Welcome to Giving Helpful Feedback.
This will be the second of the seven feedback skills.
In our last video, we made the case that giving specific and
behavioral feedback was important.
In this video, we fine tune that concept.
In addition to specific and
behavioral feedback, make sure your feedback is impersonal.
What do we mean by impersonal?
By keeping it impersonal,
we strive to avoid someone's personality in a way that they might find offensive.
For example, what do you immediately think if you're driving and
somebody cuts in front of you, forcing you to put on your brakes?
I'll give you a few seconds to think about this.
Some of the things that pop into my mind are wow, what a jerk or
what a horrible driver and so on.
Or let's say you're in the doctor's office and the doctor keeps you waiting for
20 minutes.
When she finally arrives, she seems preoccupied,
barely listens to you, finally jotting down a prescription and leaving.
What words would you use to describe the doctor in this case?
Maybe cold, maybe distant, disinterested, preoccupied.
Any time we use words like cold or jerk or
disinterested, we're talking about somebody's personality.
When you're giving feedback, you don't want to talk about people this way.
Those are called personality traits.
Instead of calling an employee lazy,
we want to say something along the lines of they failed to deliver on time.
Instead of calling an employee a loudmouth,
we want to say they failed to listen to other people in a meeting.
Let's think for a moment about why it's so
important to avoid personal attacks and to keep feedback impersonal.
Say you have an employee who is quiet in meetings and you want them to speak up.
They don't offer opinions, no perspectives, and
you feel that this is part of their job.
You may offer up something along the lines of, you're too quiet in meetings.
That doesn't sound too bad.
Take a few minutes, however, to think about why this might be ineffective from
the quiet employee's point of view.
There are a couple problems with this statement.
The first, of course, relates to skill number one.
The feedback is not specific, and so
the quiet employee really doesn't know what to do.
Perhaps more importantly, it can be insulting,
implying that being too quiet is in some way a deficiency of character.
A third problem is that when you talk about someone's character,
you say, you're too quiet or you are lazy,
you're talking about something that's very hard to change.
If someone's too quiet, what they can do about it?
Should we roll back the clock and
retrain ourselves from infancy to be more extroverted and gregarious?
When you're quiet, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to
turn yourself into the life of the party, we're all party animals, so to speak.
A more effective response would be to say something along the lines of,
we would like your input during Monday's meeting.
We want to hear about your quality control work and
whether it's proceeding according to plan.
This is more effective because it's a, impersonal,
b, avoids being insulting or judgmental.
And it gives the employer something very, very specific so
that they can correct their behavior.
So in summary, keep your feedback impersonal.
Avoid being insulting and putting somebody on the defensive.
You'll avoid asking them to change something they really can't change.
And you're more likely to be specific and behavioral, which is what we want.
That said, there is always a but.
In this case, the but is that it's natural for
us to talk about people in trait terms.
If somebody comes in late to a very special meeting you've set up,
it may run across your mind that that person is really rude or disrespectful.
We don't say that person has too many events on their calendar.
How then, since it's so
natural, do we recognize when we're talking about personality traits?
Why don't we take a minute to look at some of these negative traits
we may use to describe people.
This'll make it easier for you to recognize them when they occur.
So all of the traits that you're seeing on the screen right now are used
to describe people.
For example, impossible.
I was with my mother the other day and we had a little disagreement and
she said this to me, you're impossible!
And I said to her, hey, you ought to take my feedback course.
Course, I actually didn't say that to her, that would have made things much worse,
as you know.
But being impossible is a trait.
Okay, there are a number of others here.
Pushy, nitpicking, rude,
disrespectful, dishonest, unassertive.
These are all trait attributions that you can make to people.
Give you a chance to look at these and see if you have every heard any of these.
Now that you know what a negative trait is,
let's talk about the opposite side of the issue.
What about talking about people in terms of traits
when something good is going on and you want to encourage them?
How about a statement like you're great, or you're sure helpful, or you're so
cheerful?
So think about it, is this okay?
Saying something nice about somebody's personality definitely
won't get you into trouble like saying something negative about them.
However, the same thing holds.
You're painting them as always cheerful or
always great, and they may not feel like this not always true and
you're actually putting them on a higher pedestal.
Again, it's better to be specific.
You can something like, your jokes in yesterday's meeting
really cheered the customer up about the missed deadline.
This gives them interesting information about what's effective and it's
very specific and doesn't setup a goal for them that would be too hard to achieve.
Before we leave this topic, let's take a brief detour and
address the issue of what to say when you're having one of these conversations
and the employee gets defensive.
If you don't know quite what I'm talking about here,
I'm going to give you some examples, and I think you've been here.
So let's take the meeting example.
Someone comes late to a meeting and you might hear excuses like the following.
Maybe so, but
I'm not the only one who was late, or I don't know how you can say that.
I wasn't late yesterday.
I checked the clock when I got in the room.
Another one.
This seems quite minor, especially since the meetings don't really get started
until five minutes after the hour, and so on.
Your goal for giving feedback is to make sure that your point gets made.
Defensive responses will get you off track if you let them.
What can you say to get the conversation back on track?
Take a minute to think about this.
Now that you've given this some thought, here's some tried and
true responses the researchers suggest to get the conversation back on track.
If the receiver gets defensive, address the issue right away.
You may want to write these down and use them every time.
Here is the first one.
I know you don't agree with me, I'm just asking you to hear me out.
Or, rather than debate the issue,
let's work on what you can do differently next time.
And here's one more.
This is how I see it and you need to know that.
Now here's what I recommend.
So those are tried and true responses that you can actually memorize, and
I would recommend that you do that.
If you get a defensive response, avoid arguing, debating, denying,
insisting, or citing others as the source of the evaluation.
You don't want to generalize or personalize.
You want to just make it clear that the conversation needs to continue and
that you have something to contribute to that conversation.
Basically, memorize a response and use it every time.
It may help you be more confident in a very, very uncomfortable situation.
In summary, avoid giving feedback that is personal, make it impersonal.
This holds for both negative and positive feedback.
Understand that talking about people in personal or
trait language is really natural for us.
We are engineered to make personal evaluations.
So that's what makes it harder.
When you encounter a defensive response, which you probably will and
you probably have, learn to use simple phrases to pull the conversation back
on course and avoid getting into an argument.
We'll continue with giving feedback in the next video.
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Well, we've concluded the first part of the video and
now we're going to give you a bonus feature.
Some of you may want to know a little bit more about the psychology behind
our advice about giving impersonal feedback.
Well, we're going to talk about that now.
I call this strictly a bonus feature for
those of you who like to know kind of why we're giving this advice.
There's a tendency to describe the behavior of others in terms of traits or
personality traits, as we were talking about.
And it is called the actor observer bias.
That is, we use trait terms or personality terms to describe others.
For example, if you see someone knitted a beautiful scarf and
it's ten feet long and it has all sorts of great detail in it,
you think, wow, that scarf knitter is very creative.
We don't think, wow, I bet he spent hundreds of hours learning to knit, and
pored over thousands of magazines to get creative ideas for that killer scarf.
We may describe people in trade terms because we do not
have access to the story behind the scenes.
That is, information about how much time the knitter practiced and
how he got his ideas in the first place.
Interestingly, when we evaluate ourselves,
we do have access to the background information and we tend to use it.
For example, my grandmother taught me how to knit when I was a child and
that's why I can knit today.
So there's sort of a general inconsistency.
In evaluating others we use traits and
evaluating ourselves we take into account situational factors.
One more example may help.
Let's say a teacher observes a student entering the class about ten minutes late
after a class begins.
What is the teacher going to think?
The teacher may think, whoa, this student is a little bit rude,
maybe disrespectful, could be disorganized.
These are personality traits.
And what's going on in the student's mind?
The student is thinking, whoa.
The bus was late and I tried really,
really hard to get into class on time because learning is important to me.
Totally different explanations of the situation.
Neither party has access to the other party's information.
It is helpful to understand the actor observer bias because it helps explain
why the person on the receiving end of the feedback may look at things
quite differently than the person giving the feedback.
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