Feedback in Organizations

If you and your team are like the majority of others in the workplace, feedback is something to be avoided and survived, but rarely embraced. Last year, we polled office workers to find out what three things they are most likely to avoid or to try to escape, and they were, not surprisingly:

• Conflict
• Meetings
• Feedback

Providing and listening to feedback is certainly something we spend a lot of time doing in our own office. Our Marketing Director eagerly awaits our program evaluations from our participants, recognizing that client feedback is a better indicator of her performance than close ratios and costs-per-lead. Our facilitation staff meets regularly to review this feedback and determine which things we'll continue to do, which we'll do less of, and which we'll stop doing. Feedback begets change.

Internal feedback is just as important as external feedback, and sometimes harder to get. Even if your team isn't the type to offer feedback (positive or constructive), you can establish systems that will facilitate those processes, over time making feedback a component of your company culture. For example, we have a 10-minute daily "huddle," a 15 to 60-minute weekly check-in within each department, a monthly staff meeting for the entire company, and quarterly personal evaluations. The final outcome is a set of yearly professional development plans and a company development plan that work in tandem.

In this issue, we tackle some of the myths about feedback (especially the one about it being hard) and look at a handful of the numerous books about the subject. And while this information is helpful, we appreciate that it's just a review. The barriers to feedback in organizations are usually of the interpersonal variety (hence the need for an outside facilitator to help establish feedback processes).