FEEDBACK PROCESSES

Team Product 9

	THEORY INPUT

W
e know we need it; yet, mostly, we avoid it.  It’s called Feedback.  What we have learned is that it’s mostly negative, can be painful, and yet is a key to helping us choose change.  High performing people, teams and organizations are dependent on it for growth and survival.  We all need feedback, and we all need to learn how to share in order to create awareness.  It is through awareness that alternatives can be discovered and applied.  For our teams to grow, each must take responsibility for sharing and receiving feedback on how our behaviors either help or hinder other team members and the team’s producing and social processes.

	OBJECTIVE

You and your team are to learn effective supportive ways of sharing and receiving interpersonal feedback and how, based on this information, we can improve individual and team effectiveness.

	DESIRED OUTCOMES

!	Awareness of what constitutes feedback and how to provide it in a supporting way.

!	Increased understanding of team member views and how our behavior affects performance.

!	A process that provides a method for both providing and hearing individual feedback within the team.

!	A working theory on feedback.

!	A process for sharing your learning with the other teams.

	SUGGESTIONS

As before, reach agreement on your team’s objective and desired outputs of this task.  Once agreement is reached, design a process that will allow your team to attain the objective and desired outputs.  The following will be helpful.

!	Read the article in this section entitled “How to Learn From Your Own Experience.”  Pay particular attention to items 1 through 11.

!	The “Team Development Grid” is one vehicle for providing and receiving feedback.  Each team member can duplicate the “more of, less of, keep” on a flip chart pad, starting by listing what they feel they need to do more of, less of, or keep.  Then, all members can post theirs on the wall, asking others to add to theirs.

!	Follow these guidelines when sharing your feedback charts.

	a)	Feedback receivers should only be allowed to ask clarifying questions - such as, “Could you explain that more?”

	b)	Paraphrase in your own words what you have heard at the end of your feedback to the team.

	c)	Thank the group for the feedback.

	d)	At this point, you may give whatever thoughts or insights that come to mind.  It is a perfect opportunity to self-disclose or declare what actions you might take.

	e)	After the first couple of rounds, check the effectiveness of your process and make whatever changes are needed.

!	Analyze your team’s experience and develop a way to share your group’s learning with the other teams.  
(Each team will be allotted up to 10 minutes for sharing.)

TEAM
DEVELOPMENT GRID

For: ______________________________
										(Name)

Instructions:  Have each team member complete one of these sheets.  Then post and ask each team member to contribute their thoughts.  Use behavior-descriptive language only.  You may, if you wish, ask for the facilitator’s help in wording your thoughts.  Complete one of these sheets for each of the team members present.

Behavior description examples: “Keep asking for clarification when the group does something that’s not clear to you.”  Or, “Stop joking with Les while the group is working on serious business.”  Do not use evaluative, emotional-laden or vague language about “attitudes” or feelings.  (Do not say: “Be more sensitive,” or “Keep being yourself,” or “stop feeling paranoid.”)

START	STOP	KEEP	

			

I will: _________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________

HOW TO LEARN FROM YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE

What is it to be an open person, or to have an open relationship?  The Johari Window provides a graphic way of looking at personal and interpersonal openness.

The window represents your whole person.

The “open” area includes that part of you–your behavior, feelings and thoughts–which you share freely with others.  When you form a new relationship, this area tends to be small.  What you share with a new acquaintance is governed largely by social convention and limited to things that are public knowledge anyway.  As you get to know and trust another, you are both willing to share more of yourselves and the open areas grow in size.

The “blind” area includes behavior you are not aware of, although another may be.  “Would that God the gift would give us, to see ourselves as others see us.”  You find out about your blind area through feedback from others.

The “hidden” area includes thoughts and feelings that you have not yet revealed to others through your behavior.  You share your hidden area by self-disclosure.

The “unknown” area is that part of you which you once knew and have forgotten, or which you have not yet discovered.  What helps you to probe into your unknown is experiment and play.  Small children are experts at self-discovery, simply because they are experts at play.  As people grow older, they often tend to lose their capacity to play, to test, to experiment, to fool around.

In this context, being “open” focuses on behavior (words and actions) and reactions to behavior (understanding and feelings).  When you communicate freely with another about your behavior, perceptions and feelings, you are being open.  When you are evasive, defensive, reserved or silent about them, you are not being open.

You can use the window to look at yourself, to help you to understand how open you are and what growth in openness means.  You can also use it to look at different kinds of relationships one to one, one to group and group to group.

For example, assume that the window describes the relationship between you and someone else in the group with which you are now working.  The four quadrants represent the total relationship.  The relationship is defined by two points of view, your own and that of the other person.  The quadrant of the window that describes which is actually shared in your relationship is the “open.”  Your relationship develops and grows beyond what it now is when you both move into the “blind,” the “hidden” and the “unknown,” and become more open within yourselves and to each other.  The broken line in the diagram represents potential growth in openness.

Enlarging your area of openness by reducing the hidden, the blind and the unknown, is always a little risky.  There is risk to you and risk to the other.  Will you hurt him?  Will you make him angry?  Will he reject you?  What will he think about you?  What will you find out about yourself?  The risk, the pain and the fear of being open can be strong deterrents.  When is openness worth it?  When is it possible?  When is it constructive?

Attention to the following points increases the probability that openness will improve a relationship rather than harm it.

1.	There must be a good reason for being open.  Openness must have a purpose beyond itself.  You are open because you care enough about improving a relationship to make it worth the effort.  If a certain measure of caring does not come across in your attempts to be open, you may well be perceived as meddling, manipulative, threatening, aggressive or even hostile.

2.	Openness is not an absolute value.  It is not always possible or even desirable.  It must be put into a context of sensitive responsiveness to the other.  It must serve not only your needs, but the needs of others.

3.	Openness involves risk-taking.  There is always the possibility of rejection, anger, new and frightening knowledge, being hurt.  The risk is on both sides.  It is important to remember that when you risk and initiate openness, the other person may be running an even greater risk by being open in return.  He has many safer options:  to evade, to flee, to be defensive, to attack, to be silent.  When you offer your openness, he can back off.  When he accepts your openness, you are both committed.

4.	Realize that openness is sharing and that it is a contradiction to thrust openness on another.  The other has to be willing to be open with you.  Otherwise, openness becomes coercive.

5.	Defenses are not all bad.  We need them from time to time.  Being open should never be an excuse to strip another of his defenses.  Openness should build trust to the point where another feels safe enough to be able to drop his defenses of his own accord.

6.	Openness means facing and accepting yourself.  It means owning your thoughts, feelings and behavior and being responsible for them, and responsible for changing them or not.

7.	Openness means accepting the thoughts, feelings and behavior of the other as facts, and letting him be responsible for them, and responsible for changing them or not.

8.	The aim of openness is not to change the other, but to share an understanding of your relationship.  It helps you to know how you perceive each other’s intentions and behavior, and how you feel about each other’s actions.  This awareness of each other should open up new behavioral alternatives.  The change that grows out of openness, should be self-determined.

9.	Being open is not the same as being “personal.”  Revealing a lot of personal details about your past can be a defensive substitute for dealing with here and now behavior, thoughts and feelings.

10.	There are a number of simple communication skills that are useful in trying to be open.  These skills can be acquired by attention and practice.  It is usually more helpful if you...

•	separate behavior from feelings
  Less helpful:	“You jerk!” (an accusation)
  More helpful:	“What you just said (your behavior) made me very angry (my feeling reaction).”

•	are descriptive of behavior rather than evaluative or judgmental of the person

•	are specific rather than general

•	separate thoughts from feelings
“I think that this is a good idea, but I feel very threatened by it.”

•	let the other draw his own conclusions

•	state the other’s idea in your own words to check out if you have properly understood.  This is called paraphrasing.

	•	are provisional rather than absolute.

11.	Giving and getting feedback plays a key role in being open.  Feedback is a way of seeing the impact on another of what you say or do.  Feedback on your behavior, on how you come across, can help you to consider some alternative ways of behaving.  If it is not given constructively, it can just encourage defensiveness, or simply be destructive.

Feedback is constructive if...

•	it is asked for rather than imposed.
	•	it is well timed.  Feedback is most often useful when it is given immediately after the behavior in question.  Sometimes it is better to wait, especially if the recipient is angry, confused, upset, or defensive, and not inclined to listen.
•	it is not saved up and dumped all at once.  This is usually accompanied by a build-up of feeling which is hard to sort out from the message.
	•	it is checked to insure accurate, clear communication.
	•	it is checked for validity against the perceptions of others.
	•	it is intended to be helpful to the recipient.  It meets his needs, rather than the needs of the one giving the feedback.
	•	it leaves the recipient free to do with it what he wants, to change or not as he chooses.
	•	it is specific rather than general.  Examples of exact statements and behavior are most useful.
	•	it simply describes the recipient’s behavior and its impact on others, without making any judgments about what he is as a person.
	•	it is given in a climate of trust, with a feeling of caring and support.
	•	it focuses on things the recipient can do something about.
	•	negative feedback is preceded by positive feedback.  This helps given support.
	•	it is received non-defensively.  A good rule of thumb is to ask only clarifying questions when receiving feedback.
	•	the recipient has a chance to say what he thinks and feels about the feedback when it is all over.  This can lead to a better understanding of why he behaves the way he does.

JOHARI WINDOW

Self-Rating Sheet

LEARNING JOURNAL
FEEDBACK PROCESSES

Teaming Skills and Learning Checklist

(Check the areas in which you excelled)
(Circle the areas you wish to improve in next session)

	Growth Values

Empathy

Authenticity

Spontaneity

Courage

Open-Mindedness

Intuition

Teaming Skills

Meeting Effectiveness

Brainstorming

Problem Solving

Planning/Organizing

Decision Making

Assessing Results

Conflict Resolution

Giving Feedback

Receiving Feedback

Decisiveness

1.	What did I learn most around Growth Values and Teaming Skills:

2.	I can use the feedback I received to be more effective by...

3.	As I gave feedback to other members of our team, I felt...

4.	The difference between giving feedback and having a process to give and receive feedback is that...

5.	The things I learned that I most want to be able to use back home are: