Imagine having an app installed on your work iPad that you use to constantly rate your interactions with your colleagues, while they rate you too. This actually already exists at Bridgewater Associates which is managed and owned by Ray Dalio. You can read about Dalio’s policy of “radical transparency” here. Bridgewater even goes as far as recording every meeting for any employee to watch and be aware of what was discussed in the meeting. Not sure about you, but I can say personally there are many meetings that I am grateful for not being recorded. There are a lot of people who don’t know what I really think about them and I would be worried if they did.
It is fashionable these days to ask our colleagues and teams for feedback. Feedback obviously being business jargon for asking people what they think. Usually about us, our performance, our leadership or some other aspect of our work lives we deem worthy of review. Some organisations have a culture of doing this regularly as part of formal reviews and some have a culture of doing this informally as part of the normal business process.
I had a bit of a lightbulb moment when I was listening to an interview from the Global Leadership Summit where Marcus Buckingham discusses his latest book on Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World in an interview with Kim Simios a partner of Ernst & Young. Basically, what we call feedback most of the time is not feedback at all, but rather our reaction to something. It is how we processed information, how it made us feel and how it made us behave. It has more to do with us than the person receiving the feedback.
A great practical example of this I witnessed recently was when I was reading some notes of a contentious meeting that took place at an educational institution. While the topic of the meeting was very sensitive and race based the notes were all captured in the form of the phrase:
– What I said is…
– What I heard in reply was…
I thought this was brilliant because it encapsulated the reactionary element of feedback so well. The person wasn’t judging, condemning or coming to any sort of conclusion. They were simply stating what they heard in the full knowledge that how they received the message could be different from how it was intended to be communicated. This is not about reading between the lines or any political machinations. This is about understanding that our feelings towards people or certain situations are exactly that. Our feelings and our reactions. So next time we want to provide someone with “feedback” we must be aware that this is being given through the lense of how we experience the world and how we personally reacted to the message we received. Your reaction and your feedback are two different things!
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