The Five Conversations That Deliver Accountability and Performance

- This is an audio course. No need to watch. Just listen. Welcome to the latest edition to LinkedIn Learning - podcasts. We've curated some of the best business podcasts and made them even easier to listen to. Each episode is split into sections. Use the links in the contents area to skip to whichever section you like. We're always looking for new ways to help you learn, and we'd appreciate your feedback. Thanks for listening. - When it comes to communication effectiveness, I wanted to chat with you in some real depth about feedback. And so, I would like to talk about feedback in particular for this chat, and maybe just start us off with, in what ways does feedback often, sort of, just not work in teams and organizations? Sort of what's the problem that you bump into most often? - Yeah, so, well, let's start by thinking about, for anyone who's married or in a serious relationship, when you try to give feedback to your partner or spouse, how does it go? Usually not well, right? Why? Like, why does feedback not generally go well? One is because we've got a lot of pent-up emotion, typically. We sometimes have more power than the other person; not always. We are often missing context about why they did what they did when they did it. There are so many possible ways that things could go wrong. We have our own bias, we have our own judgments, we have a lot of our own projection and how we feel about ourselves, so it's a mess. So when we enter into a thing called a feedback conversation, the likelihood of success is very low, given all of those factors. And so we have to start thinking beyond feedback, because that set up, whether it's in the workplace or in our families, it doesn't work. We know that it doesn't work. People get defensive, it's awkward, we feel uncomfortable, we talk past one another. So we need another way to think about solving the problem of, what is the problem that feedback is intending to solve. There's a real problem there that we're sort of taking this tool called feedback and saying, oh, that's going to solve it. And at Refound, our position is like, hmm, not so much. It's not going to work for that for a lot of different reasons. There's another way. - I suppose most often, the problem I'm trying to solve with feedback is, you know, I would like for you to do this thing differently and better, as I perceive better. And so if feedback is not the mechanism, what is? - So for us, the everyday conversations take a different tone. So exactly as you said, right? What is the purpose of feedback? Well, I want someone to behave differently. But if we think about approaching that conversation, not by making a statement about something, but by asking a question, or making an observation, but doing it from a place of acknowledging our subjectivity and saying, hey, I noticed this. Or, it seemed to me that X, or when I was sitting in the meeting, one of the things that struck me was blank. But we're approaching those conversations with a spirit of curiosity, with a spirit of dialogue. Like I don't have all the information. I don't know everything about why you did what you did when you did it. I just noticed something. And I'm going to bring it up, because as your colleague or as your manager, or as your subordinate, whatever the case may be, I see that as part of my role, to, when I see things that are either problematic or potentially problematic, part of my role as a leader in this organization and in standing for our own values is to say something. But the way we go about it changes the whole game. If we approach it from a place of assumption and conclusion and prescriptive, like this is what happened, and this is what you need to do differently. Well, now we're doing feedback and we'll get the result that you would imagine. But if we approach it from a place of, hey, I have a question about this. I wasn't sure what to make of it. It seemed like this, but I could be. And so it's having that open hand relative to those everyday conversations. So, in one way you could say, oh, well, that's another way to do feedback and that's fine. You could call it that. But for us, it's really different. When we train and teach these tools, people feel like, oh, so I don't really have to give feedback in the way that I understood it. All I have to do is talk with people. All have to do is show up as a human being, find a way to surface what I'm feeling, thinking, sensing, and then we can have a conversation, and that's right.