Transcript
Hi there and welcome to section two of our introduction in the Constructive Feedback at Work course.
So why is feedback important?
As mentioned earlier, it’s far easier to commit to improving our feedback literacy when we have a deep sense of the underlying why, so let’s spend a bit of time here.
Here are four quotes I pulled from various industries.
Beginning at the upper left: “A mistake to me equals I’m getting feedback,” says trailblazing American tennis legend Billie Jean King.
For her, a mistake wasn’t an opportunity for pity or self-loathing; it was a tremendous dose of feedback from which she could learn from to improve her craft.
Moving to the right here: “As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did this.” This quote comes from MacArthur Genius recipient and psychology professor Angela Duckworth, author of an amazing book titled: Grit The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
Professor Duckworth understands as well as anybody many of the mechanisms for how people improve their performance, and she found that those at the top of their fields pursued feedback, particularly negative feedback, at every chance they could and from there worked to process that feedback for the sake of their development.
Professor Duckworth also said a few other bold quotes on feedback, including “We only learn with feedback” and another one: “I have never actually encountered a company that does a good enough job with feedback.” At the bottom left, we have “The key to learning is feedback.
It is nearly impossible to learn without it.” This comes from Steven Levitt, one of the world’s most influential economists.
And on the bottom right, we have “The most successful are the most coachable.” This comes from Tim Grover, renowned trainer of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.
For Tim, being the most coachable means an absolute obsession to your craft, which means remaining radically open to the many signals of feedback that are necessary for moving, as he puts it in his book, from good to great to unstoppable.
So team, here we have a rather interesting cross-section of folks who see feedback as not only important but as actually vital for performance improvement in their domains – whether it be tennis or economics or human improvement – just about anything.
I could have pulled hundreds of other quotes from hundreds of other domains, all of which have the same flavor as the four quotes here.
When we pair this with how organizational leaders think about feedback, you may recall our mention of Slack earlier, a company that made feedback the epicenter of how it grew to become a $1 billion dollar company in just two years, a clear picture emerges about why feedback is so important.
But a clear and convincing picture isn’t necessarily what we need here.
We need to at once hold what these industry experts say say while excavating our own experiences, while finding the picture within ourselves.
So I ask you, has feedback played an important role in your life?
What are you good at right now, and what allowed you to keep course correcting so you could get good at it?
Or, maybe put more directly in this moment, What do you want to be good at and what steps are you taking to improve?
For many of you, there must be something you are working hard to improve right now because here you are watching a course on what to me seems like the universal key to unlocking improvement.
I think about my many years training and competing in martial arts or stocking shelves at a grocery store or writing poetry or being a team leader – when I really quiet my mind and dig into those questions around improvement, I see the role of feedback in its many dimensions all throughout it.
So while we have different experiences, different nuances to our situations, it’s clear to me after discussing feedback with people from all walks of life and all over the world, that feedback is one thread that links us.
To me, it seems to be one of if not the most important aspect of our personal and professional development.
And yet who among us has received empowering and truly comprehensive feedback training at our workplace?
If you’re one of the rare few who has, congratulations!
May this course deepen what you learned.
For the rest of you, may this course provide the valuable insights you deserve.
At this point, you likely see why feedback is important, but what if we add a few words to our question?
What if our question becomes: Why is feedback important to learn about?
Do you still see the reason?
While the decades of academic research show how important feedback is, it also reveals a complexity that is not evident from those quotes.
We mentioned the work of John Hattie earlier.
Well here’s the full quote: “The most powerful single influence on achievement is feedback, but impacts are highly variable, which indicates the complexity of maximizing benefits from feedback.” Team – notice the section starting with “but” here.
Hattie’s work revealed the variability and complexity of feedback.
Just like great feedback, if adopted, can have a positive impact, bad feedback, if adopted, can have a negative impact.
And as we’ve touched on, the complexity of human-to-human communication means that feedback challenges us.
Sometimes we don’t always give great feedback, at other times we may receive great feedback but not adopt it, or we may need feedback but get nothing at all – hindering our future growth.
Put all this together and I hope you’ll see both why feedback is important and why feedback is important to learn about.
Let’s continue on this thread and learn about why feedback can be so challenging, and what we can do to address some of those challenges.