Prepare Your Leadership: Guided Feedback

Hello, Cadre crew. Happy Monday. Happy President's Day. If you're in Minnesota, Happy cold day. Woke up today. My windows were frosted over completely. And so if you're a window person, let me know what that means. Probably need new windows. I already know that. But yeah, cold day here in Duluth. I'll give it a minute. Welcome, Luke. Happy to have you. Happy Monday. Happy President's Day. Give it about one more minute. We can kind of jump in, get things started and let people join. Hope you're having a great day, Luke.

I saw we added a new event that looks exciting. Teen Mental Health. Haven't read too much about it, but I'm excited to dive in as I finish up my work today. Jules, good afternoon. Hi, welcome. Okay, I'll get started kind of with my ritual of three things of three. You know, right here it's noon Central time, kind of halfway through the day for most people whether wherever you are in the country. So good time to kind of reset, reevaluate how we want to attack the second half of our day. And a good way to do that is the three things of three.

So my first three things is what are you feeling right now? What are three emotions? Sensations, could be even thoughts that are reoccurring. What are three things that you are experiencing right now? It could just, you know, be emotion, could be sensation, I'm cold or over, too hot. You know, what are three things you're feeling right now? Just ground yourself and be present. And then what are three intentions that you have for the rest of the day? What are three things you want to be? Tasks on your to do list could be emotions that you want to get across to other people in meetings.

What are three things or three intentions that you have for the rest of the day? And then what are three gratitudes that you have for the rest of the day? What are three things that you are grateful for? Just kind of use that as a reset. And I'll jump into some research that I came across today. This is on feedback. I've talked a lot about feedback so far this year in my lives, so might as well keep it going. And this is a article from Frederick and Seal and Elad Shif and they're from, I believe, New Zealand.

Rachel, welcome. Happy Monday. Talking about feedback and looking at an article about the 25 year review of research on feedback in organizations. So kind of looking at the organizational side, but we take it, we'll take it away and talk about the broader implications of it. So one of their major findings was they found six different types of feedback. So feedback is a one time event. This is just a single piece of feedback that maybe a manager will give to their direct report. And often negative feedback on this leads to more resistance.

Because just a one time thing, maybe you messed up once and the manager points that out and then you're kind of thinking, oh I had, you know, I did this 10 times correctly before, but you caught me the one time and you give me feedback on that. So negative feedback leads to a lot of resistance in this case and individuals prefer more positive feedback on specific things even though negative feedback is more useful. The second one is feedback as a, as you're learning something. So like in a learning environment maybe you're trying to build skills and too much detail in this feedback can reduce the learning actually because it limits reflection and experimentation, kind of that critical thinking.

So if somebody's learning it's better to add reflection rather than just telling them what what to do. Feedback multi Source, this is 360 Feedback, some more of a coaching technique. Also if there is feedback on kind of more task specific things. So workplace feedback, kind of your standard performance evaluation. And this often lacks clarity due to kind of inconsistent ways to measure that. And that's a whole debate. We won't get into that feedback as performance conversations. So this is the development side of feedback.

So helping somebody develop over time and this high quality feedback here reduces resistance and increases motivation. There's other research pointing out that it increases trust with managers who prefer good developmental feedback and then other things where it leads to higher engagement in the workplace place and can even be connected to larger profits across the whole organization and then feedback about creative ideas. I thought this was a very interesting idea that it is a separate category where feedback on creative work such as product development or designing something with its own separate type of feedback and negative feedback here is valuable when framed constructively and part of like a supportive process.

So collaborating on something creative, it can be productive in that case. However, if it's framed negatively, it can be more critiqued and more likely to be taken personally. So another the big finding they had was that negative feedback tends to make people defensive and less likely to improve. Now that's not groundbreaking. I feel like we all kind of know that if we got negative feedback we're going to be more defensive, we're going to be kind of more closed off from it. But they also found a key part of this was feedback can be very useful if it's part of a back and forth conversation and not just Being told you're doing it wrong.

So they gave away, they gave three techniques to help people give feedback in the workplace. But this can be broad feedback in general. So any type of feedback, this can be helpful, distract from the task. So the specific thing you're giving feedback on, don't distract from that specific thing. Because once you distract from that, it's harder to learn from it, it's hard to improve on it. They don't exactly know what that feedback is getting at. Also, guided reflection helps learning. When I talked about the learning area, people learn better when they have a coach or facilitate facilitator type person helping them reflect on their work rather than just doing it alone or just giving, you know, this is good, this is bad kind of feedback.

So being reflective, asking questions, and then the last tip they gave was two way feedback leads to better results. So when feedback is more conversational rather than being one sided, people tend to resist less and are more likely to change that behavior. So it talked a lot about what a feed forward feedback like I talked about a few weeks ago where we go into giving feedback by just asking questions about how that went, how did this project go, how did that task go? Instead of just giving the feedback.

So asking a question first, letting them reflect on it, letting them say how they can improve and then you can give more, more feedback about the future. So hey, how'd this go for you? Then they'll talk about what they want to improve on and you can say well yes, and then we can collaborate on this and I can help you do this in the future and we can work on this together. Very more appreciative type of feedback. So that's all I have for you today if you want to learn more. Again, that article is titled A 25 Year Review of Research on Feedback in Organizations.

From Simple Rules to Complex Realities. So that is my Cadre live. I hope you have a great rest of your Monday and a great rest of your week. I'll catch you next Monday. Thanks for joining. Bye.