It was management expert Ken Blanchard who originally said, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions,” but this week I’ve been thinking a lot about feedback and wondering whether such a general observation is actually very helpful.
For a start, “breakfasts of champions” is a very wide genre indeed.
Champion boxer George Foreman used to start the day with coffee, toast, and jelly, and six egg whites beaten up with black pepper.
Hafthor Bjornsson (World’s Strongest Man) tucked into 500g of beef, 500g of sweet potatoes, 8 eggs, oats, fruit, nuts, and leafy greens.
I’d need to go back to bed after Bjornsson’s.
It isn’t feedback (breakfast) that we need “per se” it’s the breakfast (feedback) we actually need that helps us thrive.
All this week I have been either receiving questions about feedback or reflecting on feedback I’ve received and the common theme is that an absence of anything specific is what makes feedback pointless.
“How do I tell my partner that I don’t feel loved without putting pressure on them?”
“Tell them specifically what makes you feel like that, whether it’s the way they talk to you, touch you, treat you. Don’t worry about putting pressure on because, in the long run, there’s more pressure in not saying what we feel.”
It reminded me of an editor I used to work with from whom I learned a great deal, not least how to be more emotionally resilient.
I’d send her a piece of 700 words that I was very proud of and she’d send back a single word such as,
“Boring”
After a while, she just wrote,
“No”
It’s funny now but at the time it felt less like the breakfast of champions and more like finding a half-eaten pasty in the glove box of the car on the way to the dentist.
“I have someone experiencing burnout at work and I want to know how to support them?”
Almost every client I have who is struggling with imposter syndrome or feelings of burnout at work will tell me that they get little or no guidance in their role and never have the opportunity to review progress against the role they barely understand.
Standing on the other side of the equation in the little groups I run for business leaders I hear them telling me how worried they feel about micro-managing or upsetting their people, and these are the ones that care about being good leaders by virtue of the fact they turn up to the sessions.
So their teams are starved of feedback and the managers are either too afraid to give it or ignorant of their people trying to work without any breakfast (feedback) at all.
One of the things that get in the way of effective feedback is our fascination with measuring everything because we become obsessed with the numbers rather than the gist of the message.
The workplace mental health organisation I do some work for gives clients the opportunity to feedback after each session and mark their therapist out of 10 on a number of different criteria. It’s also anonymous which is particularly unhelpful.
Up until this week, I have had unremittingly positive feedback for the questions I write answers to.
An email arrives, “You have feedback”
Arrogantly, I assume another glowing review thanking me for my laser insight and sparkling advice.
“How would you rate your experience out of 10”
“1”
“Why did you give this score?”
“Totally missed the point”
“Anything else you’d like to add?”
“Terrible advice.”
After the shock has subsided I want to know more about what went wrong but it’s anonymous so I can’t.
“If you missed the point it’s not surprising you gave terrible advice,” my daughter says after she’s finished laughing.
I know she’s right but it still feels like a bowl of cocoa pops with water because we’ve run out of milk.
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