Our guest post today is by Jesse Goldman, an executive at Rypple, who provides this post for us in the Collaboratory today on how a culture of feedback produces results.. Jesse has been a leader in disruptive technology companies, where he experienced first-hand the importance of social business practices in driving growth. At Rypple, Jesse is able to build upon his passion for social business by working closely with leading organizations and consultants on new ways to drive professional and organizational success. Rypple is the best way to give and get feedback and coaching in the enterprise, keeping managers and teams more socially calibrated. It’s used by thousands of high performing organizatons.
Top performers need to learn quickly to advance their careers. It’s no longer acceptable to wait for our next performance review, often months away, to get critical insights on how we can improve. Managers often forget about important advice and it’s usually too late to do anything concrete about what we do hear!
We need constructive feedback and coaching much more frequently to excel in today’s fast-paced business environments. A quick comment or simple kudo, such as Nice job!, can be just as valuable as more thorough advice on what we can do to improve.
This is what top performers I’ve worked with thrive on – a more interactive, social dynamic at work in which they can be faster at:
- Course-correcting
- Identifying their strengths and opportunities for improvement
- Sharing useful insights and advice with team members
Alternatives to traditional performance management are out there. Oft-quoted and much respected Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer describes the requirement clearly: “Encourage managers to have frequent, ongoing conversations with their staff about performance.”
It can be challenging to get people talking regularly and about the right things. To create effective dialogue, we need to make it easier to adopt the social behaviors of top performers:
- Getting useful feedback and advice from the people they work with
- Giving feedback to help their team improve
- Doing collaborative 1:1 coaching to align their team and get results
There are a number of simple ways to encourage these behaviors, including:
- Make it quick and frequent – brief exchanges increase participation and relevance compared to lengthy surveys, meetings and reviews
- Make it easy to engage through existing tools – including mobile devices and email
- Provide a way to share anonymous feedback – this helps overcome traditional barriers, such as management hierarchies
Making it easy to participate is the first step in creating a constructive and hiveminded work environment. Together with improving focus and alignment, it will give people at all levels within the organization the ability to take control of their own development while also helping their peers, employees, and managers grow.
Hey Bryan.
People development is the secret sauce for high performance businesses for sure. I love all of your advice, but I’m still not entirely clear about the anonymous feedback part. In our business, owning your words is essential because anonymous feedback is exceptionally hard to make sense of. I’ve been told by many consultants that providing a channel for anononymous feedback is a best practice, though I’m still not convinced. My concern is the message it sends to your organization – an assumption that management can’t be trusted, and that is not always the case.
Couldn’t agree more on the people front, Steve. It’s easy to focus on technology, and lose sight of the importance of people and process issues. While I’m not totally familiar with all parts of the Rypple technology, I think anonymous feedback is only one part of the equation. In some company cultures, honest upward feedback may be awkward or have unintended consequences. Having the option to provide anonymous feedback when it’s appropriate is probably a pretty solid customer requirement for Rypple.
Very cool. Thanks. I’d be interested in hearing from any managers who have tried it both ways. What is their POV on the role of anonymity in next generation business world?
We use anonymous feedback every week for every engagement project. It is instantly published for all of our contractors/knowledge workers to see. Instead of being fully anonymous, it is written by a ‘process facilitator’ whose sole job for the week is to manage the intricacies of the team. They can then decipher the anonymous feedback that is given by all members of the team and more therefore more accurately help the contractor/kw manage and improve upon their work the next time round. We are still along way from the next generation of 360 feedback. We have lots of little tips and tricks we do for positive feedback, but still haven’t mastered critical feedback.
Bryan, you are correct – many of our customers want the ability to share anonymous feedback, but we do also provide a way for people to have more effective face-to-face conversations. In this way, we can cater to different company cultures.
For those cultures that use anonymous feedback, one of the outcomes we’ve been seeing is that it can get more face-to-face conversations started. For example, managers review anonymous feedback with their team in staff meetings, and use it to resolve issues that may not otherwise have surfaced.
To Steve’s point below, I’d also be interested in POV’s on the role of anonymity in business.