The Hindu Business Line : Feedback sessions that work

The board meeting was a disaster. The company was not doing too well and the directors had asked the CEO and his senior team to make presentations on the issues confronting the company. It was all too clear that the CEO and his team were not reading from the same script. There were factual disconnects; even more alarmingly, there was a disconnect between the mindset of the CEO and his senior team. The board of directors decided to ask them to sit down and have a frank disc ussion on how best to address these differences.

The CEO and his team met subsequently for a feedback session. Given the negativity in the system, the meeting soon degenerated into a crib session where all manner of real and perceived issues that affected interpersonal relationships at the senior levels came tumbling out. It was all about fingers being pointed by each member of the team at everyone else. The scene resembled a football match where each member of the unit was intent on scoring an “own goal”. As can be expected, the meeting achieved little and the warriors lived on to fight another day.

The above scene is typical of most feedback sessions. The very words seem to trigger an avalanche of pent-up bad feelings, a need to score points off each other and earn brownie points with those in authority. The ambience of these sessions is charged with negativity and mostly degenerates into a formal cataloguing of ill feelings, real and imagined.

Obviously, all that is achieved is a heightened sense of aggrievement and unhappiness at one’s subordinates, peers, superiors and at the system itself. Everyone goes away ready to store up lava for the next eruption of the volcano. The moot point is: Should feedback only mean exchanging information on things on which there are differences?

Ideally, the word feedback should be read along with its invisible prefix “constructive”. The whole game changes when it is viewed this way. The objective of such a session is to identify the trouble spots, use the collective wisdom of the group to find solutions and get everyone charged up to make it happen on the ground. The focus rapidly shifts away from personalities and their foibles to a cooperative endeavour in finding a common cause to solve problems affecting the company. The appeal should be to the highest common factor of good rather to the lowest common multiplier of problems.

To make this work in daily working life, it may help to frame a rule which says that in any such session, the starting point should be for each member to identify things that have gone well and acknowledge the contributions of others in making this happen. It is best if this is done from the heart, but for starters even a mechanical process will do. Celebrating others’ success, however minor it may be, will surely set a positive tone. Once the mood is positive, it becomes simpler to address the more difficult and contentious issues. If this is done well, it has the power to make people open their minds to what others are saying and take the first step towards listening, debating the merits, internalising and acting on feedback.

The other aspect that bears attention is to make sure that only issues are addressed and that the discussions do not revolve around actions of the various personalities involved. This helps set the context that the objective is to find a resolution to issues and not to fuel interpersonal wars. This is indeed a very difficult thing to do, but those who are running the meetings must intervene strongly whenever there is a tendency to drift into discussions on the actions / possible motivations of people. Over a period of time, it is most likely that the process will evolve from being a formal one to one which is driven by internal conviction; the evolution from personalising issues to seeing it in the organisational context will also happen.

In Sanskrit there is a wise saying: Yatha raja, thatha praja (As the King is, so the citizen). It is up to the senior management team to ensure that they set an example for others to follow. If they don’t, feedback sessions are most likely to continue to be feeding frenzy sessions.

(The writer is advisor to 3i Infotech, Manipal Education & Medical Group and IDFC Pvt Equity. He can be reached at mcshekaran@gmail.com )

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