On the first of December, we brought together a curious group of Growers for another purposeful and practical exploration of a topic — regularly suggested for exploration….
Here we share some session notes, key takeaways and helpful resources for onward exploration, sharing and team conversation. And we’re looking forward to more fertile group discussions in ‘23.
And if you’d like to revisit the Master Miro board, that’s here.
Three key blockers:
— Finding the time, and the right time. Is it always best to share feedback as close as possible to the event? We discussed how, with positive feedback, it probably always is. When it comes to developmentally focussed feedback (perhaps a difficult conversation, or course correction) — naming it, and then diarising it can often be the best attack.
— Fear of offending someone. How can we create cultures where calling out the difficult stuff is expected, normalised and gets easier over time? Sophie from COOK shared a brilliant example how linking the need to share some feedback with recognised cultural language can be a great help. At COOK they refer to ‘Churchill’s Pig’. The story goes…. 'Churchills Pig' is one of our COOK values, based on Churchill’s view that a cat looks down on a man, a dog looks up to a man, but a pig looks a man in the eye as his equal. This sums up how we want to talk to each other, our customers and suppliers with absolute honesty and openness. And so if someone at COOK needs to share some important development feedback, they might say ‘look, I need to be quite Churchill’s pig here….’ What values or cultural cues exist in our organisation that we might use as helpful velcro when it comes to confidently communicating?
— Having a decent framework. Often feedback (positive, and growth oriented) isn’t shared regularly, confidently and descriptively, because people haven’t been trained or enabled around a simple, memorable model. Such as the loved BID (Behaviour > Impact > Do/Dialogue), more on that below.