In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, Brandon Laws sits down with an executive coach, speaker, and author Jen Ostrich to discuss the importance of focusing on strengths, growth, and allyship when giving feedback to employees. Reimagining feedback means moving beyond pointing out what doesn’t work and, instead, painting a picture of what changes you’d like to see in your people.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Jen is an executive coach, facilitator, speaker, and author. She serves as the CEO of Grow Collective and is the co-author of Feedback Reimagined: Transform Your Organization through Positive Psychology and Social Support.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE SHIFT POSITIVE METHOD
According to guest Jen Ostrich, co-author of Feedback Reimagined, we must focus on strengths, growth, and allyship when it comes to feedback. Research has shown that leveraging strengths can enhance well-being and improve employee engagement, as the likelihood of disengagement is only 1% when managers give strength-based feedback. This type of feedback goes beyond general positive feedback and focuses on specific strengths, helping your people feel “seen” and appreciated.
To effectively support growth, Jen says it’s essential to be clear about what behaviors are desired and what more effective actions would look like. The T-chart exercise can be used to help clarify these behaviors, with the left-hand column identifying ineffective behaviors and the right-hand column outlining the desired behaviors. By providing specific goals and areas of improvement, team members are better equipped to work on areas in need of development. Jen Ostrich noted, “We have to be clear on what it is we’re wanting to see from people, not just what we don’t want to see.”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Getting it Wrong
“We talk in the book about negativity bias. I mean, look, it’s the way that our brains are wired. We’re more prone to see things through the lens of the negative. And so when it comes to people, I think that we are just more apt to look for and to notice when someone’s doing something ineffectively and wanna spend a lot of time talking about that, which of course, you know, can make someone feel triggered or defensive. […]
So a lot of times we just stop short by saying, ‘Here are the things to work on.’ And you’re reiterating, most likely, what the person already knows, but you’re not really telling them how to do it differently, which is challenging when you’re kind of left on your own to figure out what to do to improve.”
Negative vs. Positive Reinforcement
“Your mind fixates on the one thing that you hear, that you tell yourself, or that you’re told is the negative, even if you heard ten positive things prior to that. […] Negativity has this stickiness factor that we actually feel more positive emotions throughout the day, but we remember the negative more poignantly. That’s what makes it difficult with feedback because the negative information isn’t necessarily the most helpful thing when it comes to actually helping someone developmentally grow.”
Moving Beyond Correction
“We need to help them see and understand what would be more effective. So maybe you have to call to their attention the way that they did it and why it was ineffective. And that can be helpful context, but you can’t stop there because that still doesn’t tell them what to do. So painting the picture for what it could be if it was even more effective is what’s gonna be most useful. We wanna point people towards the behavior we want them to do versus always bringing them back to the thing to stop doing.”
Delivering the Tough Stuff
“Talking about somebody’s weaknesses can be informative and insightful, but by itself, it’s insufficient for change. And so whether you choose to deliver it as the tough stuff or not, you’re still not really painting the picture for what more effective would look like. And when you paint the picture for what more effective would look like, it’s very unlikely you’re gonna trigger somebody because you’re actually giving them an aspirational vision for how they could show up as their best. And you’re suggesting a couple of small shifts they could make for how to be even more effective.”
Fostering Safety
“I think also what helps to build psychological safety in the workplace is just the willingness for the person giving the feedback to show a little vulnerability. Share a story about how you’ll never forget when someone pulled you aside and had to tell you this, or you know, when you made a mistake, but it was a pivotal turning point for you in your career. I think it just humanizes all of us and, for somebody that maybe has a little bit more of a fixed mindset, it’s gonna […] help to hear, ‘Okay, well we all go through one of those moments where we get told something that was tough to swallow.’”
LEARN MORE
Grab a copy of Jen Ostrich’s book, Feedback Reimagined, where you’ll find more insight and methodology for helping your team members grow and thrive in the workplace.