What is feedback?

Feedback is data for the purpose of learning. Feedback is a sure way to understand how to improve your individual performance, skills (personal development), tasks and/or the processes you work on.

Why is feedback necessary?

There are four main reasons why feedback is needed. Feedback helps us learn, helps us adapt to change faster, creates accountability, and provides a key element for employee engagement.

learn faster

The ability to learn faster than your competitor is a huge advantage in the age of knowledge. Feedback is a necessary element of a learning cycle. In the 1950s, Walter Shewhart and Dr. W. Edwards Deming popularized this scientific learning cycle. In many business and scientific circles today it is known as the Shewhart cycle or the Deming cycle. There are four steps in the learning cycle: Plan-Do-Study-Act. Feedback occurs in the Do phase of the cycle, where data is collected to better understand how a process works. It helps answer the question: “Is the process producing the expected products and results?” Without feedback there can be no learning.

In the industrial age, learning depended primarily on how quickly managers could solve problems. The new policies and procedures were created primarily by management and were to be implemented by employees. Management used command and control and management theory from Taylor Scientific to accomplish this. In the Industrial Age it is the management that knows the most. They were responsible for creating the policies and procedures and then holding the people accountable to whom they used Management By Objectives or MBO (performance appraisals and pay-for-performance policies). Feedback took the form of corrections to policies and procedures created by management. Feedback depended on the manager.

adapt to change

Feedback is needed to work with change. Change can occur both inside and outside the system. A system is a series of interdependent processes that exist to achieve an objective or purpose.

A key success factor is having the ability to understand the nature of change and respond to change appropriately to achieve desired results. Change becomes, therefore, something to be detected and acted upon to adapt to it. Therefore, the change cannot be controlled or managed. It can only be detected, anticipated and adapted to

The organization that can accelerate change and engage everyone to participate will create a competitive advantage. We are now in the age of knowledge and these MBO strategies and techniques no longer give us the speed to adapt to changes fast enough to remain competitive.

Feedback provides a stimulus to bring about change. All change creates imbalance that generates motivation to adapt.

create responsibility

Holding employees accountable for methods and their agreements (commitments) is the most effective strategy for performance. Holding people accountable for results can have unintended consequences. Feedback provides the final key step in our definition of accountability. To build trust, we must expect employees to honor their agreements. We must hope that their integrity can be trusted. We should expect them to do what they say they will do. When they don’t keep their agreements, we need to remind them. We must bring that to your attention. This is the role of feedback. Feedback provides confirmation that people kept their agreements. It provides confirmation that people have integrity.

retain talent

Finally, feedback is important to retain talent. Retaining talent and creating a culture of trust are two of the most important challenges facing leaders in the next ten years according to a 2011 study by SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management). To optimize retention and trust, managers (and all employees) need to know how to create employee engagement.

Frequent feedback is an extremely important element in creating an environment of employee engagement. A better ability to give and receive feedback will improve the relationship between supervisors and employees. According to Gallup, employee retention is directly dependent on the quality of the relationship with the employee’s immediate supervisor.

Giving and receiving frequent feedback willingly means that we are involved and committed to the organization and our relationships.

Why Fearless Feedback?

Organizations must learn faster than their competitors, they must create engaged workers, they must create an environment of accountability, and they must adapt to change faster than competitors. All managers must learn to work with change and stop trying to manage change. A key element to achieving these results is creating a culture of trust. Most research on organizational development confirms the importance of trust. High confidence destroys fear or neutralizes the effects of fear. When there is a lot of trust, people are willing to be vulnerable.

Because the most successful organizations are those that can adapt to change, the ability to work with change becomes a required competency in today’s fast-paced global economy. Receiving feedback in a fearless environment allows everyone to take positive steps to work with change. In his book, Managing Transitions, William Bridges emphasizes the need for trust in management as a basic component of working with multiple simultaneous changes.

Giving and receiving feedback is a critical element of trustworthy communication.

Feedback is a critical element for employee engagement. Fearless feedback is the best. Right now, most organizations and most leaders are unable or unwilling to provide courageous feedback. Unless we can deliver bold feedback, it will be hard to get employee engagement. This could explain why we can only achieve an average employee engagement of 31%.