Giving and Receiving Feedback

Few things will enhance performance faster than deliberate practice, a rigorous feedback loop and enough cycles to build the competency.

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Personal Development: Feedback.

Here are the common challenges many people face:

GIVING FEEDBACK

  • Inability to give specific feedback that is actionable by the person receiving it. Telling someone they missed the basket is a waste, specific input about hand positioning and demonstrating is valuable. 
  • Discomfort giving someone feedback as if it were a judgement. Great feedback is 90% information and instruction. 

RECEIVING FEEDBACK

  • Taking it as criticism and not information to learn from.  
  • Not digging deeper to turn it into something truly actionable.  
  • Not weighting feedback properly. Look for the most experienced person for the particular task to give feedback, not the most convenient or friendliest.  
  • Using 3rd party feedback as a crutch that weakens the ability to build a good self-reflection feedback loop. When receiving any feedback from an experienced 3rd party, the first question should be “Why didn’t I already provide myself that feedback?”  

We spend a lot of time with the teams of contractors helping improve their performance. Effective feedback loops are just one of those tools.

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Definition - Organizational Development (OrgDev / OD)
Organizational Development is an effort that focuses on improving the organization’s capability through the alignment of strategy, structure, people, rewards, metrics, and management systems.
Connecting Metrics to Activities and Outcomes
Outcomes are created through doing the right activities. Data is only a proxy for that activity and a metric is a synthesis of lots of data points. Metrics are valuable, but always have a skeptical view of proxies for performance, especially with growth.
A Typical Project - Understanding Cash Flow at the Company Level
As contractors face many opportunities in the market it is important to keep cash flow management top-of-mind. Growth eats cash and just a few hiccups in execution can put just about any contractor in a very bad position.