Is feedback culture all it’s cracked up to be?
Employee development is everyone's responsibility every day
The problem? The end shouldn't justify the means, which is, unfortunately, the message from An Everyone Culture.
Learn about the 9 common mistakes about people development spotted in the book.
Table of Contents
This is not a summary of the book. Instead, I offer my learnings and thoughts based on reading it, in combination with my own experience and interpretations.
The quick and dirty
Title: An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization / Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey
One sentence about the book: The book is guaranteed to trigger a strong emotion in you, for better or worse (for me it was the latter).
The book in one sentence: A primer on creating a DDO (deliberately developmental organization), from the lens of the adult development theory, with concrete examples from 3 companies.
Reading recommendation (yes/pass/must): Pass…
When good intentions go wrong
The book starts with a wonderful premise: employee development is the single best way to get both the people and the organization to fulfill their potential.
The authors describe happiness at work as a process of human flourishing, not a stable state of seeing the good and overlooking the negative. With that in mind, they suggest that the development path is through continuously working on your limitations. Doing so will shift your mindset, make you happy, and your company culture better.
And it's not just about the individual; the organization benefits from greater resilience and business performance. Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs) are claimed to be a better fit to deal with the adaptive challenges of a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world.
These great promises are taking a turn for the worse pretty early on. The book describes 3 exemplar companies and their practices for developing their workforce using continuous feedback. What I took most out of this book are the anti-patterns (i.e. what not to do), rather than inspiring ideas.
In this article, I describe 9 such anti-patterns with the hope that you will be more mindful of them when developing your team(s).
A few words about Deliberately Developmental Organizations
DDOs are companies that intentionally focus on developing their employees into a better version of themselves. They see people development as an integral part of achieving business outcomes rather than balancing the investment between these two aspects.
How do they achieve it? They design and implement rituals, policies, and processes that aim to work on personal development day in and day out. These practices can be found anywhere from interviewing candidates to onboarding new employees, how meetings are structured, and more.
The book uses these practices to showcase the authors' adult development theory. The backbone of the theory is that we keep developing through adulthood through 3 linear states:
Socialized mind - defining ourselves based on our relationships with others
Self-authoring mind - generating an internal seed of judgment and a self-belief system
Self-transforming mind - the ability to step back and reflect on the limits of our self-ideology
Vertical leadership by Ryan Gottfredson, based on Kegan & Lahey’s adult development theory
9 Anti-patterns to watch out for
"Be more candid", "don't sugar-coat things", "don't wait for a bi-annual cycle", "implement a 360".
The discourse around company culture, growth mindset, and continuous learning often goes back to feedback: more, better, faster.
But is the feedback culture all it's cracked up to be?
Too often leaders sin in advice-giving and course-correction attempts because it's the norm. In the next lines, I describe a few practices which the book recommends directly or implicitly. I call these anti-patterns because, in reality, I find them as practices you should absolutely avoid:
1. Being constantly on
When providing feedback, think of the forest, not the trees. Address the crucial points, instead of dwelling on each and every thing that you notice. Not mentioning everything doesn't mean you're letting things slip. It does mean that you make it easier for the person to who you give feedback to digest it and act on it without getting lost.
2. Focusing on weaknesses/gaps
Change follows the path of least resistance. In other words, You need to pursue actions where the lowest energy is required to move forward. Keep telling someone what they're doing wrong, and you'll find that improvement takes forever, if it's even sustainable. It requires far less energy to work branch from something you do well than to close a gap in something you don't.
So, should you ignore the negative consequences of a person's actions? No, not at all. Instead, focus on the actions and bring to light how they make you or others feel. Discuss how the person can use their strengths in a way that mitigates the downsides.
As an alternative, you could take the advice from Marcus Buckingham and play to the person's strengths and manage around their weaknesses. Think about what change you could apply to the team setting, the structure of work, or the context to mitigate the shortcomings. Then, put the spotlight on the person's strengths and allow them to use them to radiate to everything else they're doing.
3. Referring to the "truth"
When it comes to humans and our behaviors, you can probably forget about the accuracy, the truth, and root causes. Humans are complex; We're not computers, don't think binary, and don't act in a purely linear sequence.
What does this have to do with giving feedback? It's simple: the fact you think something to be true doesn't mean someone else sees it in the same way. Don't assume everyone sees something as you do and ignore the urge to think everything has one specific reason. There are usually multiple intertwined factors that influence human behavior.
4. Don't assume people's motives/intentions/meaning
This one is a natural continuation of the previous point. We each perceive the world through our unique lens and interpret it based on our unique baggage.
Think about the many times you were in a meeting and said something which you thought was an absolute fact; remember the surprise you felt when you realized afterward that some participants understood something entirely different or gave it a twist of their own?
When engaging in feedback exchange, focus on how what happened affected you or others. Inquire what were the motives and let the receiver do the heavy lifting when it comes to why it happened and how to make it better.
5. Opting for feedback by default
One of the biggest traps of a feedback exchange is the appearance as if there's one way to do something and that the giver knows this truth. Complex systems seldom see just one root cause or one best solution. Context is ever-evolving, which causes and solutions that might have worked at one time or space to not be relevant in another.
So what can you do? Instead of opting in for feedback and "correction", opt more for coaching conversations. In these interactions, you support the other person in going through their own process of evaluating and advancing through the situation based on their own context. You ask more questions, summarize and reflect back at them. Your positioning becomes that of a thought partner, not an evaluator.
6. Trying to make individuals better/change
Let's get it out of the way first; people don't change much, definitely not quickly or due to external reasons, unless a life-changing event happens. Our job as leaders is not to change, improve, or develop others. We are there to create the conditions that are conducive to that happening as an emergent property. The implication is that we need to make it more likely to happen through people's interactions within their team or organization, and by how they engage with their work.
Though in the book all 3 exemplar companies are presented as implementing similar concepts, I actually see them adopting 2 distinct strategies:
Individually changing employee behaviors and tendencies directly by discussing them, labeling them, and aggressively challenging them daily (in the book this is employed by Bridgewater and Next Jump)
Fostering an environment where leadership is distributed, where people develop through the on-job responsibilities and the way interactions are designed (this approach is represented in the book by how Decurion operates)
Leadership is about the latter. It's not about hammering in you every day all the things you need to change.
7. Changing by push
Let me give a short refresher about some of the things mentioned earlier in the article:
Change follows the path of least resistance (aka lowest energy gradient)
Leadership is about creating the conditions for change/growth
We should allow employees to make sense of their own context
In complex systems, which human systems are, root cause and absolute truth are not really a thing
With these in mind, I pose the following claim: efforts to push change from top-down by designing programs behind the closed doors of a leadership forum are doomed to fail. It's a waste of time, resources, employee engagement, and of the talents in your company.
What's the alternative? Change by pull. Tap into the wisdom of the crowds (your employees), start with small experiments, and look for the patterns that emerge. When you see something that works, support your team members in amplifying it, and when the opposite happens, dampen it.
8. Feeling "pain" through the development journey
I'll be honest, one of the things I disliked about this book the most is how the authors seem to celebrate the notion of feeling mental pain at work. To me, pain has no place at work. Generally speaking, this is probably not something that should be designed by intention to happen to you anywhere in life.
Now tension and discomfort, on the other hand, are welcomed. Think of holding a rubber band around your thumb and index finger: if you position your fingers too close together, the band will be too loose and drop. If you stretch it too much, it will fly off and probably flick you in your face (seems like a good point to mention the word pain again...).
The tension needs to be just right. The discomfort shouldn't overwhelm your team and shouldn't be too low that it creates apathy. People need to have stretch assignments or, in the words of Liz Wiseman, do work that they are capable of starting but not yet capable of mastering.
9. Compensate/incentivize culture
Goodhart's law stipulates that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
People have the tendency to game the system to achieve the goal, often unintentionally, which makes the intended effect quite useless.
Given that a company's culture is a human system, making it a complex system. Remember what we said about these environments: there's no direct connection between cause and effect. It means that culture is an emergent property, not a lever you pull, knowing what will happen consequently.
There are a few gems to uncover between the pages
The deliberation in the process is the key. Even though you can't make people develop, you can definitely and intentionally create the best grounds for that to happen.
Development in the workplace is typically about gaining skills. In today's reality, access to knowledge is easy and cheap, allowing employees greater access to acquiring skills. What's usually left untouched is the mindset shift, or shift in mental models, which An Everyone Culture touches. It's not enough to put something on your list of company values to make it a reality.
The last gem on my list is not mentioned directly in the book. Most of the practices deliberately designed by the featured companies revolve around colleagues working in groups. Often, employees participate in rituals outside of their "organic" teams.
This practice creates informal networks across the organization. Informal networks help companies with knowledge flow, alignment, and weak signal detection. The bottom line is that the decision-making can be better distributed when everyone in the company has first-hand access to information and is able to evaluate it outside of the formal hierarchies.
A few examples of informal networks at the workplace
Reflections
Before wrapping up this article, I'd like to leave you with a few questions. Use these for reflecting on how you support the development of your team members and whether you generate the conducive environment to make it happen.
You can answer these questions in private, or make it a team exercise. In any case, I recommend that you try to put some small actions in place to make sure you see the forest and make feedback a tool rather than an end.
What do you do to develop your team deliberately every day?
What's the ratio of advice-giving vs. reflection/debate-triggering in your interactions with your team?
How do you ensure your team's involvement in change initiatives?
Can you name the strengths your team members possess? How do you put them to use day in and day out?
Which informal networks exist in your organization? What do you do to intentionally create more networks and form more connections across your team or company?
What training do you provide for individual contributors and people leaders on developing coaching skills?
How do you enable employees to bring their whole selves to work? Which rituals, micro-rituals, or facilitation techniques do so?
