"You can't blame people for doing stuff you didn't tell them they couldn't do." | ||
| --David Sandler | ||
Having learned the general feedback principles and how to apply them throughout the year in Chapter 2, Delivering Balanced Feedback, you're now going to learn how to provide feedback based on a specific and instantaneous event; for example, an outcome or piece of behavior that you have observed in the workplace. Of course, timing will be extremely important in this feedback model, and put simply, it's a question of the sooner the better. Hopefully, you will be able to catch your staff doing great things around the office; in which case, this model can be used. But there will also be times when something didn't meet your expectations and needs to be corrected—and this is the context that we're going to focus on most in this chapter. In this case, you need to take the dentist's viewpoint: it's unlikely to get better on its own, so best get it dealt with as soon as possible.
In this chapter, you will:
- Meet Kate, who gave me a vague but lasting piece of feedback
- Learn how to apply the BAR feedback model
- Understand how to ease the delivery of critical feedback
- Be pleasantly surprised at how much you've learned already when you complete the short exercise at the end of the chapter!
Back in 1990 when I was a mere 21-year old, I joined a large company in an Project Management role. The manager who recruited me took a sideways move three months after I joined, and I had a new line manager called Kate. The previous manager had known that I was new to the industry and had taken the time to guide and mentor me where necessary as I adjusted to the way things were done in the company. Kate, however, had a different way of managing. It was more of a "get on with it" style.
I've come across this style a few times over the years, and I'm sure you have too. If questioned about their approach to management, this style of manager will usually say something like:
"Look, you're all grownups, and I pay you $xx per year… I expect you to just do the job."
This approach can work for experienced and motivated employees, but there are a few situations in which it won't work, and training a new hire is one of them.
As a new manager, you have many roles to get to grips with in your new job, including:
- Direction setter
- Decision maker
- Subject matter expert
- Role model
- Trainer
- Coach
- Mentor
- And of course, feedback giver
Sadly, the roles toward the bottom of the list sometimes get overlooked in favor of the ones toward the top. So, after a good start in my new company, I started to lose my way and felt abandoned in my new role. Kate didn't hold status reviews or give feedback and didn't always speak to me. After three months, it was time for the half yearly appraisals, at which time she wrote on my appraisal:
"Glenn seems to lack motivation in his work…"
The truth of the matter was that Glenn didn't know what he was doing!
Strangely, that piece of feedback has stayed with me for a long time; it was never repeated in subsequent appraisals, and in fact the opposite became the norm for me.
There lies a fundamental problem with that piece of feedback. What on earth do you do with it once you've received it?
Of course, having read the previous chapters, you will know that managers need to hold regular status reviews as well as coaching and feedback sessions with their staff so that feedback becomes a regular and accepted part of the working calendar. But in addition to that, if someone is unable to relate a comment to a specific and recent experience, they are very unlikely to modify their behavior, which of course is the whole point of giving feedback in the first place. So, now let's take a look at the BAR model that can be used in relation to a specific incident that you need to address with someone.