There Are All Kinds Of Feedback Benefits. What does feedback do for us? It opens up conversation and shuts down closed off areas between us and our people, between us and our customers and between us and valuable data. Feedback helps cut down our blind spots. No leader likes to be blindsided, right? It also helps us develop more of our potential/ We can only improve on that which we know. Once something is known and discovered, then it can be dealt with, as long as it lays undiscovered and undiscussed, the more problems is can eventually cause.
Feedback Is The Breakfast of Champions: Peyton Manning is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, setting records in his 14th season at an age when most players are long retired, and yet, after 14 seasons in the NFL, he feels that he still needs people giving feedback and helping him maintain a fresh attitude and new ideas. He demands constant advice., especially from Adam Gase, his former quarterback coach and now the offensive coordinator, to give him specific and unceasing feedback. Only his second year in his role as quarterback for the Broncos, Manning used feedback to guide his teammates’ responses and patterns to plays he called, showing them what he wanted, how he does it, all while giving them plenty of positives for the performances his feedback was reshaping. Now imagine, if Peyton were the manager of your company, he would know the strengths and weaknesses of all his team members, their tendencies and he would ask for their feedback to more effectively communicate with them. One last thing. Often, Peyton will leave post-it-notes on some of his players’ lockers with congratulations on a great practice, or something they need to work on.
Game Changer Action Steps:
Go out and kick the tires. See if your decisions and plans have their desired impact with both employees and customers. Military Generals learned long ago the best and most reliable feedback from the battle was to be engaged and go and look themselves at the progression and results.
Perform a Leadership SWOT Analysis on your key people. Discover and document strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats on each person. Proceed accordingly with feedback.
Establish a two-way feedback loop. Receiving feedback can be just as valuable as giving it. Don’t forget to show them how you have acted on the feedback you have been given.