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Why Managers Should Give Up Feedback And Pay More Attention

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Many business books purport to challenge the received wisdom. After all, what is the point of another book reinforcing what we already know or believe? (Which is not to say that there are not plenty like that.) But Nine Lies About Work (Harvard Business Review Press) is a lot more successful in this than most. Using a great pile of data — co-author Marcus Buckingham is an experienced researcher currently heading all people and performance research at the ADP Research Institute, while his colleague Ashley Goodall is senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco — but also a readiness to look at things askance, the authors making a compelling case for the argument that much of what is done in the world of work is a waste of time, money and effort.

Their questioning of the obsession with listing and then developing the attributes of leadership is well covered elsewhere. An examination of this subject is particularly pertinent at the moment, especially in the U.K., given the ongoing search for a new Prime Minister and the analyses of the failings of Theresa May. But the real value of a book sub-titled "A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World" is its challenging of a lot of the ideas that have become sacrosanct in modern corporate life. Things like culture, the notion that the best people are well-rounded, the need to focus on people with high potential. And feedback.

The first — Jane Austen-ish — words of the chapter devoted to this most vexing of issues are: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a millennial in possession of a job must be in want of feedback." At a time when it seems that just about everybody in business — leader or consultant — is in thrall to the idea of making this "special" generation happy, a statement that even suggests that there might be other priorities is to be welcomed heartily. But, as Buckingham and Goodall point out, it is not just millennials who crave all this commentary. "It goes without question that feedback for each and every one of us at work is a good thing, and that more feedback is an even better thing," they write. "As a result, today we are blessed with upward feedback, downward feedback, peer feedback, 360-degree feedback, performance feedback, developmental feedback, constructive feedback, solicited, unsolicited and anonymous feedback, and with all of these flavors and variants has emerged a cottage industry of classes to teach us both how to give this feedback and how to receive it with grace and equanimity." Part of the problem is — as Buckingham and Goodall discuss in the following chapter — that people are not nearly as good at rating their fellow human beings as they think they are. And the reason for that is, Buckingham said in a recent interview, we are "only at baby steps" when it comes to data about people.

But there is a bigger issue — and one that underlies much of the book. This is that a lot of what human resources specialists and hence management teams think improves performance is at best only moderately successful and at worst is counter-productive. Accordingly, giving people feedback so that they know how they are measuring up against what is expected of them sounds a good idea. But Buckingham and Goodall offer various psychological explanations why other factors might come into play and negate the effects of feedback. More simply, though, they suggest that what people want is not feedback, but attention. Preferably, positive attention. This fits with Buckingham's idea that focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses is the basis for excellence. For those that think this might be a little soft when surely a hard-driving approach to eliminating mistakes and relentless improvement is the way to success, the book offers the example of Tom Landry, legendary coach of the Dallas Cowboys football team for 29 years. Instead of concentrating on missed tackles and dropped balls, Landry instead focused his players' attention on little things that they had done well. His reasoning, according to Buckingham and Goodall, was that there was  an infinite number of ways to do the wrong thing, but a finite number of ways to do the right thing. The idea was to capture the distinctive moments of excellence and enable the individual players to learn how to repeat them. This is valuable in its own right because often people do good things without realising how they did them, but it also leads Buckingham and Goodall back to their central argument that it is attention — rather than feedback — that improves performance. Of course, that attention will involve managers asking questions of employees. But in this new world they will be much more revealing and less formulaic than the ones that currently drive so many employees — and probably their managers, too — to despair and hence to that lack of engagement that is seen as such a problem in today's workplaces.

 

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