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F E E D B A C K —T H E H E A RT O F A L L C O A C H I N G
Now that we have settled into the concept of coaching and our leadership role in developing others, let’s talk about feedback. Ken Blanchard, best-selling author of The One Minute Manager and many other leadership books, said, ‘‘Feedback is the breakfast of champions.’’ With all due respect to Wheaties, we agree. Feedback is required for anyone to continue to improve his or her performance in any skill and in any setting.
Though coaching is more than just feedback, feedback is an integral part of coaching. In this chapter we explore feedback from a variety of angles, helping you understand it and, more important, helping you use it effectively and confidently in your leadership role. There are two additional benefits you will gain from this chapter—you will be better able to give feedback in any situation (not just with those you lead), and you will be better equipped to receive feedback as well (don’t you want to have every resource available to you to continue to improveyourskills too?).
Position or Power
People expect feedback from people in a place or position of power—
from their supervisor, for example. It isn’t unusual to get feed- back from this perspective, and if a person is looking to improve, gain a promotion, or get a new assignment, feedback from this perspective will be highly valued.
Generally speaking, a leader’s ability to be heard when giving feedback is granted by his or her role. Other examples include positions such as teacher, judge, minister, and parent. Depending on the individual this could also include lawyers, doctors, and others.
Paradoxically, in terms of inspiring willing and positive cooperation, this may be the least powerful of the three feedback sources.
Expertise
People seek out or expect feedback from people with expertise. If you want to be a better runner, you want feedback from an expert in the mechanics of running or training. If you want to create a more effective blog, you ask for counsel from someone who has been blogging for a long time and is successful. If you want to be a better listener, you seek advice from the best listener you know. This is true for all of us—when we want to improve we want to learn from someone with more expertise or experience than we have. Recognize that in this case, expert status isn’t something that we can claim, but rather something that must be conferred upon us by other people. The other people judge our expertise, and, in this case, their perception is the reality that drives their receptiveness.
Expertise can show up in a variety of ways, and before others can see it, we must recognize it ourselves. For more perspective on how to recognize your own expertise, go to the Bonus Bytes page at BudToBossCommunity.com and click on the Perspective button.
Relationship
Have you ever gone to someone for advice, not because of what she would know about the situation but because she cared about you? Most people have confided in and asked for feedback about a
f e e d b a c k — t h e h e a r t o f a l l c oa c h i n g 165 work-related situation from a friend or loved one, even if that other person knew nothing about the work, industry, or people involved in the situation. Why did they seek this feedback? Because of the relationship.
how these three sources work
Here is a quick example to better understand these three sources. At the time of this writing, Kevin’s oldest child, Parker, is eighteen, has just graduated from high school, and will soon be off to college. As his dad, Kevin has the first feedback source with Parker. Since Parker also works for Kevin, Kevin has positional power as his boss. Because they have a strong relationship, Parker values and some- times seeks advice from Kevin based on their relationship.
However, as previously stated, Parker is eighteen, and, like most eighteen-year-olds, he doesn’t really think his dad knows much at all about the things that matter to him (things like taste in comedy, music, or movies, and college experiences, for example). Kevin hopes that as Parker gets older he will regain the expert status, at least in some areas that he once had in Parker’s eyes.
These three sources ultimately come down to trust—can people trust your feedback and your motives for giving feedback or not?
Consciously or otherwise, these three sources are the lenses through which people make that trust determination about you as their coach.
Trust is a critical ingredient for feedback and coaching success. If you want to be a great coach, you must constantly and consistently work to build trust with those you coach.
This information is important to you for several reasons. First, only one of these three sources is yours automatically as a leader (position, in case you missed it). You may think you have earned the expertise
source, but that is far from automatic. Consider the following possible scenarios:
❍ If you are a new supervisor and came from another area or company, people may not know your experience. When you come from ‘‘somewhere else,’’ without information to the contrary people will assume that you don’t know their jobs.
❍ If you were literally a peer, doing the same work as those you now supervise, one of two very different scenarios could play out for you. Either people grant you expertise status because they know you know the work, or they resist giving it to you because they don’t feel you know any more about it than they do (after all, they may have trained you when you started—how can you possibly know more than they do?). This scenario further complicates the expertise source, because people may perceive it based on your actual knowledge or on your relative knowledge, compared to what they know. Either way,theymake the call.
The relationship source is complex too. Consider these possible situations:
❍ As a former peer, you know someone well, and your strong past relationship provides you with the ability to use this source.
❍ As a former peer, people see your relationship as having changed, and so tapping this source could be challenging, because people aren’t clear about your motives.
Relationships take time and personal investment, thus it may take time before you can lay claim to and use this feedback source.
As an aside, the juxtaposition of these sources is often fuel for an ongoing debate. Would you rather have a supervisor who has great people skills and knows how to lead (position and relationship sources) or a person who knows your job well (expertise). If you are like us, you have heard this argument many times. In some ways everyone’s perspective is correct. The argument is about which of these sources people personally value the most. Although people may never come to an agreement on which source is most important, everyone is likely to agree that in most situations the best scenario is when all three sources are present. When people can say their supervisor (position) has excellent leadership and interpersonal skills (relationship) and has enough knowledge about the work of the
f e e d b a c k — t h e h e a r t o f a l l c oa c h i n g 167 organization to have credibility (expertise), they are much more likely to receive feedback well.
If you believe you are lacking in both expertise and relationship from the perspective of those you lead, keep in mind the quotation we’ve seen attributed to many different people: People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care about them. The message is clear: work on relationship first. In most cases that will be easier to establish than expertise (especially if you don’t know people’s work), and it is more highly valued by most people anyway.
We humbly submit that if you want to be an exceptional or remarkable coach, you must aspire to earn all three types of feedback.
For details on how these three types of feedback connect to people’s communication styles, go to the Bonus Bytes page at BudToBossCommunity.com and click on the Feedback Sources button.