What Feedback Demands | Jon Kidwell

What happens when feedback is given but ignored? Discover the consequences of inaction and the power of active listening in this thought-provoking episode of the Leadwell podcast. Drawing from real-life scenarios like NPS surveys and employee evaluations, we explore the frustration that arises when feedback isn't acted upon and how it can lead to dissatisfaction and distrust. Referencing Corey Shearer's insightful book "Closing the Trust Gap," we underscore the crucial role of responding to feedback to build and maintain trust within your organization.

Join us as we dive into the essential strategies for fostering open communication and sharing actionable feedback within your team. Learn how meaningful discussions and collaborative efforts can lead to better outcomes and healthier relationships. We encourage you to engage with this episode on social media, share your thoughts, and contribute to the conversation. Your feedback is invaluable to us—rate, review, and let us know what's on your mind. Let's lead with purpose, build trust, and ensure that feedback drives action. Stay well, be blessed, and keep leading with intention.

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For more information visit https://leadwell.com

The Leadwell Podcast gives mission-driven leaders principled and practical advice to do just that, lead well.

In each episode, your host Jon Kidwell, interviews leaders with great stories, to share strategies that help leaders navigate complex, confusing, and often down-right challenging leadership, personal growth, business, and workplace culture situations.

Jon is a nonprofit executive turned coach, speaker, author, and CEO of a leadership development company. In working with nonprofits and businesses, big and small, he realized the unique challenges leaders face when they are committed to keeping the mission and people the top priority. Those leaders’ commitment to their principles and the people they lead, plus seeing the need for more leaders who strive to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons, is what inspired Jon to start a leadership development company dedicated to the success of mission-driven leaders and their organiza...

Transcript

Jon Kidwell 0:04

As leaders, we often request or demand feedback of our team, for our businesses, of ourselves, because we want to grow, we want to improve, we want to make sure what we're doing is working. But have you ever stopped and considered what does feedback demand? Welcome to the Leadwell podcast, the podcast for mission-driven leaders, where we dive into what is most important so that you can lead your business and your people well. We are doing a short series that also has short podcasts for the summer, taking a break from guests, and I would love your feedback on if you've enjoyed that. Now, continuing on that thread of feedback have you ever stopped and considered what does feedback demand? We get asked to give feedback in so many different arenas. There's NPSs for all of the places that we go. Everyone is sending me something that says rate us on a scale of one to 10. We also are getting employee surveys and culture surveys. There are assessments and employee evaluations and we do debriefs on projects. All of it is feedback. All of it is essentially how did that thing go? How are we doing? What can we do better? Which is feedback?

Jon Kidwell 1:21

And you're probably sitting there thinking, like me on most of the ones that I just listed out there, nps organizations, and there's always the like follow up and tell us like well, why did you unsubscribe? What was it that you didn't enjoy, what isn't working for you here at work, and what can we do to help you? And a lot of us take the time and dive into giving feedback and if you're like me, all of a sudden you get annoyed, you get frustrated. You start to tell yourself a story about what they're doing based on the feedback that you gave and the inaction that you are seeing. You leave it to your favorite or maybe not so favorite anymore coffee shop, or you've sent in something to your leader as kind of the anonymous culture survey, or maybe even a 360. And it's just crickets. I mean, all of us get annoyed with those organizations where we say things like well, we told the grocery store exactly what they needed to do to improve this. I mean, they asked and I told them and they're not doing anything about it. That level of dissatisfaction actually has an inverse reaction to the feedback that they wanted, because now we're even more dissatisfied. And the same is happening at work, where, as leaders, we do that same thing with assessments, with surveys, 360s. We may be as far as saying thank you, but there's no closing of the loop and there's just this void of well, the feedback has been given, but what's going on? And here's the thing that I kind of realized about feedback, and I'm going to dive into some pieces, and then what we can do about it is that feedback demands action. Action, because if there isn't any action, the purpose of the feedback becomes kind of discorrelated. I don't actually know that that's the right word, but it is counterproductive. If we ask feedback to grow, to get better, to make things more effective, and we don't take action on that feedback, we actually frustrate and dissatisfy and disconnect even further from the individual or the place that gave us the feedback. I mean, even in ourselves.

Jon Kidwell 3:48

I think about myself as a runner, and if you read the book Redefine your Servant Leadership, you know this story. If you haven't, you can go pick it up at Redefine your Servant Leadership. But I talk about my running and my body was giving me feedback. It's essentially what it was. But I would run and run and run and my hips started hurting and I just told myself I was getting old. I wasn't trying to do anything about it and it started hurting more and more and more and I started to take action on it. Now in my story, I took the wrong action. I started trying to stretch and then I started using ibuprofen and then I started using more ibuprofen and at the end of it I finally realized that I just actually worn out my shoes and the feedback that my body was giving me through my hip to my knee was saying hey, dude, you are wearing us out over here. We need new shoes because we're not getting the support that we need. And when I did that, all of those other things, including just thinking I'm getting older, started to unravel because the appropriate action was taken.

Jon Kidwell 4:53

So what does feedback demand? Feedback demands action, and it goes even better when it is the most appropriate action. So I've been man crushing a little bit on Corey Shearer. He's a friend and a growing friend, but I just I want to read from you his book a little bit Closing the Trust Gap, and he talks about feedback. Feedback is huge in breaking down trust or distrust, or building trust, and so here's what he said he actually calls it a sin. He said sin number five for kind of approaching trust is this ignoring feedback sin number five? And here's what he said Organizations must be committed to actively listening to the results and either taking action on what's being said or actively listening to the results, and either taking action on what's being said or clearly communicating to the team that they have been heard, along with the explanation of why certain feedback is being prioritized.

Jon Kidwell 5:50

Otherwise, this is the big otherwise, because feedback demands action. Here's the otherwise. Otherwise, a lack of active listening or even the perception of a lack of active listening will result in an abundance of active speculation and distrust. And isn't that what happens for all of the surveys, all of the MPS? Every time a business asks us or a leader asks us for feedback and it's just quiet, there is active speculation. Our brain starts building out these crazy stories. Even in my running story, I was trying to deduce something. I just figured out the wrong thing because I was taking the easiest path, not the best path, but I was trying to build out what might be going on. I'm just getting old. Oh, my leader didn't respond to that feedback, so now they're just angry with me. Oh, that business doesn't care about me, instead of actively listening and giving a response, even if it is something that's really important and here's the priorities that we're focusing on.

Jon Kidwell 6:56

So if feedback demands action, what can we do to lead well? Well, corey gives us that answer too, as he talks about developing trust, and he said one of the things that they need to prioritize is regular employee feedback that we take action on. If we get regular employee feedback that we take action on, we will build a culture that is more trustworthy, not distrusting. So asking folks through those surveys, but then coming back around doing the second half of the work and taking action on it to clearly communicate. Here's what we heard, here's what we are doing, here's what's being prioritized, here's what's not being prioritized. The same is true in small conversations, when we give and receive feedback after a project. We might be the receiver of that feedback, right? Maybe our manager's talking to us and they give us feedback on our missed deadlines, on our missed priorities, on the fact that we delivered something but it wasn't quite yet up to the standard that we want. The feedback demands action that we go and take action on whatever it was that that individual said, or that we come back and circle around and follow through, follow up on that feedback so that we can close the loop. When we close the loop, then we start to build more trusting, more connected, more honest relationships, teams, organizations, and we actually start to give ourselves the ability that, when we do miss, when there isn't the action or the appropriate action on feedback, we've started to give ourselves the ability to assume positive intent instead of the active speculation, because we've seen it in other places.

Jon Kidwell 8:50

So you are probably out there getting feedback from a client, from a customer, from your team. You're asking for it, you're debriefing projects. Be thinking about what feedback demands. Feedback demands action. What action are you gonna take the next time that you get feedback so that you can lead your team, your business, everybody around you?

Jon Kidwell 9:14

Well, I'd love to hear about it. Share it with me on social media, on LinkedIn, on Instagram. Send me a message and if you would take the time to share this episode with somebody that you know that is also sitting there and maybe you all were talking about feedback, or you're thinking about what do we do based on some of these things, or you had the active speculation conversation of like, I don't know share this episode with them and work together on how you can act on feedback that you get to build more trusting, healthy, thriving relationships, teams and organizations. Thanks for being here today. I'd love your feedback on that episode Positive, negative, go rate it, review it wherever it is, shoot me a note. I would love to hear it. I promise to take action on it and until next time, my friends, be well. God bless and lead on.