8 Quick Tips to Improve Your Effectiveness with Feedback
Filed under: Developing Key Skills, Leadership Tip of the Day
Leaders at all levels struggle with this most important of performance tools: feedback. We delay delivering it, we water it down, we sandwich it in praise and obscure the message or, we avoid it altogether.
Like anything else, practice makes perfect, and a few simple suggestions can help ease your concerns and usher in more “practice time” in your workplace.
Suggestions for Improving Your Comfort and Use of Feedback:
1. Frequency and timeliness count! Your job is to deliver feedback everyday….not just at the performance review. In fact, that’s a horrible time for it.
2. Always base feedback on observable behaviors.
3. Link the behavior in question to business issues. Don’t make it personal.
4. Describe the appropriate behavior or in the case of positive feedback, specify the good behavior. Tell a person, “nice presentation,” and while they feel good, they have no idea what they did right.
5. Keep the discussion simple…focus on one behavior, not everything that you can think of for the past three months.
7. Actions and outcomes count! Create an action plan to change the behavior. Ideally, the target of the feedback creates the action plan.
8. Observe, coach and provide on-going feedback.
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Bonus Tip 1: Take a few minutes before your feedback discussion to jot down your opening statement and plan your conversation. Use the above as a check-list to make certain that you’ve incorporated all of the key elements.
July Issue of the Management Excellence e-Newsletter: Subscriber Only Content
Filed under: Developing Key Skills, Developing Others, Developing Yourself, Leadership & Career, Leadership Tip of the Day
Today’s “Leadership Tip of the Day” is for e-newsletter subscribers only. Of course, I would love to have you as a subscriber!
See the note below that I carried on my Management Excellence site. Also, you are more than welcome to subscribe via the Building Better Leaders site and the offer for copies of Practical Lessons in Leadership below stands for all subscribers, subject to the noted limits.
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The July issue of The Management Excellence e-Newsletter is out, with subscriber-only content.
The current issue includes content on:
- Improving Ideation & Creativity with Your Team
- Surviving and Thriving at the Dreaded Annual Strategy Off-Site
- Ideas for Jump-Starting Your Personal/Professional Development Program
- New Suggestions for the Management Excellence Reading List
- A tasteful promotion at the bottom of the newsletter outlining new beta test opportunities for upcoming Building Better Leaders programs and other services. (Hey, I am in business here!)
If you’re not a subscriber, please consider signing on and gaining access to content and opportunities not covered on my blogs. As always, I will guard your e-mail information with amazing ferocity!
As an incentive, I will send a free, signed copy of Practical Lessons in Leadership to the 1st, 10th and 25th new subscribers (and every 25th after that, until 500) after this post publishes today. This offer is good for 24 hours…and you must have a U.S. mailing address to participate.
You can subscribe at Management Excellence (http://artpetty.com) or Building Better Leaders (http://buildingbetterleaders.com) on the far right column under E-Newsletter Mailing List. And of course, new subscribers will receive a copy of the newsletter and very soon, access to all newsletter archives as well!
I look forward to sharing ideas for development and performance with you in our e-newsletter format!
Happy Reading!
-Art
Want to Lead? #3 of 7-Your Individual Contributor Skills No Longer Count!
Filed under: 7 Key Questions of Aspiring Leaders, Developing Key Skills, Developing Others, Leadership Tip of the Day
Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro. I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.
The prior questions challenged you to ask and answer, “Why do you want to lead?” and “Do You Understand the Role of a Leader?” The third question focuses on the issue of skill sets. For too many early career leaders, it comes as a shock that the skills that brought them to the dance are not the skills that will help them win the contest.
Question number 3. Do you understand that the skills that make you successful as an individual contributor are not the skills you need to succeed as a leader?
I’ve noticed that new leaders on technical teams (software development, engineering, IT), often struggle with this issue. In part, the dilemma is created when senior leaders promote the best technicians into leadership roles, and then fail to provide the proper mentoring for the new role. This freshly minted leader is used to surviving and prospering on their technical prowess, and without proper context for their new priorities, they emphasize the technical topics over the issues of motivating, leading and guiding others.
One senior manager observing this repeated pattern, offered, “give a technical professional a choice between a technical or a people issue, and I guarantee which way they will go.”
While technical competence is important in many roles, the demands of leadership require that you shift your focus to priorities that emphasize forging an effective working environment and facilitating the development, coaching and achievement of others. Your job is to help create other technically adept team members, and to use your skills as a tool to cross-check on key decisions and encourage broader and bigger thinking.
Your value as an expert is now worth less than your value as someone that is responsible for creating experts. It’s critical that you focus on internalizing your new role and shift your focus to the people and teams in your environment.
Tripping Points and the Leader
Filed under: Developing Key Skills, Developing Others, Leadership Tip of the Day
Note from Art: this post originally appeared as The Five Tripping Points of Emerging Leaders at my Management Excellence blog. The five points are important and bear repeating.
Firms and teams run into natural Tripping Points in the form of infrastructure and know-how as they work to grow a firm from start-up to $10 million or from $10 million to $25 million and so on. Often, the only viable solution to get beyond a Tripping Point is to retool the management team with people that have experience creating the infrastructure and programs/teams/processes needed to reach the next few levels.
I can easily apply Tripping Point thinking to the challenges that we as professionals face in advancing our careers and in particular, in developing as leaders. Awareness of your prospective Tripping Points is an important first step in creating your personal and professional development plan.
The Five Tripping Points of Leaders:
1. Strategic thinking skills-the ability to see the big picture, to look at patterns in the marketplace and assemble pictures that others don’t see into competitive, value-creating strategies.
2. Business acumen-Ram Charan describes this as the ability of the leader to understand how the firm makes money in the language of a street vendor.
3. Inbound communication skills-especially the ability to ask questions, listen intently and interpret what people truly mean or are thinking, which is often different than the words they are voicing.
4. Outbound communication skills-the ability to translate complex ideas into simple concepts that resonate with others and that promote positive action.
5. Diplomatic skills-the ability to broker value-creating relationships and resolve disputes with the finesse of an ambassador.
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The Tripping Points have profound implications for us as we seek to grow and expand in our careers, and they are THE issues we need to focus on as we seek to develop others around us.
As simple as the points are, we are often blind to our own limitations in these areas. So are the people you are seeking to develop.
Use the Tripping Points as filters to evaluate the advancement and maturity of your team members, and as the basis for creating developmental assignments. Use these points as the basis for coaching and feedback.
For your own purposes, seek feedback and coaching about the perception of your competence and maturity in each of these areas. Be aware of your limitations and areas of discomfort, and if necessary, design your own developmental assignments to ensure that you gain experience and refine your skills in the right areas.
We all have Tripping Points, and while perhaps there are truly limits to our individual abilities, I remain convinced that with awareness, focused effort and coaching, we can advance our skils and increase our contributions to our firms.
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