Author, consultant and leadership coach. Co-Founder and President, Academic Leadership Group. Instructor, Harvard Extension School.
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World Bank President Jim Yong Kim once told a Washington Post reporter, “No matter how good you think you are as a leader, my goodness, the people around you will have all kinds of ideas for how you can get better. So for me, the most fundamental thing about leadership is to have the humility to continue to get feedback and to try to get better.”
It is too often a reality of organizational life that the higher up an organization you go, the less likely you are to receive candid feedback about your performance. Even well-intentioned leaders who ask for feedback (“Tell me how I’m doing, I really want to know.”) will often receive platitudes in return.
What are your options as a leader if you really want to know how you are doing? The most effective feedback is often qualitative. When I begin a coaching assignment, I encourage the client to consider a qualitative 360 assessment. During this 360, I ask a range of folks (direct reports, peers, any higher-ups, board members, key stakeholders, etc.) a series of open-ended questions. These questions yield rich behavioral insights into the leaders’ strengths and weaknesses — and how they can leverage those strengths and mitigate the weaknesses.
Here are some sample questions that I find to be helpful in the interview:
• What are their strengths?
• How can they best leverage these strengths?
• What are their weaknesses?
• What would significantly improve their effectiveness?
• What should they continue/stop/start doing to improve their effectiveness?
As you can see, these questions are not exactly rocket science. However, the resulting data provides a rich picture of the leader’s overall performance through multiple lenses, as well as practical, actionable suggestions on how to improve.
If you are not working with a coach, or would like to take a more direct route, I encourage you to ask a better feedback question — meaning a question that will yield candid actionable insights. Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone, authors of Thanks for the Feedback, encourage leaders to ask this question: “What’s one thing you see me doing (or failing to do) that holds me back?” You can ask this question of your direct reports, your peers, your board — the more you can get a full 360 view of your leadership, the better.
Don’t forget: feedback is step one. Step two is to go back to the people who shared their feedback to tell them the themes that you are taking away, the actions you are planning to take and any support you might need from them. Bonus points for taking step three, which is going back to the same group of people six months later to get their feedback on progress made, any missteps and advice needed moving forward.
Feedback is an incredibly powerful tool. If leaders use it often and well, it has the power to change an organization’s culture. There is so much conversation in leadership development programs about culture change and peak organizational performance. A leader’s ability to receive feedback, reflect and learn — and to make that learning transparent to the organization — is one of the biggest levers at their disposal to lead an organization toward peak organizational performance. If you are giving yourself permission to learn, you are doing the same for everyone else in the organization, and what a gift that is.
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