She who controls the agenda – Part 1

Yep, it’s that time again.  You have to get the board agenda set.  Have to work out what the heck we need to do this time.  Have to corral the chairman, the CEO, other interested parties and get them all to agree.  If you can get their attention, that is.

It’s an important document, the agenda, although its value is not widely understood.  The fruits of a good agenda are that:

• You will ensure that you have covered all the necessary issues – nothing important or essential will have been missed
• The board will be given the best shot at completing the most important pieces of business
• Everyone should be able to contribute towards the meeting’s objectives
• Everyone will have a much better chance of feeling , at the end, like “That was a productive meeting”.

And from a purely personal perspective viewpoint, she (or he) who controls the agenda has a pretty good chance of controlling the meeting.

How do you get everything necessary onto the agenda?

What if about three-quarters of the agenda was already set and agreed on?  Yeah, I’ll take some of that.

You can generally bank on 4 categories of agenda item.

1. There are standing agenda items which occur at every meeting, mostly formal ones and regular reports.  You can collect a list of these by looking over the last 4 or 5 agendas.
2. There are other things which the board is required to do, which recur on an annual basis, and which need to be dealt with at pretty much the same time each year.  It’s not hard to list all these and add them into the board’s annual calendar.
3. Some matters may need to be addressed at regular intervals during the year, but do not require review at every meeting.
4. Then there are the bespoke matters which arise out of the ongoing operation of the company, and will depend on what is hot at the time.

Sort out the first three categories, get the board to agree on them as a rolling program, and the majority of the agenda will be pre-written.

1.         Standing agenda items

Most of these will be familiar – apologies, approval of minutes, declarations of interest, committee reports.  Add the CEO’s report, financial report and any necessary business unit reports, and the list should be just about complete.

2.         The annual program

The most likely candidates for annually recurring items include these:

• Setting or approving next year’s strategic directions and goals – usually early enough in the annual cycle so that when the next financial year is about to start, the strategy will already have been agreed.  If you have a 1 July start to the FY, then the company will have a head start if the strategy is approved by March, because there will be a significant amount of operational planning which will need to fall out of the strategy.
• Setting or approving next year’s operational plan and budget.  Again, on the basis of a 1 July start, it is helpful for management to kick off the year with a concrete set of financial goals, so having these items approved by end of May is advisable
• Approving the annual financial statements – this is always driven by regulatory requirements which provide that the annual financials be approved and lodged with ASIC within a specified period (e.g. 4 months from the end of the FY for public companies)
• Completing CEO and executive staff performance assessments, and salary reviews – the finalisation of performance reviews will generally depend on the availability of the company’s annual results.  The overall salary review budget for the whole of the workforce generally needs to be set in conjunction with the FY budget.
• Holding a board meeting held in an interstate or regional location. or a facility outside head office
• Making time for the board to have a blue sky thinking session beyond the next year.

3.         Semi-annual agenda items

There are other topics which the board may wish to review at more regular intervals, but not at every meeting.  These can include:

• Compliance and risk management
• Progress report on execution of the strategic plan
• Developments in the external environment
• Customer or client complaints

Knowing when each of these matters is up for consideration helps management to make the necessary enquiries and prepare the appropriate reports

4.         Bespoke items

There will inevitably be one-off items which need inclusion in the agenda.  Major business transactions requiring the board’s approval are a common example.

There is one other way to make sure that all the necessary items are covered in the agenda – ASK.  On the board which I currently chair, I circulate the main elements of the agenda about 10 days before the scheduled meeting to the board and senior management, and ask for comments and suggested additions.

I don’t commit to including everything suggested into the agenda, but at least everyone has the opportunity of input.

A collateral benefit of consulting ahead of the meeting is that it helps minimise that potential destroyer of a well-constructed agenda: “other business”.  You have a good chance of flushing out possible red herrings before the meeting, rather than have to spend time during the meeting working out whether they should be dealt with or not.

With a bit of one-time organisation, and the board’s concurrence, life can be a whole lot less stressful come agenda time.

This Consulting Life

Sometimes I’m standing in the middle of a big conference room and I think: “I love my job”.  I’m surrounded by a group of smart, capable, usually passionate people, and it’s as if I’ve been thrown the keys to an Aston Martin DB9 V12 Vantage, and the salesman has said, “Here, go take this for a spin.”

I’ve spent the last couple of days with the committee of an iconic sporting club, along with their senior staff.  The committee members all do their governance job for nothing, other than their love of the club and their passion for the game.  They are planning their strategy for the next 4 years.

I get to twirl the baton.  All I really have to do is set up the framework and let their talent and accumulated wisdom fill it up.   Then I just synthesise it a bit, and play back their own cleverness and insight to them.

I also get to spend a couple of days in an idyllic spot in regional Victoria, hang out with interesting people, and learn things myself.  Then they pay me for it.  Life’s good.

I sat on the plane coming back and thought about what had worked well.  A few things stood out:

Chemistry

I only like taking on a major job with clients when we’ve been able to suss each other out beforehand.  I have previously spent time with this committee, when I had sat through one of their committee meetings.  The chairman had virtually dictated to them that they had to spend an hour listening to this alleged expert about “what good committees do”.  While I waited for my turn on the agenda, I amused myself by timing each agenda item.

I played the timings back to them in my presentation, and noted that they had spent 42 minutes on one minor operational item; 15 minutes discussing one of the bar staff who had recently resigned; 5 minutes on finances; and 6 minutes on strategy.  They took it pretty well, and I suppose after that they concluded I wasn’t just a finger-wagging pointy-head.  Anyway, they asked me back to run their strategy retreat.  I certainly felt there was the right chemistry for us to work well together.

Clarity

We spent some time at the outset establishing just where on the Strategy Continuum the committee wanted to be (see Avoiding Strategy Ping-Pong).  They felt they would like to be slap bang in the middle, where strategy is developed jointly by the committee and management.  That worked for them because they would get some solid input from the staff, who would also feel shared ownership of the strategy and shared responsibility for executing it.

As ever, it doesn’t necessarily matter where you are on the continuum, as long as you are there consciously and by choice.  The joint ownership of strategy was referenced a number of times during the retreat by both management and the committee, and they felt good about it.

Responsibility

There was a potential wobble early in the retreat, when one of the committee members said, “This is a club, not a business, and the members just want to come and play their game.  They don’t care about this strategy stuff, so what are we doing?”  We had a chat, based on that view, about the responsibilities of governing bodies.

The members’ wants and needs are fair enough, but in the end the conclusion was that in any member-driven not-for-profit there will always be those (relatively few) people prepared to step up and be the custodians, planners and executors –  that’s why the rest of the membership are able merely to pay their fees, turn up and enjoy their club.  And that’s the way it will always be.  The up-steppers and the beneficiaries of the stepping up.

Learning

The concept of club v. business continued to rattle around, cropping up at various crunch points.  Then Tom, the youngest and most junior person there, dropped in this: “My dad says he thinks of organisations like ours as a ‘not-for-loss’ “.  That really clicked with everyone, and put the whole “are-we-running-a-business” debate into a different perspective.

For the rest of the retreat they referred to themselves as a not-for-loss.  Thanks Tommy.  You never know whence a nugget of wisdom may drop.  I’ll certainly be using that one again.

Visualising

The club’s general manager was keen for me to play the “what kind of car are we?” game with the committee and staff.  I thought it was a bit corny, but if that’s what the client wants …. So we played the game, and 4 groups went off to have a discussion which was really about what kind of organisation they needed to be to reach their intended 2016 destination .

They came back with some thoughtful and insightful responses framed around car brands.  As a bonus, out of that work we have started to distill the essence of the club’s brand.  In the end-of-retreat debrief, they rated the “what kind of car” game as one of the best sessions.  So I should be less snooty in future about corny visualising games.

(Note to self – why does the “what kind of car” game so frequently end up with people wanting to be Audis?)

One other bit of visualising got the team particularly engaged – we threw up the Google Earth view of the club’s land on the big screen, and it very effectively grounded the discussion on the property strategy:  ”Ah, so that’s where our tenant is growing the bok choy garden …  maybe we could do something better with that land.” Wish I had thought of the screen shot, but it was the idea of one of the committee members.

*****

As we walked back to the car park after the retreat, one of the committee members said to me, “Thanks David, I guess you did what consultants always do – we give you our watch and you tell us what time it is.”  Actually mate, what I think I do is just help you pull up your sleeve, so you can tell the time all by yourselves.

Now that’s a real job

You may (or may not) have noticed that I haven’t posted here for a while.  I’ve had another career going – full time carer.  And it’s been, well, full time.

The Squadron Leader had an accident at work.  (Anyone who knows my wife Brigitte knows why she’d be called the Squadron Leader, and it’s not just because that was her rank when she left the Air Force.)  She only slipped down one little step at work, but managed to give herself a catastrophic foot injury, the kind that is severe but rare, and gets the specialists excited in their own morbid way.  A buzz went round the Emergency Department when the orthopaedic registrar gushed: “We’ve got a Lisfrank’s fracture!”  Talk about schadenfreude.

So I haven’t been blogging much.  But I’ve been learning plenty.

“Full time carer” is an often repeated phrase, frequently used but perhaps spoken a little dismissively.  Having had a go at it for 7 weeks, I have much more sympathy for anyone who is actually doing it.  You still have your own stuff to do, plus the patient’s stuff that they can’t now do, plus the actual caring part.

Luckily, not having a real job (well, not a full time one anyway), I have had the flexibility to adjust my schedule and ease back on the fee-earning part.  How people without that flexibility manage in similar circumstances, I can hardly imagine.  There have been a couple of assignments I have absolutely had to do, and then I’ve had to arrange respite care for the patient.

The impact on the caree is probably underestimated as well.  The Squadron Leader is generally a clone of the Eveready Bunny, so only being allowed to move from the bed to the toilet to the couch has been particularly tough.  Even watching box-set after box-set of DVDs pales after a while.  The frustration of the patient is understandable, but it’s something extra the carer has to manage as well.

I for one will never underestimate what it takes when someone describes themselves as full time carer.  I know, now, that is a real job.

The Squadron Leader is on the mend, although still condemned to the couch.  And I am back on the blog. (And posting this from a new blog editor program – fingers crossed!)

To tell or not to tell – what’s in your personal brand?

“Horribly wishy-washy.”  That was the email response I got from my client Bob to a proposal which he had requested for a NFP board he is on, and which I had spent a couple of hours crafting.

Bob expanded his views in a subsequent phone call.  “What are you trying to do, sound like some kind of ageing hippie?  It makes you sound soft, and you’re not soft, and we can’t afford to have the board think you’re soft.”

I thought I had done quite a tight proposal, but it turned out that the bit which had pushed Bob’s button was my “differentiation” material.

I had originally written the template for that proposal because I had been asked to pitch for a high profile corporate job, somewhat outside my usual sphere of operations.  Only one other pitch had been sought, from the doyen of that part of the trade.  I reckoned there was little point in me doing a me-too proposal, and that my best tactic would be clear differentiation (oh, and price – can’t deny that).

The pitch included this:

“Zentricity is a small consultancy I established following my retirement from full time involvement in the corporate world.  It is not so much a business as an opportunity to live my purpose:  helping people and organisations find clarity and direction.

“Zentricity is run on 3 basic business principles:

• Is any potential assignment aligned with my purpose?
• Can I make a positive difference to clients or potential clients?
• Will there be the right chemistry between me and clients to co-create a successful outcome?”

I was a little surprised to win the corporate job.  I am not sure how much of the win was price, and how much was the “differentiation”.  But I deemed it to be a winning pitch, and trotted the template out for Bob, and got the reaction about being “soft”.

I have had similar reactions before, when I think about it.  I originally had a website with my brand name, which I had set up to support my small civil celebrancy practice.  When I decided that that I should also have a web presence to support the consultancy business, my idea was to have a common, branded landing page with links from there to the celebrancy site, the consulting site and the blog.

I tested that idea with a few trusted consultancy clients, and I was a bit surprised at their strong and unanimous view that I should keep the two sites separate.  But in the light of their reactions I did just that.

In another case, I have a joint venture partner together with whom I do occasional presentations, mostly under his firm’s brand.  He is very much against me mentioning, in my self-introduction spot, that I am a marriage celebrant; so I don’t.

So back to Bob – he is the client, he reckons he can read his board, and I don’t want to be fruitlessly standing on a soapbox.  I changed the proposal to take out the differentiation material.  The board is happy, and I have the assignment, but I can’t help feeing a bit ambivalent about it.

Notwithstanding the strongly aligned views of my corporate colleagues, I still believe that the work I do can best be done with the right chemistry.  I have managed to find that chemistry with some pretty hard-arsed denizens of the corporate world.  The chemistry can only be real if I am being who I am, and the client is comfortable with that, without me hiding things.  If that is part ageing hippie, part Buddhist fellow traveller, part lawyer, part business executive, part parson, so be it.

In any event, anyone who googles either me or the brand (and who doesn’t check up on a potential business contact?) will turn up my dark hippie secrets.  So I now have that common landing page, headlined by a quote from Rumi, despite the corporate misgivings which were expressed.

Perhaps I am just being realistic, or perhaps it’s a statement – this is the kind of guy you’d be doing business with, take him or leave him.  If it means potential clients would be put off, then most likely we wouldn’t have worked that well together, and they would be better off with someone from the bag-of-fruit brigade.  I’m fine with that, because that is more likely to generate for them the necessary chemistry.

Or maybe that’s the way things are going in this ‘slashie’ working world (e.g. hippie/corporate coach), where more and more people have portfolio careers; the fact that parts of the portfolio are quite different to other parts may be recognised as a benefit, with one part informing another rather than detracting from it.

So what’s the harm in letting your personal brand reflect who you really are.  What have you got to hide?  Except those pictures taken in the bar in Ibiza, maybe.

Avoiding strategy ping-pong – finding the right place on the strategy continuum

Does it ever feel like the strategic planning process is a game of ping-pong?  Management brings strategy to the board, the board doesn’t like it; management goes away for another attempt, the board still isn’t prepared to sign off.

I’ve seen this occur on plenty of occasions.  One of the keys to effective strategic planning is of course iteration, but where the iterations are in fact second guessing, with management trying to read the board’s mind and invariably getting it wrong, a good outcome is difficult to achieve.

The second guessing usually happens because the board is not clear about what role it wants to play in the planning process, and hasn’t given the appropriate signals.  Management tries to respond by using ESP, and is generally  about as successful in the process as husbands are in using that skill.

There is a continuum for strategic planning on which, at one end, the board does the actual planning work, and at the other end management does the work and the board approves the plan.

I sit on the board of a small not-for-profit – every employee bar the managing director is engaged in delivering the organisation’s services, and there are no administrative staff.  If the board (led in this instance by the MD) does not undertake the strategic planning work, there is no-one else to do it, so we are clear about where on the continuum we sit.

In contrast, when I was a much younger lawyer and company secretary, and sat in the corner of the board room of a top ten listed company taking minutes, we had the luxury of a strategic planning department who brought the pretty-much-final version of the annual plan to the board, which asked some token questions and then approved the plan.  Again, the board was clear about its role in the process.

There are many places on the continuum in between these end points.  For example, the ASX’s corporate governance principles provide that: “Usually the board will be responsible for … providing input into and final approval of management’s development of corporate strategy and performance objectives.”

There is not any objectively right place to be on the continuum.  The board’s role in strategic planning will depend on the company’s circumstances and internal capabilities.  There is no point in management developing the initial strategy if there is not sufficient capability or experience within the management team.

The positioning on the continuum needs, in my experience, to be the subject of an explicit discussion and agreement between board and management.  With due deference to the ASX guideline, the suggestion that a board should “provide input” into the strategy process is not quite explicit enough.  Some clearer statement will help – for example, that the board will provide clear guidelines and parameters within which the strategic plan will be developed.

Setting such parameters upfront can help reduce the likelihood of management presenting a nicely developed strategic plan to the board for expansion of the business, only for it to be greeted with: “No, that’s not what we wanted.  We need an international growth option, not just organic domestic growth.”

Finding and agreeing the right position on the strategy continuum will not remove the need for iteration, which is essential to gather the contributions from everyone who has some value to add, from either board or management.  But it should negate the ping-pong effect and lead to a smoother and more effective process.

Who are your stakeholders? (And why would you care anyway?)

Don’t you find that some words, through endless public repetition, become grating and almost meaningless?  Take for example “offshore processing”.  Haven’t we all had a gut-full of hearing that term?

I got a bit like that with “stakeholder”, hearing it bandied around in all sorts of circles, whether intelligently or not.  But the concept of stakeholder is an important one in governance, and particularly so in the not-for-profit world where I often work.  So I sought the advice of my language expert and PR guru Belinda to find an alternative term.

However, even her in-depth research couldn’t turn up another viable word, so you will just  have to bear with me while I flog a possibly dead linguistic horse. Because if you want to govern your organisation effectively, you really should know who your stakeholders are, what their stake is, and who in the organisation is managing it.

So what is a “stakeholder” anyway?  The most useful definition I have found goes along these lines:

“a person, group or organisation that has a direct or indirect stake in you rorganisation because they can:

• affect, or
• be affected by

your organisation’s action policies and objectives”

The concept of stakeholder is important in the not-for-profit world because there is not usually a simple answer to the question “Who are we governing for?” (or as Belinda would have it, more correctly, “For whom are we governing?”)  In the commercial world the answer invariably given is “the shareholders”, since the primary objective is maximising shareholder wealth.

This, of course, is an over-simplification, because even commercial organisations have other parties to whom the firm’s success is vital.  But for NFPs, the lack of such an easy starting point can cause much confusion, unless some thought is given to which are the parties who have the primary interests in the outcomes of an NFP’s operations.

It is a relatively simple process to map who are the stakeholders in your organisation, if you reflect on the definition above.  Sit down with your senior management team, or your board, or preferably both, and brainstorm who might affect or be affected by what the organisation does or aspires to do.

Here are a few hints:

• in a club or other member driven organisation, obviously the members
• in a charity, the people (and their families) who access the  benefits or services which the charity delivers; and also the funders on whose continuing involvement your future depends
• in the case of all organisations, the staff whose livelihoods depend on the organisation’s ongoing viability
• the suppliers and creditors whose own viability is affected by your organisation’s ability to pay its debts as they fall due

Depending on the nature of your organisation’s operations, there will be a range of other potential stakeholders.  Where the organisation has some tax-free or tax-preferred status, the ATO is one of your important stakeholders.  Other players in your sector may also have stakes in what you do – in the medical research field, for instance, the associated scientific community.  The local communities in which your operations are conducted might also have an interest in your organisation.

My experience in helping organisations develop stakeholder maps is that, when you turn your mind to it, there will always be some people, group or body whom you have not previously recognised as having a stake in what you do, but who are worthy of inclusion on the map.

The mapping process is not, however, the end of your considerations.  Since, by definition, the parties identified can affect or be affected by what you do, you should also address how the various stakeholders are being managed. Your next steps, for each stakeholder, are:

• what is the precise nature of the stake
• who is managing the stakeholder
• what is the current status of that management process
• what if any activity ought to be undertaken to ensure that the stakeholder is being managed appropriately

Taking those steps should give you a stakeholder management action plan, an impressive development in anyone’s language.  You should also end up with more clarity around that fundamental question about whom you are governing for.

So I will stop stressing about the term “stakeholder”.  But the likes of “mandatory detention” and “pre-commitment technology” will continue to glaze me over and switch me off.

Three tactics for a great board presentation

You can be facing a tough audience when you are presenting to a board of directors.  Since the board sits at the top of the hierarchy, the directors get to make their own rules and run their own timetable.  So if you are presenting to the board, you have to fit in with their rules and their agenda.

Here are 3 suggestions to help you get the best possible response from the board:

1.   Check the board paper and the presentation slides carefully

Directors generally hate typos and numbers that don’t add up.  If they find one, it will at best chip away at your credibility, and at worst derail the whole presentation.   Look at Quade Cooper’s kick-off in the World Cup semi-final – out on the full and setting an adverse tone for the whole match.  One little typo can do that to your presentation. So, before your board paper is circulated to directors:

• Do a final proof read, and add up any numbers again (and don’t just rely on spell-check, or you might let “manger” slip through instead of “manager”)
• Get someone else to do a cold-eye review of the paper, just to be sure, to be sure
• Do the same for the slides which you will be using in the meeting.

2.   Have at least two versions of the actual presentation you will make to the board

Board meetings invariably don’t run to time, and things get squeezed.  The further down the agenda you are, the more likely it is that the time originally allotted for your presentation will be compressed.  Even if you are ushered into the boardroom  on time, the board will often ask you to shorten the presentation to help them stay on track with other agenda items. To avoid stressing yourself:

• Be prepared, and have a second version of the presentation up your sleeve which is half the length of the scheduled one.  That way, if you are squeezed you will still be able to get your desired message across without having to rush, or make decisions on the run about what you will leave out.  If you end up with more than half your time, it is easier to add things back in than decide what to chop.
• If you find yourself outside the board room with your allotted time ticking away, don’t sit there fretting.  Stay calm and, each 5 minutes or so,  mentally work out which of your slides you will skip, so you can have a presentation which will fit comfortably into the remaining time.

3.   Never assume they will remember

Boards generally meet no more than once a month, or even less frequently.  Each director has at least one other job, and often sits on one or more other boards.  They probably don’t keep previous board papers (and arguably they shouldn’t).  It is no surprise that they may not be able to keep mental track of  all the relevant issues for your organisation.

You should expect that they will not remember what was discussed last time that the issue on which you are presenting came before them, or what decision was made. You can avoid false starts this way:

• Always start with a re-cap of what has previously happened in relation to the issue, and what the current state of play is.  Everyone will then be at the same point from the outset.
• Don’t be concerned if it sounds to yourself that you are stating the bleeding obvious. I can pretty much guarantee that at least one director will remember nothing, or remember it differently and incorrectly.

If you have done these 3 things, have a good grasp of your material, and have plenty of illustrative examples for your important points in your pocket, you will be able to present confidently, and greatly increase your chances of getting your desired outcome.  And you won’t kick out on the full.

Effective conversations, part 5 – Dealing with power differentials

Have you ever felt compelled to have a conversation with your boss, when you reckon they are wrong and you just might be right?

My friend Donna asked me about a conversation she needed to have with her boss.  There are some current pressing issues in the organization, and the boss has been forced into some difficult decisions to address them.  The boss might think she’s gone far enough, but it is likely that some further hard choices will need to be made to make the solutions sustainable.

Donna’s underlying difficulty with the conversation is the power differential which will exist in the room while the discussion is taking place.  What can you do to get the best outcome, when there is an imbalance like that?

Here are a few steps which might be taken, to give you the best shot at your desired result:

Neutralise the power

Consider how the situation can be re-framed to negate the power differential.  One way to do this is to position yourself as the subject matter expert, rather than the subordinate.  Grasp your professional discipline, if there is something appropriate you can refer to.  It might be financial expertise, legal experience, retail or engineering or IT knowledge.

I guess I was lucky with my bosses – I could always say:  “Look, I’m just going to put my lawyer hat on for a minute,” whether it was strictly a legal matter or not.  Find whatever reason you can to re-position the situation from a reporting line frame to an advisor/client kind of setting.

Why do this?

Be clear with yourself what the reason is for you having the conversation.  If or when the discussion becomes difficult, you will have a compelling reason for standing your ground.  For Donna, she expressed her reason simply as “I care.”

Why me?

Express to yourself the reasons why you are the best (or only) person to be having this conversation.  That may be because of your knowledge, or some particular analysis you have done, or some facts that only you have been able, or bothered, to gather.  Or it may be that no-one else is prepared to take on the task of having the necessary conversation.

These reasons, when identified, can give you confidence to press your points, especially if you haven’t been able to neutralise the power imbalance.

Find your space

Use all the above aids to help you visualise the metaphorical space in which you will be standing during the conversation.  What does that space look like; where are its boundaries; where will you be coming from; what will the discussion sound like?

Your space might look like the high moral ground, or you might have your back to the wall, or you might have the rest of the team standing with you cheering you on (or hiding behind you).

You might be coming from a place of genuine concern, or compassion, or solid belief in your position.  The discussion might sound measured and composed, at least on your side.

Wherever the space is, it’s better to have been there before and know what it looks like.

Rehearse

Finally, as with any difficult conversation, consider rehearsing it with someone you trust; preferably someone not involved in the situation.  Things can sound different when they are verbalized, rather than spoken in your head.  You can also fine tune things your points with the help of your sounding board.

Conversations involving power differentials can be daunting, but the chances are that you will feel worse if you don’t have them when the need arises.  Finding the right space to stand in can make such conversations a whole lot more manageable.

So good luck with your boss, Donna:  you are in the right space – let’s hope she sees the light.

Effective conversations, part 4 – giving tough feedback

I was rehearsing a potentially difficult conversation recently with my mate James, who is a senior executive.  He needed to pass on some tough feedback to another executive which he had received from a third party.

In the rehearsal he started the proposed conversation off like this:

“Steve, you’ve been doing a really good job, and you’ve been very effective in sorting out the transition to our new structure.  BUT … I need to talk to you about an issue that’s come up which isn’t going very well …”

He was then going to add in a reference to a previous (allegedly similar) incident which happened 6 months ago.

Giving effective, targeted feedback is an essential part of effective people management these days.  James was about to commit a couple of cardinal feedback sins:

1.  The devaluing “BUT”.  If you want to give positive feedback, go right ahead, and do it often.  But let that positive feedback stand on its own.  If you use it as a prelude to giving “constructive” feedback, you will at best erode the re-inforcement value of the positive feedback, and at worst negate it entirely.  Let the good stuff stand alone; let the constructive feedback come out clean, without artificially trying to sugar-coat it.

2.  The “allegedly similar situation”.  The best feedback is timely and specific; trying to link a current issue with something else which has been, or should have been, already addressed can take the conversation into counter-productive territory.  Think about what it feels like when, on the strength of something you’ve done or failed to do, your partner starts off with “You always …” or “You never …”  There’s nothing so likely to get a discussion off to a rocky beginning.

So if you need to pass on some tough feedback, try and keep it as clean and stand-alone as possible, and think about rehearsing it first with someone you trust.

And remember that the recommended ratio of positive to constructive feedback is 10 to 1!

Effective conversations, part 3 – coming to the conversation clean

Ever feel like you have missed something important? I did an interview a few days ago, and looking back now, it feels like I was sitting there in judgement mode instead of listening mode. And in doing so I may have done just that – missed something important.

I was interviewing a member of a team as part of an evaluation process.  This interview was the last but one of the series.  There have been 7 previous interviews with other team members.  Nearly all of them have had something to say about yesterday’s interviewee, both positive and negative.

This person holds a key position in the team, and the consensus seemed to be that he handled most of the role with great expertise, but lacked that last 20% which would have really enhanced his value to the team.

I realise now that I conducted the interview based around that consensus view.  The interviewee’s responses to the questions I asked were all filtered through my pre-conceptions, and I allowed them, correctly or not, to validate that view.  I probably did some retro-fitting as well.

It could well be, for instance, that the last 20% represents something that the team should be providing for themselves, instead of expecting someone else to produce it.

I wonder what I would have heard in the interview if I had come to it clean, treating it like a blank canvas – instead of seeing it as a paint-by-numbers exercise where I tried to make each response fit into one of the pre-drawn shapes.

I have been constructing a tentative set of recommendations for this assignment, even though all the interviews are not complete.  I’d better go back, unscrew the judgement filter, and let the various elements find their place – without my built-up pre-conceptions force-fitting them into a particular shape.

I will also have to be careful in future to let each conversation I have with someone be one of those blank canvases. Who knows what fresh or important insight might paint itself onto that plain white background if I do?