PREFERCE:
As a baby you learned to use the feedback all around you to begin to master your environment. As you grew and developed an interesting thing happened. You began to ignore the constant stream of feedback coming at you from every possible angle. We humans do this so that we can focus and better understand those things which we want to attend to and we can ignore those things we decide are unimportant.
As the years go by we pay even less attention to the constant feedback all around us. But now we are ignoring things not just for the sake of clarity but because some of the feedback is becoming unpleasant. We don’t want to be told not to do that. We don’t want to be told we are wrong. We don’t want to be told the right way to do things. We want to figure things out for ourselves.
There are many things we can and need to figure out for ourselves but that are many more that we should rely on experts for. Experts can help us because they have this special knowledge and understanding that allows them to look at us, diagnose our problems, then provide specific feedback and provide specific suggestions to help us improve. If you’ve had a cough for 2 weeks and it doesn’t get any better you will likely go to a doctor who will look in your throat, up your nose, in your ears, probably run some tests and may even send you for x-rays. After the doctor has had a chance to collect all the information there will be a diagnosis and a prescription designed to help you get well. Most of us will not try to diagnose and prescribe medical treatments for ourselves but when it comes to other aspects of our lives we shy away from the people who know how to help. For some reason we want to do that by ourselves.
The role of an expert, let’s call that person a coach, is to serve as a living video camera. In today’s world which abounds with cameras on our cell phones, we could video a great deal of what we do on a daily basis but the problem is we often never look at what we do in critical and diagnostic manner. In fact we look at those videos more for their entertainment value. A coach, on the other hand, will look at what you are doing and then help you discern what’s going on. If that coach is a good one, it won’t be a matter of telling and responding. It will be a matter of asking questions and getting you to analyze your own efforts. It’s something we refer to as talent talks and something many therapists refer to as motivational interviewing. The key is to help us take a careful look at what we are doing and using that information to evaluate our efforts and the effectiveness of those efforts in helping us get to where we want to be.
Using feedback allows us to move past our own perceptions of what’s going on and on towards a more objective evaluation of things. Personally, in my own mind, I still see the 30 year old, young man that ran the Chicago Marathon but when I look in the mirror I see a 63 year old man that is considerably heavier than that 30 year old runner. I would really like to look like that young man again but in order to do that I would have to engage in the life style I lived at 30. That life style included daily runs of anywhere from 5 to 15 miles and it included a diet that was high in healthy fruits, vegetables, nuts, complex carbohydrates, low-fat meats, and lots of water. When I look at my diet today, well let’s just say it’s not quite the same. So my mental perception of myself is that runner and everything that was that runner. Reality is quite different. For me to get even half close to that past ideal will require that I reframe my thinking process. I might be able to do that by myself but it would be a lot easier if I had that objective third party to keep me grounded in reality with honest feedback.
In our professional lives and as leaders we also have the opportunity for using or ignoring feedback. That feedback can often be uncomfortable but if we can teach each other how to provide feedback in a constructive and kind manner, there is a good chance that we will be able to use the feedback for our own personal improvement. On a good team there are many coaches because every team member can help to coach his or her teammates. This can really be beneficial if we know the talents of every member of the team. If we know who the planners, strategists, tacticians, influencers, schedulers, caregivers, and innovators are, we can use them to help the others improve in their area of strength. If we learn to do this naturally and supportively it becomes a cultural norm and part of the expected behavior in every meeting, function, project, and action. This doesn’t happen overnight because we are not used to that much constructive feedback. But, if we stick to it our teams will become that much more effective because of these efforts.
The most frequent question I get regarding this feedback process is “won’t this take too much time?” My answer is in the beginning it will take more time than you are used to giving the process. But tell me, how effective have your improvement processes been in the past. Tell me about an improvement project that actually helped people become better at what they do. How well did that work. The answer I frequently get is we had this speaker in and he gave us these exercises to do. Some of us did them most did not and we are basically at the same level of performance that we were before they brought that speaker in.
The truth is you need to invest a little time to get the system going. Then as you continue to provide feedback to one another along with suggestions as to how to carry out each action more effectively, everyone starts to improve. The function of the entire team improves and you recoup all the invested time and actually make more time for the team in the future.
One of the real strengths of feedback is that feedback can help you understand that your past failures in any critical area are not for lack of motivation or knowledge. Most of our failures stem from a lack of skill. Think of it in terms of our skill in golf or singing or playing the piano. Once you have the basic idea, you can continue to improve as long as you have someone to point out the critical areas where you need improvement. You see, after about 5 years we have reached our peak of ability, or skill if you will, unless we have someone to help us see past our own limitations.
The difference between a PGA champion and the occasional player is not the desire to do well, it is in the way they practice. The PGA champion looks at the details of a good swing and practices, with a good coach to provide feedback, each aspect of an effective swing. The occasional player goes out to the driving range and hits a bucket of ball hoping to get better because we all know practice helps us improve. But it is not just practice; it is guided, deliberate practice that helps. Practice that has a specific purpose to improve our effectiveness in one aspect of whatever we are doing.
A huge part of that practice is acquiring feedback about our performance and then comparing that to an ideal or standard. As we engage in specific, guided, deliberate practice to help us improve in what we are doing, we will begin to see how that one piece of the whole increases our chances for success. As we practice other pieces of the whole, we continue to improve. Once we have the whole picture, once we practiced deliberately in all critical components of one part of our skill, we will see that skill improve. If we continue to work on larger and larger components of the skill we will see the skill continues to grow and develop.
FEEDBACK:
Every action we take produces outcomes. We can also consider these outcomes to be consequences. Some of the consequences of our actions are intended and some are not. All of these consequences provide us with feedback regarding the effectiveness of our actions. If we get what we hoped we would get, then our actions were effective. If we don’t get what we hoped for, our actions were relatively ineffective.
It is always quite amazing to observe the number of people who continue to engage in the same activities, over and over again, while expecting quite different results than what they always get. Einstein is noted to have commented that this is what constitutes insanity; doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
The part of the process that most people miss is the feedback. Living systems are full of feedback loops. If no food enters the digestive system the acid naturally found in the stomach stimulates the nerve endings in the stomach sending a message to the brain that says I’m hungry. When food enters the stomach the acid is busy and the message is interrupted. This is one of thousands of feedback loops that control our daily lives.
There are similar feedback loops that affect our behavioral processes. If we put our hand on a hot pan on the stove the pain message rushes to our brain and our reflexes make us take our hand away quite quickly. We soon learn that such an action is harmful so change our behavior.
When we interact with people however, we often get quite stubborn about how we do things and expect other people to change instead of changing ourselves. If the way people react to our behavior is the social equivalent to grabbing a burning hot pot with our bare hands, why would we ignore the feedback? We have a choice. We can choose to pay attention to the messages we are receiving.
How carefully do we consider the feedback that is all around us? Do we analyze it and evaluate our effectiveness based on that feedback. If we are truly honest with ourselves, we will carefully consider 4 key aspects of our leadership efforts. It begins with knowing what it is we really want to accomplish. Next we have to do something to try to get to our desired endpoint.
Now comes the feedback—how effective were our efforts in either attaining the desired outcomes or in moving us significantly closer to that outcome? Finally, based on that assessment of effectiveness, what plans should be implemented to either improve our effectiveness or to sustain our progress? We have condensed this into an easy to remember acronym: WDEP. Sort of like a radio station’s call letters; WDEP. What is it you really WANT? What are you DOING to get it? What’s your EVALUATION of your progress? (How’s that working for you?) And finally; what’s your PLAN for being more successful in the future?
SUMMATION: :
What do you do with all the feedback that comes at you every day? Do you use it as a tool for personal and professional improvement or do you ignore it? How you answer those questions will reveal a great deal about your growth and development. People who pay attention to the feedback and use it to develop specific, guided, deliberate practice activities have the opportunity to grow and develop while those who ignore the feedback do not. Research has shown that if you work to improve yourself based on an initial set of instructions and “normal” practice regimes you will improve your skills for maybe the first 5 years of using those skills.
However, beyond those five years you will stagnate and actually digress in your skill utilization. People who use feedback to engage in specific, guided, deliberate practice to improve their skills continue to grow and develop eventually passing up the folks that fail to apply the feedback they attain during their practice sessions. In fact, Dr. Albert Bandura the father of modern cognitive theory tells us that if you want to succeed you will need to spend more time than you initially think you need to, practicing the behaviors that lead to success. This deliberate practice focuses on specific behaviors that feedback tells we need to improve.
If I’m trying to improve my ability to teach new skills to others I will need to know what good teaching skills are. Not just the physically observable skills but the emotional and psychological skills as well. We need to be able to measure expected outcomes and use the feedback we acquire to modify our practice rituals as needed. And we never acquire these skills easily. They all take time and if we pay attention to the feedback we can get better and better and better.
There are extraordinary piano players and great piano players and good piano players and then there are the people who took lessons for a few years and now just play around at piano playing. The difference between the extraordinary, the great, and the good is not talent. It is how well they pay attention to the feedback they receive, how they react to that feedback, and then how they use that feedback to create the practice regime that can make them extraordinary, great, or good. And the real amazing aspect of the research is that it’s not how long people practice as much as it is how they practice. Those that use feedback to craft those specific, guided, deliberate practice regimes improve much more than those who diligently practice skills based on what they think they ought to do. And the good piano players, they practice what they like to play, not necessarily those demanding skills that cause them to stretch and grow and develop.
If you want to really get better at anything, it all starts with the feedback that comes from what you are doing now. Use that feedback to craft and practice regime that will help you improve your skills. If you can find an expert to look at what you are doing and then give you more feedback you can continue to grow when others atrophy. We are finding that we do not yet know the limits of human skill development. Each time we think we have improved as much as possible, someone comes along and does even better. Consider that prior to 1968 most people thought a man would never be able to run 100 meters in under 10 seconds. In 1936 the great Jesse Owens ran a 10.2 second 100 and it took another 20 years to run a 10.1. It took only 4 years to get to 10.0 and 8 years later Jim Hines broke the 10 second barrier running a 9.9.
Since 1968 the record has fallen 9 times with Usain Bolt running an amazing 9.572 in 2009. How fast can man run? Surely a man can’t break the 9 second barrier; or can he? Indeed these runners have some amazing physical attributes but it’s not purely their physicality that allows them to run so fast. If you examine their practice regime you will find they are very focused. They use the feedback they receive from coaches, video recordings, and any other source they can find to create specific, guided, deliberate practice regimes. That’s what makes all the difference for them and it can make the same difference for you. Are you willing to do what it takes to become extraordinary? Are you willing to pay more attention to the feedback and create the specific, guided, deliberate practice regime you will need to get there?
© 2013-2014 Culture by Choice-WTBG, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin: All rights reserved distribution of this information outside of an academic setting no permitted without express written permission from Culture by Choice-WTBG.
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