Whistleblowers provide feedback but only the bad kind. Exit interviews provide feedback but those who take up the offer usually have an axe to grind. 360 feedback is a chance tell your manager what you really think about their people management skills, if only you had the courage. Complaints provide feedback but they can appear rather nit-picky. Inspection and audits provide feedback, mostly unwelcome, and usually failing to take account of the circumstances. Compliments provide welcome feedback but are too few in number. Suggestions are better received when requested. But is any of it useful?
It’s not difficult to get people to give you feedback if you offer rewards. It’s not hard to get people to tell you what you want to hear if you bribe them. Just as it’s perfectly possible to shrug of a few complaints. In fact most organisations operate within such a feedback culture.
But for feedback to be useful to an organisation’s or individual’s development it has to be honest and therefore occasionally brutal and because the most useful feedback is the feedback you most didn’t want to hear or expect it is the most devastating. How will the individual respond? How will the organisation respond? Hurt, anger, denial?
Speaking personally the feedback I took on board tended to come from people I admired. The feedback I ignored was from people I thought were idiots. This was a mistake because it really isn’t about the person it’s about the quality and usefulness of the feedback. What I realised was effective leaders have good insight into their own behaviour and how it effects others and they use this to modify their behaviour. You get this insight by listening to the critical and unflattering things that people say about you. But you generally have to hear it from more than one source before you recognise there may be some truth in it.
It’s the same for organisations they need insight into how their culture, ways of doing things, effects others and to make changes accordingly. They get this insight by listening to the critical and unflattering things people say about the organisation. But most Senior management teams first response to negative feedback from employees is, “ well they would say that wouldn’t they”. Just as their initial response to a critical inspection report or audit is to question the accuracy and claim the problems are exaggerated before suggesting the inspectors/auditors have failed to appreciate the uniqueness of the organisation. And then there is the biggie where the leaders of an organisation see their role as protecting the reputation of the organisation even at the expense of ignoring or suppressing negative feedback.
Inevitably an organisations feedback culture is not about techniques for getting people to say what they really think or methods for collating and using the feedback it’s about the willingness of the leadership to here and act on unflattering and negative feedback.
