugh. Then he talked about his history of not listening, describing incidents from elementary school and the home he’d grown up in. He finished by saying, “Peter, I don’t listen; it’s something I’ve never been good at.”
In the chapters that follow on imagery and blocks, we will learn that often what’s in the way, what is blocking someone, is that they can’t imagine themselves doing something. For Robert, listening was a monumental and unachievable goal. He literally couldn’t imagine himself as a good listener. The goal of becoming a good listener was, for Robert, an end goal. It was a very big hurdle and would be achieved only as the result of a series of smaller goals, called performance goals. (If the end goal is the top of the staircase, the performance goals are the stairs.) We learn later that good coaches focus only on performance goals.
I asked Robert if he was willing to let me help him improve his listening skills. He said he was, but then added, somewhat skeptically, “Many have tried.” We narrowed the goal down to giving people who report to him his undivided attention when they came in to see him in his office.
I started the coaching session by asking him, “Who do you know who is an exceptionally good listener?”
He immediately responded, “Monique, my wife.”
I thought, Well, she has to be. You’ll notice I wrote, “I thought”—I did not say this out loud. I didn’t know Robert well enough to throw out a quip at this early stage in our relationship. It was important to manage my own ego and curb my need to be clever and possibly contaminate the coaching environment. (We discuss the need for the coach to selfmanage in the next chapter.)
“Okay, Robert,” I said, “I want you to be you and I will be Monique. I want you to coach me in acting and behaving the way Monique does when she is really listening to you. I want to know specifically what she says and what she does that make her such a good listener.” Then I walked to the other side of the room and stood with my arms crossed.
His first comment was “She wouldn’t be way over there.”
“Then where would she be?”
“Over here, closer to me and on the same side of this table as I am,” he responded. I moved over beside him and started glancing around the room. “She wouldn’t do that; she would look at me.” I looked at him and then looked away. “Oh, she wouldn’t ever do that,” he said quickly, then added, “She locks you in. When you are here [motioning with both arms to indicate a narrow corridor of eye contact between us], you do not want to be caught looking anywhere else!”
This bit of role-playing told me that Robert was beginning to get it. He was starting to be able to imagine what good listening looks like. But he thought he was done. “That’s about it, Peter,” he said.
“But, Robert, how do you know she is listening?” I asked him. “What does she do or say that lets you know she is paying attention?”
After a few seconds of thought he said, “She grunts a lot—you know, things like ‘aha,’ ‘oh yeah,’ ‘uh-huh.’” I asked him what function he thought those “grunts” served. “Well, she’s with me, she’s encouraging me and letting me know she’s following along.”
I then moved to the most difficult part, asking him, “How do you know she understands you?”
It took a few minutes, but eventually he said, “Every once in a while she says, ‘Robert, shut up. Robert, shut up!’ and when I stop, she says, ‘Let me see if I’m getting this,’ and she summarizes in her own words what I said. If I say, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ then she says, ‘All right, go on,’ and I continue. If I tell her, ‘No, that’s not it,’ she asks me to go back and repeat, in a different way, what I’ve said.”
We had to tone down the “Robert, shut up” part, but by now Robert had a very clear picture of what listening to a person might look like. I asked him, “When people come in to see you in your office, do you think you could go around to the other side of the desk, sit in a chair, lean forward and make eye contact, grunt, and every so often summarize in your own words what you hear them saying?”
“Yeah, I can do that!” he declared. (He couldn’t listen but he could do that!)
Robert’s company probably spent a good $10,000 to send him to the leadership program at Queen’s. If, when he gets back to work and someone comes in to see him, he engages in the listening behavior described above, do you think he’ll have a different relationship with his people? You bet he will! Coaching is all about the little things that make very big changes down the road. It’s about the performance goals—what Buck-minster Fuller referred to as “trim-tab adjustments.” If the Titanic had turned half a degree south as it left England, it would have been in an entirely different place days later.
Metaphorically speaking, it’s as if Robert and I went into a darkroom and developed a picture of what good listening looks like. And as I asked questions and actively listened to his responses, we gradually created a picture of listening that he could imagine himself doing. The skills of asking and listening are very important ones for anyone who wants to trigger the Third Factor.
Give Competent, Relevant Feedback
Now here’s a vital skill that has been worked over in numerous ways and made much more complicated than it needs to be. I read several books on the subject a few years ago, and when I finished I was more confused than when I started. My friend Diane Abbey Livingston drew the following simple diagram on a cocktail napkin and said, “Peter, it’s not really that complicated. The fundamental principle is that you learn to tell people what you feel, see and hear, and not what you think.”
This was a brilliant piece of feedback for me on the concept of feedback. There are other guidelines, but learning to separate out what you are seeing, hearing and feeling from what you think—your interpretation—is at the core of developing your skill in giving effective feedback. And, boy, is that ever hard to do! I frequently teach this skill, and it is astounding how often I fall back into telling people what I think—giving them my interpretation. I was particularly guilty of this with my own children on the subject of the cleanliness of their rooms (or lack thereof!). I would fall back into using interpretive phrases like “You don’t care” or “This is the biggest mess I have ever seen”—guaranteed, of course, to bring about immediate and lasting change in the child’s behavior—not!
The truth is that when we give evaluations, the other party takes exception to our evaluations and rarely hears the message. However, if we are able to describe what we see and hear and how that makes us feel, it is far more difficult for them to dismiss our feedback. If, for example, someone pushes their chair back in a meeting, gets red in the face and starts shaking their head from side to side, my feeding that observable data back to them (“I saw you push your chair back, your face got very red, and you were shaking your head from side to side; what was that all about?”) makes it very hard for them to argue. It’s far more effective than offering up your interpretation (“I see you lost it in the meeting”), which they are much more likely to dispute. (You can add the feeling part if you need to let them know the impact they had on someone else.)
Let me say once again that this is much harder to do than it appears, especially when the feedback is corrective in nature. We are used to telling people what we think, giving them our interpretation of what has occurred, and it’s a tough, tough habit to break. For most of us, capturing a group of behaviors under a single label is something we have done thousands of times. We are used to summarizing in our minds and labeling behaviors as rude, inconsiderate, evasive, uncooperative, bad, excellent, great, ineffective, et cetera. Not one of these interpretations, when fed back to a performer, will in any way enable them to get better at whatever it is they are doing.
The Four Rules of Effective Feedback
There are four simple rules for giving effective feedback. (I started with the second one, describe versus evaluate, above, because it is such a challenge.)
1. Be specific versus general.
2. Describe versus evaluate.
3. Focus on the behavior versus the person.
4. Maintain the relationship versus indulge in self-serving behavior.
The first rule, that feedback should be specific and not general, ties in with what we will talk about in the imagery section. There we explain that coaches need to paint clear pictures so that people can self-adjust their performances. Even positive feedback needs to be very specific if we are going to increase the performer’s competence. General feedback like “You were terrific, Muhammad,” or “That was a great speech to the Rotary club last night, Ashley” may make the person feel good, but it does little to improve their competence. How can Muhammad stay terrific if he has no idea what he did, specifically, that you thought was terrific?
The third rule reminds you to focus on the behaviors you wish to improve, change or reinforce in the other person. I recently asked a group of leaders in a seminar I was teaching if they thought their children were bad. Except for one jokester parent, all concurred that their children were not rotten-to-the-core bad. They also acknowledged, however, that they often were not thrilled with their children’s behavior. I suggested that perhaps a more accurate form of feedback to their children might be something like this: “I love you, but I don’t like the way you are treating your younger brother” (or the mess of your room or whatever behavior you’re dealing with). The message then is that they aren’t bad, but that you sure don’t like the behavior.
In the same way, I may have an excellent employee with a bad habit I would like them to change. Let’s say, for example, that one has a tendency to interrupt people in mid-sentence in meetings. It’s the interrupting that I choose to focus on. “Adam, you interrupted Jacques three times during his presentation this morning. A rule of thumb in those situations is to let people finish talking before you comment or ask questions.” If I think he needs to be made aware of the impact he had on at least one person, I might add a comment on my feelings: “I must admit I felt a bit frustrated by the interruptions.”
In the above example I chose to take a teaching approach and did not assume competence on Adam’s part—I did not assume he knew not to interrupt—and so fed back to him a picture of the appropriate behavior. Had I chosen to use a more consultative style I would have asked, “Adam, are you aware that you interrupted Jacques three times during his prepared presentation in the meeting this morning?” You will recall that the consulting style—asking questions and actively listening—is focused on developing self-awareness and self-responsibility in the other person. If he answers casually, “Yeah, so what?” then clearly he does not have enough awareness yet, so I might move to a second question: “Well, I know how I feel when I have prepared something I want people to hear in its entirety and I get interrupted. How do you feel when that happens to you?”
A third possibility is to use a mentoring style. Mentoring is simply coaching that focuses on a career path or survival in the organization. In this instance my feedback would sound more like this: “Adam, as you know, one of the things that is really valued in this organization is that we treat each other with respect and dignity. Interrupting Jacques three times during his prepared statement in the meeting this morning might be interpreted by some as disrespectful. I am sure that wasn’t your intention, but I must admit I felt a little frustrated by it.”
The fourth rule reminds us to give feedback for one reason and one reason only: to help the other person get better. Feedback is not meant to be self-serving to the person giving it. This is not where you get even or show them you’re smarter. Whatever approach you take, you should be able to give feedback—all feedback—in a way that maintains the relationship.
If your feedback is to have maximum impact in bringing about increased competence on the part of the performer, then it should also be timely, varied and frequent. It was Paul Allaire, the retired CEO of Xerox, who once said that we under-communicate “to the power of 10.” Just because we said it once doesn’t mean people got it. For them to get the message clearly, you need to communicate it over and over again, as often as you can, in as many ways as possible. As for timeliness, research tells us that the effectiveness of feedback starts to decline 0.4 seconds after the act. The best time to tell someone? Now!
A few important final thoughts on feedback. Leaders who are good at the skill of feedback are highly disciplined; they think carefully about what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it. Few of us can spontaneously offer up exceptionally good, competent, relevant feedback. This simply doesn’t come naturally. All of us are capable of giving general, non-specific, focus-on-the-person feedback such as “Great job on that report, Bruce.” Giving exceptional feedback is a different matter altogether. “I read the McDougal report, Bruce, and it’s extremely thorough and well-targeted. It focuses on efficiencies, succession planning and return on investment (ROI), which are the customer’s key concerns. I feel confident in forwarding it to the client. Excellent job!”
Who spontaneously speaks like this? Perhaps only your golf pro or someone who is trying to make you better. Most of us need to spend a few moments capturing the key points and getting back in touch with the guidelines for effective feedback before we’re able to give such comprehensive, meaningful feedback.
Here’s what University of Illinois track coach Gary Winckler had to say about the role of asking questions and listening in coaching:
“I ask them, almost on a daily basis, how they’re doing, and I’m always telling them, ‘Don’t just tell me you’re doing okay. How are you really doing, how’s school, how’s your family, how are you adjusting to homesickness?’ It’s not so easy, especially in the school environment, where you only see your athletes an hour or two a day and we jump on the field and do our routine and then go our separate ways again.”
Gary is right. We do have limited time. But these constraints signal that it’s even more important to make asking and listening priorities. If you want to make the most of the time you have with your people, take advantage of the opportunities you do have by using the most effective communication skills available to you.
It seems appropriate to finish this section with two simple questions related to your developmental bias and igniting the Third Factor in your people:
• If people continually come back to you for information, answers and feedback, are you developing them?
• What happens when you are not there?
Extinguishers don’t engage the Third Factor in their people.
• They only ever tell—which often feels to their “peons” like ordering.
They don’t seem to have any real interest in the other person’s thoughts on the matter at hand—even when that person may be the one with the data and the experience or the only one to have witnessed what took place!
Their feedback, if they give it at all, is evaluative and has a “You should have done this, you idiot” feel to it.
To be an Igniter remember this!
• Ask effective questions. Engage with the other person and encourage their Third Factor.
• Actively listen. Be present to the other person and value their thoughts, observations and ideas.
• Give competent, relevant feedback.
Editor: That last question, “What happens when you aren’t there?” is a doozy. It really gets at the crux of the matter.
Author: How so?
Editor: Well it would seem to me that if my answer isn’t some version of “They would be as engaged and working as effectively and as diligently as if I were there,” then that indicates that I, as the leader, have some work to do.
Author: It’s a high standard, but given the quality of the work required to succeed today, it’s a fair measure.
Editor: The piece on how to give effective feedback was very good, but it has been my observation that men in particular don’t get the “feeling” part right. Men rarely distinguish between a feeling and a thought.
Author: I feel you don’t know what you’re talking about. I feel you are being very sexist here.
Editor: Exactly! Two good examples where you substitute the word feel for the word think. Many of the men I know use the word feel as a synonym for the word think as if they meant the same thing.
Author: I blame Bum Phillips, the old Texas football coach, for this. When he had Earl Campbell, the magnificent running back, on his Houston team, he would say in his wonderful drawl, “I feel like we can run the ball tonight.”
Editor: You’ve got to be making that first name up—and I don’t care who’s to blame. A leader needs to recognize that a feeling is an emotion—I feel angry, upset, excited, et cetera—and feed that back to the other person to make them aware of the impact they had on at least one person, you.
Author: It is so a real name!
* 360 feedback is a process of anonymous feedback from direct reports, the person the individual reports to, peers, sometimes people from other levels in the organization, as well as customers, family members and friends.
