Many managers struggle to give effective feedback. They spend hours carefully crafting their message only to have it fail to land. What they neglect to notice is that feedback is at least as much about the relationship as it is about the message. One of the keys to a strong working relationship – one that enables difficult conversations – is a sense of shared purpose.
Giving Useful Feedback
The purpose of feedback is to influence effective future behavior. While it addresses something that happened in the past, it focuses on the future. Feedback might be corrective, meaning it aims at creating different or changed behavior the next time. It might instead be reinforcing, meaning it hopes to encourage more of that behavior in the future.
Regardless of whether it is corrective or reinforcing, feedback happens within a relationship. The relationship between the two people involved creates a container for feedback. When that container is strong, any message is more likely to be useful – even when it is unskillfully given.
I once had a manager give me this feedback: “Paul, sometimes your curiosity sounds like judgment.” By many standards, this is poorly constructed feedback. It’s not specific and it’s not directly actionable. And yet, I took it in immediately. Our relationship was strong enough to hold the difficult conversation we needed to have. What that relationship had was a powerful feeling of mutual purpose.
Establishing Mutual Purpose
I am much more likely to accept hard truths if I can tell that you are speaking for my benefit (and I know I’m not alone in this). When my manager told me about my tone, I knew he was trying to help me. He was trying to influence my future behavior in a way that would make me more effective and would benefit our organization. I was going to be working with a new team, and he wanted me to avoid traps I’d fallen into with his teams. How did I know? He told me.
It’s easy to take for granted that the person we are giving feedback believes that we’re doing it for their benefit. Indeed, so much “feedback” seems to be for the benefit of the person giving it. There’s a difference between telling someone something that will make them more effective and making a request that will make your life easier. It’s possible, of course, that they do want to make your life easier. There’s nothing wrong with asking for what you want. The key is making sure that they want it, too.
One way to establish mutual purpose is to assess how the future behavior you’re trying to influence will benefit the other person. Is the impact you hope to achieve something they value? If so, consider telling them about it. In my situation, my colleague believed that finding a way to sound less judgmental would improve my relationships with my co-workers and increase my influence. This would allow me to have a more significant positive impact on the company. He asked me if that was something I wanted – and I definitely did. Knowing that we had a common purpose helped us to navigate a difficult conversation.
Using Mutual Purpose
That feedback was the beginning – not the end – of a conversation. My manager’s somewhat shocking statement had gotten my attention, but it didn’t tell me everything I needed to know. We spent a good bit of time exploring what he meant by it and my experience of it. I came away from that conversation with a better sense of how I was contributing to the results I didn’t want. I understood how what I was doing that was limiting my own influence and what I could do differently next time. And I thanked him for it.
When I introduced myself to the next team I worked with, I said to them, “I’ve been told that sometimes my curiosity sounds like judgment. That is not my intention. Please, when you notice me coming across as judgmental, let me know right away so that I can correct it.” That introduction helped me to avoid mistakes I’d made before. I would never have known to do that if I hadn’t received that challenging feedback. Even though the message wasn’t perfectly crafted, it was grounded in a shared sense of purpose.
