The only thing you get to change is yourself, and in the prerequisites to this course we’ve given you real tools to do that. Now, use those tools to influence the course of your future, your team's future, and your organization's future. Make a plan for yourself that will help you help others, and learn skills to make it happen.
Listening and being sure of your values underpins everything that comes with professional influencer and leadership soft skills. We’ll go on to look at self-assessment and leadership planning, negotiation, addressing and resolving conflict, and successfully identifying and promoting circumstances you want.
After this course, you will be able to:
- state your own mission and plan with confidence
- negotiate and persuade
- deal with difficult people
- contribute to crafting a working environment you want to work in
The prerequisites for this course are Courses One and Two of the Specialization "Professional IQ: Preventing and Solving Problems at Work".
À partir de la leçon
Week 3: Difficult Conversations as a Leader
Develop skills for tackling difficult conversations, including giving and getting feedback and handling complaints.
Director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics (NCPRE), Professor Emerita of Business, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory
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As you learn to ask for feedback and act upon it.
And as you move into leadership positions one of the things you'll be called on to
do is evaluate others.
Bare in mind that there is very few actions that you take with respect to
others that changes your relationship the way evaluating someone else does and
evaluating their work.
Even if you're friends, or especially if you're friends, and
friendly telling someone that their work is up to par,
not up to par, you're going to promote them you're not going to promote them,
will have a profound effect on your relationship.
And that's something for you to prepare for.
We have a number of experts to share with us tips and
lessons they've learned through their experience in giving feedback.
Let's see what they have to say.
>> When I think about feedback.
I think about it in two different ways.
One is a little more tactical, and one is little more strategic.
So, tactically, I liking feedback similar to
any sort of sporting, or sports or sports team or
team that you see performing at a high level and sort of the entertainment space
in which is you get feedback immediately and as early and as often as possible
in order to correct the behavior while it's still fresh in someone's mind.
And that allows allows folks to immediately connect the feedback that
you're providing with the action that drove the need for the feedback and
that's both positive and constructive, right?
If someone does something really well, it's important to make sure they know that
that worked really well, and if something didn't go as well as it should have.
It's important to provide the constructive or developmental feedback so
they can correct the behavior and understand exactly what drove it.
>> So when it comes to giving feedback,
I don't know that there's a specific script that I follow.
If you talk to the people that work with me and work for me,
they'd probably say that I go to the same phrases over and over again, and
maybe that's somewhat subconscious.
I think that I have a standard approach that I take, and
the language that I use may vary.
But in general,
I think there's different types of feedback that you need to provide.
As a consultant as somebody that has come through the ranks of the organization,
I've served as a staff.
I've served as an intern.
I've served as a senior associate.
So, I've had the responsibility of having to work in the details and
the nitty gritty of the document.
So for me, sometimes it's hard to separate myself from the minutia.
So my teammate provided me with a client deliverable, and what they really need
feedback back on is the larger messaging or some of the broader recommendations,
but for me, I just can't help myself, I see some of the finer details.
I'll notice that we have words that are misspelled or
formatting that could be improved.
And that's not quite as helpful for my team.
They could run a spell check and find where there's errors.
But they can't run a spell check or a computer system to tell them
where there's a larger opportunity to provide value to the client.
So while I do provide feedback on the minutia, it's a struggle for
me to make sure that I'm really giving the team feedback on what's important to them.
And based on the nature of the feedback, that will change how I approach it.
>> You definitely pick and
choose your moments as far as how you give degrees of feedback.
I will always try to give constructive feedback because
what I've learned is if you really come down hard on someone
you're going to alienate them pretty quickly.
And they're going to stop having an interest in working for you.
So, you need to work with them when you're giving feedback.
And if it's something that is very critical to a project that maybe
they're way off base or they're doing something incorrect or
something that really annoys you.
I think that there's ways that you can put it from the perspective of
walking in someone else's shoes is the way I guess I would put it.
So, what I try to do is make them or help them to understand how I feel.
So, I try to use I statements and things that will have them appreciate what I'm
going through with the behavior that they're experiencing or demonstrating.
And in getting it to a point where they're a little more self-aware
as well as aware of this impacts the team.
And hopefully that gets them to develop and
move up to the next level from a professional perspective.
And I get what I would like.
Which is that I can hopefully take care of something that's,
not pushing the team in the right direction and I also get another teammate
who is now a little bit more on board with what the team is trying to accomplish.
>> There're two more things to know about giving feedback.
One of them is that you're often told
a really good way to give feedback is a compliment sandwich.
That's where you say something positive slide in the negative,
say something positive.
Here's the problem with that.
The research tells us that human cognition, what we remember most of any
interaction, is affected by the primacy and recency effect.
The first thing you hear and the last thing you hear are what you remember, so
in that compliment sandwich, the great, great,
great bread might totally obscure the improve, improve, improve middle part.
And so someone will lose that.
It's far better simply to say I really appreciate the effort you put into this or
I see you worked hard on this and there are ways this could be better.
To help cultivate those who work for you and
whom you are evaluating to have a growth mindset as well.
Here're some final tips on best practices in giving feedback.
Choose an appropriate time and place.
Stay focused, factual, and calm.
Talk about conduct, don't diagnose people.
Don't say you did this because you have a tendency to.
Simply say on this date at this time this happened and this was a problem because,
if you talk about the effect on other people, that can be very helpful as well.
Here's how when you spoke that way in the meeting it affected other people.
Here's a way you could have done it that would be better and
I expect you to do that in the future.
Solicit the other person's perspective.
Give the other person room to give you feedback.
Help the person problem solve and a growth mind fits sort for
how this can get better.
And most of all leave clear takeaways messages.
Don't obscure in that compliment.
Here's what I'd like to see you do better, here's my expectation,
I expect this never to happen again.
I look forward to watching your improvement.
A clear take away message so
someone knows what to do to improve is part of what makes you a good leader.
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C. K. GunsalusDirector of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics (NCPRE), Professor Emerita of Business, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory
