We’ve been asked so many times, “what about giving feedback to peers? Or even to my boss?” It’s a great question, because our feedback model ( you’ll find the original show here), with that wonderfully necessary and challenging 4th step, just doesn’t seem to translate. It takes nothing more than asking yourself how you’d feel about being on the receiving end from a peer to know that it won’t have the same effect.

Why is that? We cover that, as well as what to do about it, in this cast on How To Give Feedback to Peers and Bosses. Yes, bosses are also covered by this method, because it’s so non-confrontational, but we don’t feel strongly about endorsing it as fully for bosses as we do for peers.

Listen in, and you’ll learn why and how.

What do you do when you’re in conflict with a peer… and your directs become involved? What’s interesting here is that we all ought to know that if we ARE in conflict with a peer, our directs ARE involved. Our directs know who among our peers are our allies, and who we don’t align well with. Our directs make choices, perhaps subtle, but choices nonetheless, that can add to our tensions (yes, even if we tell them not to).

What can we do as managers to help our directs deal with a peer of OURS that WE are in conflict with? When the peer begins to not behave professionally, and doesn’t meet her responsibilities to projects or teams he’s on… what do you do? When the peer expresses disdain, or is less than professional in how he treats one of your team?

Listen up; we’ve got a plan.

Part 2 of our 2-part series on managing conflict when your directs are involved.

We still have slots available for our Effective Manager Conference on April 18th and 19th. Be sure to sign-up now and take advantage of the early registration discount!

Have you ever wondered what your team REALLY thought of you? Have you ever wondered what they say about you to their spouses about you after one of their tough days? Have you wondered if other managers wondered this, or do they have their “stuff” so together that they don’t worry about this like you do?

Oh, they worry. Trust us.

The thing is, if you ask around, some people (and more than some in HR) will recommend you “do a three-sixty!”

That’s when you really SHOULD worry. 360-degree feedback is very powerful, and almost always inappropriate for managers as a way to learn how they’re doing. (We spend some time talking about 360 in the cast, as background.)

This cast teaches you a basic, simple, easy, low investment, low (zero) cost, easily repeatable, hard to mess up, gets-better-when-you-repeat it every-once-in-awhile technique for beginning to learn how you’re doing as a manager.

Finally we tackle a topic that we’re surprised no one asks about: How does one receive feedback? We know how to deliver it (even if far too many of us shy away from it all too often). But that’s only half the battle. One of the things many managers realize is that once you start giving feedback, you’re going to start receiving it as well.

Sometimes it’s well intentioned - your directs realize that you really mean it, and they’re willing to give you feedback. And yes, sometimes it’s intended to be a riposte from a nervous or insecure subordinate. But what’s great about receiving feedback effectively is that it sets a powerful example.

And we guarantee you the most effective way to receive feedback will surprise you.

In this cast, we START to describe how to respond to feedback AFTER you’ve received it, specifically: FEEDBACK NOT IN THE MODEL.

For our classic April Fools cast, we talked about how to receive feedback, but only partly. We discussed the Physical, Facial and Verbal responses to someone asking, “May I give you some feedback?”

But obviously, you’re going to get a lot of inputs regarding your performance. Some of it WILL come in the form of the feedback model, and in an upcoming cast, we’ll talk about how to continue your response under those conditions.

But, not all of it will come in the form of the feedback model. What do you do when someone gives you input on your behavior? What’s the right way to respond to praise? What’s an effective way to talk about what you could have done better?

We’d bet you’re getting the praise part wrong, anyway.

This cast discusses a modification to the 4th step of the Feedback Model.

We thought we’d kick off our third year of casts with an update* to the most frequently-used Manager Tool of them all: The Feedback Model.

If you’re giving adjusting feedback, the fourth step plays a crucial role. The purpose of feedback is to encourage effective behavior. That means that feedback is NOT about what just happened, but rather about FUTURE behavior. (We hope we don’t have to tell you that it’s never been about punishment, or blame, or fault, or a lesson, or “education”.)

But what do you do when you have some directs who stumble when you ask them to come up with more effective future behaviors (in step 4)? We’ve found that there are some situations where “What can you do differently?” can be good…but a different formulation can be even more effective.

We’ll tell you how here, in our first cast of the third year and in Year One of Premium Content, at Manager Tools.

And, as always when we recur to a topic, we encourage you to re-listen to the Feedback casts. And, if you haven’t listened to those casts, and/or aren’t familiar with the Manager Tools Effective Feedback Model, this cast will be nearly impossible to understand . . . please learn about the Feedback Model first.

* - [Look for us to be revisiting ALL of the Management Trinity this year: One on Ones, and The Feedback Model, and Coaching, and the silent fourth lever, Delegation.]

In this cast, we share what do effective managers do when a direct disagrees with the feedback you give them.

As much as many of the managers in our community love how much more effective our tools (particularly the Trinity) make them, it does seem that every once in a while, something goes awry in perfect-manager-land. A meeting still gets hijacked (even with a parking lot!), a struggling direct still fails (even with late stage coaching).

What do you do when a direct disagrees with your feedback? We think many newer managers – and particularly newer managers who are rookies with the feedback model – are stunned into a kind of affronted muteness. “What?!?”, you think. She must not understand that I have just delivered the sine qua non of development guidance, in a form palatable for all. How DARE she argue. I am … The MANAGER. This is… FEEDBACK. It is… SUPPOSED to work. Mike and Mark…SAID SO!

But it does happen, for a couple of reasons, and it’s really not a big deal.

And we have the answer for you in this, the The Shot Across The Bow show.

This show describes the The Feedback Model’s inclusion in the Management Trinity.

We continue here our recent theme of revisiting the high level rationale and actions involved in the Management Trinity. In our discussion of feedback, we talk about the basics, of course: What the Feedback Model gives the effective manager, and how the effective manager actually puts it into action.

This theme came out of many conversations we have had with managers about the value they were getting from our high level discussion of the Trinity at both Effective Manager Conferences and at onsite corporate client work.

We’re careful to make every cast actionable. This one IS. We make a specific recommendation regarding feedback delivery you don’t want to miss.

I was asked the other day by a manager who believed that we were stone dead wrong about feedback [”I could never tell my people their mistakes. it’s unprofessional!” Amazing. - H] what the history of the WORD was. It ended up being a funny story, but it’s instructive too.

I told him I got that question a lot [for the wrong reasons, but whatever.] I told him that “feedback” started in the early 20th century, with the advent of microphones. Since inputs into the mics were “feeds”, and they were designed to only work with inputs, if there were “feeds” that came back through the system [usually from being too close to speakers], you’d get an awful noise. That awful noise was named “feedback”, because it was a “feed” that came “back” into the system.

Well, you’d have thought that he’d been handed the talking points of an opposing debating team. He attacked our model for using a term whose origins were legitimately associated with an awful noise. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that feedback was even then useful, and managers who don’t give feedback because they think it’s an awful noise just don’t realize how awful a noise their silence makes.

What I should have said, rather than taking his question literally (no, he did not use the word etymology), was that we use the word NOT because of its earliest origins, but rather because we’re engineers, and all good systems are built with feedback mechanisms built in. The word feedback is NOT inherently negative today, even though that’s how it began, and how managers who don’t want to do it define it themselves. The word usage has CHANGED, to incorporate the value of feedback into systems that touch all aspects of our lives.

Word usage DOES change. It used to be that Bethlehem hospital in London was a mental institution. It was initially derogatory slang to describe a completely chaotic situation as “bedlam”, but it got that name because that was how Bethlehem Hospital was pronounced.

Maybe you as a manager think of feedback as an awful noise, but you’re glad there’s feedback in other systems, we’re sure of that. When your automatic car window STOPS going up because the system has a new force put on it - FEEDBACK - your child’s hand doesn’t get crushed. When your automatic garage door STOPS going down because something interrupts the safety circuit, well, your child’s hand doesn’t get crushed. When someone says, “WHAT?!?!?” when you use a word they don’t understand, or they just don’t hear you, or YOU MISPRONOUNCE it, or you’re not using the language they’re most familiar…that TOO, is feedback.

When you do something, the world responds. That’s feedback, and we’re usually happy to have it.

And so are your directs.

So stop worrying about the WORD - or heaven forbid its HISTORY, and add a feedback mechanism to your directs’ performance.

Just like you want YOUR BOSS to do.