Author: Wally Hauck, PhD, CSP

Most HR professionals believe that a manager’s most important job is to give feedback to employees.  Yet most managers are so poor at it which means the feedback is infrequent, poorly timed, of poor quality, or all three.  Why?

Research by Watson and Wyatt states that 43% of employees don’t get enough feedback to improve their performance.  Sibson Consulting reports that HR professionals are frustrated because managers don’t give constructive feedback and 58% of HR professionals give their number one feedback tool, the annual performance review, a C grade or below.  Study after study point to managers who are poor at giving feedback as the major reason why performance appraisals fail.  Studies also show how companies with managers who delivery effective feedback generate 47% higher return to shareholders. (Online Recruitment Resource, 2007)

There is no hiding the fact that we all must improve our feedback skills especially since feedback is required for learning, to improve performance, to reduce stress, and to improve employee retention and employee engagement.  There are at least four important reasons (barriers) why feedback is poorly done now.

First, what managers call feedback is not feedback at all.  It is criticism.  Feedback is data from a process that is used for learning.    Opinion and criticism are the same.  Most managers say they are giving feedback but instead they give their opinions about the employee behaviors or individual performance. We all know that no one likes unsolicited criticism from anyone.   This barrier frustrates and causes discomfort to both employees and managers and that frustration creates a barrier preventing the truth and learning.

Second, current HR polices require managers to give the feedback.  Why not give employees the ability and autonomy to collect their own data?  Employees who collect their own data and can manage their own processes are more motivated and engaged.  Requiring managers to give the feedback means they must be the inspector, spy, the micro-manager, or the omniscient judge.  This is a very challenging, if not impossible role to fill.  Why not provide autonomy and trust to employees instead?

Third, the work environment most often discourages open and honest feedback.  Any feedback (or opinions) from our managers often has consequences attached to it.   For example, managers often control employee pay raises, bonuses, or performance appraisal ratings.  Anything that might damage those ratings might want to be hidden by the employee. How can managers give feedback to something they can’t see?  This type of work environment can be threatening and can act as a poison to the life of useful and honest feedback.

Fourth, I believe most managers intuitively know they should not and cannot evaluate individual employee behaviors without understanding how the work environment, the processes the co-workers interact and impact the employee.  This is one reason many managers avoid giving feedback to employees.  Attempting to provide feedback on the behaviors of employees without studying the entire system (the context) is like trying to explain how to use a towel to a fish.

If we are really interested in giving better feedback we must realize these four barriers exist and must be removed first.  Many HR professionals continue to be frustrated by the lack of quality feedback and yet these four barriers continue to exist and will continue to create that frustration unless we shift the way we think about feedback and we address them.  All the management training in the world will not remove these barriers.  The barriers are endemic in the work environment and so they must be first recognized and then removed by courageous leaders with the right management theory.

Wally Hauck, PhD has a cure for the “deadly disease” known as the typical performance appraisal.  Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.   Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP.  Wally has a passion for helping leaders let go of the old and embrace new thinking to improve leadership skills, employee engagement, and performance.  See other resources here.

Online Recruitment Resource. (2007, December 5). Watson Wyatt study reveals six communication secrets of top-performing employers. Retrieved from www.onrec.com: http://www.onrec.com/news/news-archive/watson-wyatt-study-reveals-six-communication-secrets-of-top-performing-employers

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One morning I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts for coffee.  While leaving the parking lot, I was rushing and accidently backed up into a 3-day old $25,000 VW Passat.  The driver was livid and told me so in words and body language I choose not to repeat here.  I was already late for an appointment which was one of the factors that caused me to rush and cause the accident.  I needed to act and yet not rush.  I needed to influence the man and the situation. I needed to be a leader.  The owner was too emotional, understandably so, to lead the situation to an effective conclusion.

A leader is not a leader without voluntary followers.  Followers are not really followers unless they are volunteers.  Those who are compelled to comply to follow orders from a leader are not voluntary followers.  A key factor in developing voluntary followers is the ability to develop a relationship and to build trust.  A key factor in developing a relationship is the ability to express empathy.  I needed empathy to lead the situation with my VW friend.

Empathy is a valued element in building trust and relationships.  Empathy is an acknowledgement of emotion.  It’s an expression that you understand how important a situation is to someone and you appreciate how they are feeling about it.  The ability to show empathy is a crucial skill for all leaders.   Effective leaders must be able to influence the mood of others.  By doing so they create a positive context for an organization or team and that context leads to performance.

Empathy makes it safe to feel emotion, feel understood, feel acknowledged and feel cared for.  A lack of empathy is indifference.  Indifference suggests a lack of connection and lack of relationship.  Indifference creates anxiety, dissonance, dis-engagement and often deselection.

“…empathy means taking employee’s feelings into thoughtful consideration and then making intelligent decisions that work those feelings into the response.” (Daniel Goleman, 2002)

Empathic listening is the grease that keeps relationships running with minimal friction. In studies by Dr. Antonio Damasio medical patients who had brain damage to a certain part of the brain, and were therefore unable to express empathy, had diminished relationship building skills.  Their logic remained intact but their ability to build trust was clearly missing. (Damasio, 2005)

There is a great deal of research that connects empathy to business results. Studies that correlate empathy with the emotional state of front-line employees show a direct connection to customer satisfaction and employee retention.  Poor morale among those who “touch” the customer (the front-line worker) can predict turnover of customers and employees up to three years in advance. (Daniel Goleman, 2002)

Empathy; the ability to show that you care because you can imagine yourself in their situation and acknowledge what they are feeling and how intense that emotion must be.

How did I turn around the accident situation?  I immediately expressed empathy with my friend the VW Passat owner.  I admitted my mistake and told him how I could certainly understand how upsetting it must be for someone to hit his brand-new automobile. “I too would be upset”, I said.

He remained angry but shifted to cooperation from confrontation.  This cooperation allowed me to exchange insurance information with him more quickly and more accurately.  My ability to express empathy gave me the influence I needed to minimize the wasted time and to keep my client appointment with minimal delay.

Empathy, then, is an ability that every leader must add to their toolkit.  My VW friend was willing to cooperate quickly only because I expressed sincere empathy. He was willing to voluntarily follow my lead to exchange information quickly and efficiently while avoiding the negative emotion that could have become a barrier.

Emotion cannot be avoided in the workplace nor anywhere else.  It must be managed.  It must be acknowledged.  Empathy is like a muscle that need exercise to be most effective. Make it a daily habit. It’s costs nothing and it saves relationships, trust, and time.

Wally Hauck, PhD has a cure for the “deadly disease” known as the typical performance appraisal.  Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.   Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP.  Wally has a passion for helping leaders let go of the old and embrace new thinking to improve leadership skills, employee engagement, and performance.  See other resources here.

Damasio, A. R. (2005). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Penguin Publishing Group.

Daniel Goleman, R. B. (2002). Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.

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Have you ever wondered where and when the medical profession learned about germ theory?  Thanks to someone who was willing to challenge the existing surgery methods and experiment to uncover new methods, surgeons now thoroughly scrub before surgery and wear protective gear during surgery. How did that significant change in thinking and behavior occur?

In 1847 Hungarian-born physician Ignaz Semmelweis, while working at an obstetrics unit in Vienna was astonished and concerned with the frequency of child fatalities that occurred after birth when assisted by medical students.  The rate of child death was 10-20 times higher than those that occurred with births assisted by midwives.

Semmelweis’ concern motivated him to do a meticulous examination of the clinical practices.  By experimenting, he discovered that the medical students who assisted in childbirth often did so after performing autopsies on patients who had died from bacterial infections.  He theorized, the medical students were unknowingly passing on the bacterial infections to the mothers and the children.  Semmelweis instituted a strict policy of hand-washing with a chlorinated antiseptic solution and the mortality rates dropped by 10- to 20-fold within 3 months.

Semmelweis used a problem-solving process that exemplifies Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge Theory.  He had a theory.  He collected data to test the theory.  He made a change to the processes.  He generated significant improvement.  He didn’t blame people.  He didn’t try to control people.  He didn’t threaten, evaluate, or criticize people.  He used a sound scientific problem-solving method.  This is exemplary of a great Deming manager. Deming wanted management to work on improving the system in order to optimize that system over-time.  He wanted managers to create an environment which would provide joy and pride for employees while they continuously adding value to customers.  He wanted managers to question prevailing theory.  He wanted management to be able to predict.  Deming created his System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK) to help managers to accomplish this.

Deming believed that management needed a transformation and that first step in that transformation was the transformation of the individual. (Deming, The New Economics – Second Edition, 1994)   He explained how a manager who understands the key elements of SoPK could then apply those same principles to achieve significant positive results just as Semmelweis did.

Are you teaching, coaching, and encouraging employees to experiment?  If you do, employee engagement, innovation, productivity, and customer experience will improve.

Wally Hauck, PhD has a cure for the “deadly disease” known as the typical performance appraisal.  Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.   Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP.  Wally has a passion for helping leaders let go of the old and embrace new thinking to improve leadership skills, employee engagement, and performance.  See other resources here.

For more, read on: https://c-suitenetwork.com/advisors/advisor/wally-hauck/

A systems thinker avoids expressing blame because it damages trust and does nothing to address the real root causes of mistakes or problems.

“Where the rubber meets the road” is a popular phrase that means “there is a point where a theory is applied.” What does a leader do when there is a mistake and/or poor results? This is where the rubber meets the road. How does that leader facilitate improvement? What does that leader do to protect trust and address the root cause?

Leaders need a problem-solving skill that addresses problems and protects trust. They need a problem-solving skill that gives them total confidence the problem will be addressed without micromanagement. They need a skill that reinforces a self-organizing, self-managing, environment. This skill must enable people to tell the truth, to manage trust, and to be optimally innovative.

Matchbooks have been around since the late 1800s. The first ones had the striking strip on the front of the book along with a warning “Close cover before striking.” Careless consumers would often set the entire book on fire because the other matches were easily exposed to a spark when one match was struck. The warning was an “easy” way to solve the problem. It put the responsibility on the consumer to follow instructions and to be careful doing it. This solution did little to solve the problem.

It wasn’t until 1962 that a true solution was found. The manufacturers moved the striking strip to the back of the matchbook, thus preventing a spark from igniting the other matches. This was a true solution to a problem. The solution required a significant change in the manufacturing process. It required innovation and an investment in time and money. It required thought and a predictable problem-solving method. It exemplifies how a change in the system will influence behaviors. This method is known as Plan-Do-Check-Act, the scientific method, and/or the learning cycle.

The learning cycle can be traced back at least as far as Galileo, who developed the idea of making observations, creating a hypothesis and then conducting an experiment. Edison used the method to test 6,000 materials before finding the one that proved to be most practical and cost effective for the filament for a light bulb.

Plan-Do-Check-Act is the recommended problem-solving method for leaders who want to protect trust. It requires the creation of an action PLAN including the steps of knowing what to improve, creating a hypothesis that offers hope for a solution, the identification of the current condition of the problem, and how to measure the success.

The DO portion is carrying out the planned experiment. The CHECK portion is about analyzing data to see if the hypothesis was correct. The ACT portion is about deciding to revise the hypothesis, revise the method, or to adopt the method just tested. The adoption of Plan-Do-Check-Act creates an environment where blame is unnecessary. Every member of a team can contribute their ideas and their effort to experimenting with new hypotheses and with new methods.

Are you using the Learning Cycle? Are you teaching and coaching it?  Are you team members using it?  These are the opportunities for leaders who want to inspire trust.

Adopting PDCA makes problem solving a fun exercise that can involve everyone. It creates engagement and improved quality for customers. Proper and frequent use of PDCA leads to great ideas like moving the striking strip. The adoption of PDCA starts with the C-Suite leader and that is why Dr. W. Edwards Deming once said, “Quality starts in the boardroom.”

The skill of using PDCA requires knowledge, the embrace of systems thinking, the appreciation of self-organizing systems, patience to avoid jumping to conclusions (the most obvious answer of the moment), the discipline to invest time and energy in experimentation, and the desire to teach others. It’s comprehensive.

Being a leader can go to one’s head, encouraging the belief one is omniscient. That belief will damage trust. Enabling everyone to use PDCA in their work boosts trust and engagement and avoids the trust-damaging belief that leaders must always be omniscient.

Wally Hauck, PhD has a cure for the “deadly disease” known as the typical performance appraisal.  Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.   Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP.  Wally has a passion for helping leaders let go of the old and embrace new thinking to improve leadership skills, employee engagement, and performance.  See other resources here.

For more, read on: https://c-suitenetwork.com/advisors/advisor/wally-hauck/

The health and results of an organization are directly dependent upon having a healthy foundation of trust. An organization cannot achieve optimum results without trust between employees, management and customers. Exceptional leaders recognize the importance of trust, and they know how to manage the variation.

The benefits of trust are undeniable. An environment of trust brings out the genius in every employee, the full potential of the organization, and creates happy, loyal customers. According to Stephen M. R. Covey, a 2003 study by Watson and Wyatt shows that a high-trust organization can deliver a 286% higher total return than low-trust organizations (Covey, June 2007).

Creating trust is challenging because it’s paradoxical. We want control, but we don’t want micromanagement. We want freedom to act, but we want to avoid chaos. What is the best way of thinking about the world (about people and problems) that will enable us to manage the variation in trust and deal with the complexity and the paradox? The answer is “systems thinking.”

Leaders who want optimum trust, to bring out the genius of every employee, and who want to optimize results (especially through customer experience and employee engagement) must be skilled systems thinkers.[1]

It is too easy to fall prey to the spell of Frederick Taylor and avoid systems thinking.  Frederick Taylor created Scientific Management thinking in the mid 1800’s.  His theory promoted the idea that people should be told what to do and controlled with pay-for-performance policies.  Taylor theory assumed management is smarter than employees.  This justifies why employees must be supervised.

Typical management language still reflects this idea.  For example, we refer to employees as “subordinates”.   A subordinate is defined as someone who is “under the authority of a superior”.  Systems thinking does not require authoritarian relationships.  Full cooperation, optimum trust, and effective communication between employees (regardless of their position) is much more important than the reporting structure.

When we embrace Taylor we use phases like, “we need to better manage our people; we need to drive improvement, or drive change; we need to manage employee performance every day.”   These are all consistent with the Frederick Taylor model which holds that employees need to be managed.

With systems thinking, employees can self-manage.  It also explains how the performance of individuals is influenced more by the system within which they work than by their individual efforts or skills.  With a predictable process, employees perform consistently and predictably.  With an unpredictable process, employees will perform inconsistently.   Taylor increases the need for heroes and heroines to save performance.  Heroes are not required with systems thinking.

The combination of Taylor and unpredictable processes reinforce the need to rate individuals as exceptional performers or poor performers.  The policy of rating individuals is inconsistent with systems thinking and often does more to damage trust in an organization than nearly any other management practice.

When leaders embrace systems thinking their priority is to improve the system and avoid evaluation of individual performance because they know an improvement in the system and processes will improve the level of trust in the organization.  Systems thinking and trust are perfect together.

Wally Hauck, PhD has a cure for the “deadly disease” known as the typical performance appraisal.  Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.   Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP.  Wally has a passion for helping leaders let go of the old and embrace new thinking to improve leadership skills, employee engagement, and performance.  See other resources here.

[1] Systems Thinking: A discipline of using data to identify patterns, processes, and structures that cause events. It’s a way of thinking and acting to obtain knowledge to make changes in process and structure to improve the interactions between parts of a system instead of making improvements to the parts individually. Excerpts taken from The Art of Leading: 3 Principles for Predictable Performance Improvement by Wally Hauck, PhD, CSP.