It’s Not Them...It’s You

By John Austin, Ph.D.

The old joke goes like this: A couple had been married for 25 years, and the husband says, “Look, I told you I loved you when we got married; if anything changes I’ll get back to you!”

That kind of feedback is just not good enough for today’s world, in relationships or in business. Instead, we need strong feedback sources that we can rely on in order to improve what we’re doing. We just can’t learn unless we regularly see how our behavior affects others. This seems like a “no-brainer” – most organizations have spent literally thousands of hours arranging feedback systems to gather data from their customers.

My bank has a feedback system whereby the corporate office gathers satisfaction data after customers visit a branch. The system is rigid and automated. In their effort to make one size fit all and make it efficient to collect the data, the survey asks many questions of the customer that are irrelevant to your specific case – I took one of their surveys and after 5 minutes I was very frustrated. There was no personal touch, there was no relationship, and there was not much incentive for me to give thoughtful responses to the questions.

I visited my branch the manager recently and she asked me to give her branch a good rating on the feedback system. I asked her why she felt she needed to ask me to give her good ratings; and she told me that she is forced to account on the phone to her boss for every rating below a perfect-5. The change in her behavior over this new feedback system has been dramatic; she appears nervous and needy in her interactions with me – not good traits for a banker to exhibit.

Getting accurate and timely information you can trust is essential. The truly enlightened companies constantly seek better ways to talk to employees to obtain and use the information that is freely available to all who have strong enough relationships to get it. Lots of companies use external survey firms, these have a bad habit of producing levels of complexity that stifle the original intent of the surveys. Many also produce lengthy reports that make it very difficult to identify the key results you require.

Estimates suggest that managers actually receive between 10% and 20% of the feedback that employees could give, if they were willing to do so. Some of the techniques we like to use to get employee feedback include Survey Monkey and RF response cards to ask questions to live audiences and get their anonymous opinions on the spot. Once you develop your key relationships you can just ask individuals for feedback and get honest and good pinpointed responses. It takes lots of time and experimentation to get it right, but once you do, your improvement skyrockets. Once you get the pure stuff, you’ll never go back to the old stale ways you used to collect feedback on your ideas.