The breakfast of champions

Driving performance and creating a culture of coaching

Today's fast-paced, credit-crunched business environment is driving an 'exceptional' culture. If businesses are to thrive in today's challenging landscape, they will expect their individuals and teams to be high performers. But performance discussions can be a challenge in themselves, placing human communication demands on managers and mentors to find the right words to deliver feedback effectively.

Whatever process you have in place for performance management, it's as much about how you have a conversation with someone about their performance as what you cover. A well-managed performance discussion that suits both parties is a rare opportunity to have a conversation that's different to the time-critical, day-to-day communication within the business. And yet instead of it being a conversation from which both parties - and the business - can benefit, so often the conversation goes wrong and both sides are disappointed with the outcome.

That's because the way you deliver feedback influences how people react to it. They are influenced by how you behave, what you say, and even what you don't say. When we are told something about ourselves that we can construe as criticism, the natural urge - usually in the form of a knee-jerk response - is to defend ourselves against it.

These issues are discussed in 'Feedback or Criticism?' authored by Ben Houghton and Daryll Scott, the founders of DAV's Enigma sponsoring partner, Use Your Noggin. The book explains why defensive reactions which lead to negative behaviours such as arguing, ranting, blaming, sulking, detaching, withdrawing, and paying lip service only get in the way of people taking on board the feedback they are given. They are so busy defending themselves against the feedback, they cannot take anything positive from it. How a line manager delivers the feedback will either fuel or diffuse any such defensive reactions.

The book suggests defending yourself against feedback is 'lunacy' because everyone needs feedback to improve their performance. Indeed, many people fear performing because they are afraid of failure. Yet by playing safe to avoid being seen as 'failing', they actually make failure inevitable.

The situation is different in the world of the performance athlete, where feedback is welcomed because it is the fuel of improvement. There is no room for defensiveness because the athlete knows the feedback will be valuable in shaping what they should do differently next time. And they recognise that the person delivering the feedback - the coach - is on their side. As the tennis player Boris Becker puts it, 'Feedback is the breakfast of champions.' Or as Thomas Edison, inventor of the first light bulb said of his failure to develop a storage battery, 'I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.'

What Noggin's Feedback or Criticism? sets out to do is provide the reader with a 'toolkit' of techniques to help drive performance improvement through both formal and informal conversations. It is due to be published at the end of July 2009 and will be available via Amazon or through Use Your Noggin's website. For more details, see
www.mynoggin.co.uk

Extracts taken from the forthcoming book: 'Feedback or Criticism', written by Ben Houghton and Daryll Scott of DAV's Enigma sponsoring partner, Noggin.