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Feedback or look ahead?

Written by: Hemant Karandikar

Article Overview: Leaders and people spend surprising amount of time on giving and taking feedback. But feedback sessions can be counter productive due to the blame games and time lost. Look ahead sessions encourage people to collaborate, evaluate capabilities, question assumptions, and evaluate risks. They can help in getting buy-in of people to strategic efforts.

Feedback or look ahead?

Leaders and people spend surprising amount of time on giving and taking feedback. Feedback sessions are arranged in companies at staff appraisal times or during important projects. Giving feedback to a subordinate is integral to the job of a boss. Information in some format is collected first. Often the employee herself is asked to fill in the details. Then the boss gives his or her remarks. There may be some discussion. In case of team meetings, there may be heated debate on what (often who) went wrong.

Pitfalls
Feedback sessions are necessary to understand current status or level of performance. They can be useful if they focus on facts. This, often is not the case. Usually the feedback is critical; therefore it is taken personally by the recipient. It almost always leads to heartburns and defensiveness. Feedback sessions can be counter productive due to the blame games and time lost. However, it is true that no leader can should avoid giving feedback just because there are such problems.

A Leader's role
Whatever is the case, the real role of a leader starts after the feedback is given. A leader's key role is to envision the future and align strategy and resources with it.

A good leader encourages people to develop forecasts in the form of alternate scenarios based on current state and actions planned. Scenario building makes people look ahead, imagine, assess risks, and question assumptions. To build scenarios, People have to understand organization's capabilities in terms of skills and processes. It also requires them to talk to their peers and outside people and collaborate. All these are very desirable things. Such regular scenario building and forecasting sessions make people better at it. The buy-in of people in the organization's strategy is another benefit of scenario building forecasting sessions.

In my experience, the above look ahead approach works well, particularly in organizations undergoing major transformation. The benefits are shared understanding, openness and creativity, seeking information outside one's own area, assessing risks, and keeping bigger picture in mind.

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Article Tags: alternate scenarios, amount of time, blame games, boss, current state, current status, defensiveness, feedback sessions, giving feedback, heartburns, key role, peers, pitfalls, question assumptions, recipient, role of a leader, staff appraisal, subordinate, team meetings, transformation



Related Forum Posts
Re: How Important is Feedback in eBay? - Feedback is VERY important to me when purchasing on eBay and similar sites. If they don't have several transactions and a 100% feedback (or close to it) then I most likely will not purchase from them.
Subject Line Etiquette - For myself, it's not so much "etiquette" as common sense. If you're emailing someone with a business offer or to strike up a relationship, you do not put "Hello" or "Hi" or something cryptic in the subject line. You make it clear what your email is about - just as you would on a message board. So instead of "wff" for example, the guy who emailed me a couple of days ago should have said, "Feedback on Your WFF Article" - so that I would have known what it was about without having to look at it and try to think...
Re: Is YouTube Going Commercial? - [quote="Alan Mater":2biz6yta]But by reading faster, are you still comprehending what you read? I know from personal experience that I can read something and not have a clue about what I just read. As with reading something again, you can replay videos over and over as well. Also, as with reading faster, you can skip ahead in a video.[/quote:2biz6yta] I guess it's just personal preference and I know many people (including myself) who can absorb content by reading quickly. If you skip ahead in a video, you're guaranteed to miss out some points.
Re: Bill from Dallas - Way ahead of ya brother. Got the avatar and sig files in already.
Re: Brag: Over 100,000 page sitemap! - Congratulations Evan, keep on moving straight ahead.


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