Feedback should be FACT driven

As the impetus for increased levels of communication is felt by organizations, the need for being able to address project failures leading to schedule slips, quality compromises, cost overruns, and scope creeps become the sine qua non for effective project managers! Is this communication effectiveness limited to project management? Absolutely not! Agile approaches to product development and project management also constantly seek people to communicate. Even the recent state of agile claims increased transparency has not resulted in increased software quality and some contributions come from being able to communicate.

It is true that one needs to engage in several types of communication, but communication is a one-way street if there is no engagement from the audience! While I did my doctoral studies, I learned about dialogic communication (Innes, 2007) of staying the ground while holding the dialog but consistently practicing active listening to use experience in knowledge creation. This ability to come up with ideas of one's own is critical without which we only support others (like piggybacking on someone's experience, seconding another person's thought, etc.) This is also the reason why I emphasize communication is a 1-way street whereas collaboration is a 2-way street. 

During corporate training as well as in classroom facilitation, I find that the lack of engagement from the audience makes it difficult for the facilitator or speaker to create a dialog around concepts. Therefore, the collaboration between two or more people is inexorably critical for communication to be effective. And there lies the challenge in continuous engagement because people must be open to feedback.

Recently, I heard in one training that one group (say Group A) was following agile and releasing features for the internal teams. But many of the internal teams asked for features that Group A claimed are already there. When asked for better communication of these updates from Group A, the response was reading the release plan documents or seeing the dashboard. In a world of high-tech dashboards, the need for communicating updates in the language that others understand is equally important! Otherwise, communication has failed. High-Tech is not a substitute for High-Touch and people should be open for feedback.

So, I present my "FACT" driven feedback as a quick check-and-balance. I am not just referring to numbers and stories in the FACT approach. Instead, I am suggesting that feedback be frequent, accurate, constructive, and timely.

1. Frequent feedback means both parties can get incremental updates faster. The context of the challenge is fresh in people's memory to make corrective actions.
2. Actionable feedback relies on evidence-based data rather than opinions that the listener can use to make changes. This element avoids the halo effect from colored thoughts that are not actionable but shifts the focus on the truth with an actionable mindset. 
3. Constructive feedback is focusing on the continuous improvement mindset with actionable outcomes that the listener can implement as either proactive risk mitigation steps or corrective actions to exacerbate the problems.
4. Timely feedback centers around the ability of the person providing the feedback to feel the sense of urgency to elevate the feedback faster than relying on status or standup meetings.

When these four elements of feedback can be learned by both parties in a dialog, then, active listening is at its best. This is when collaboration happens for communication to be efficient and efficient.

Thoughts?

References

Innes, R.B. (2007). Dialogic Communication in Collaborative Problem Solving Groups. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. 1(1), 1-19. 

Listening with Eyes

The popularity of communication being the lynchpin for a successful project is very well known. In one of the conferences I attended, I even heard the speaker say that project success is 80% communication, and the other half is communication. People have classified communication by priority, the medium used, accessibility, etc. Communication plans therefore also require to be formal, clear, concise, comprehensive, accessible, and engaging stakeholder commitments. But one of the most critical aspects of any communication is in listening!

Again, the concept of active listening has been around for a long time. The four critical steps of hearing, clarifying, interpreting and responding to active listening have been reasonably understood by the project management community. During all these sessions, people focus on hearing the person putting aside their opinions and bias and understanding what the speaker says. All these sounds great but true active listening goes further beyond what is physically heard by the ears. One should go beyond the words spoken and unearth what is left unsaid. How can you accomplish? This is done by listening with eyes and senses.

When you are listening with eyes, you are not hearing what the person says but watching how the person says. The moments of pause and silence can emphasize the severity of the message while the rolling of eyes and other body gestures may provide indications of ambiguity, resilience, discomfort, etc. Frequent use of checking phones, lack of eye contact, and change of topics are also things to monitor as listening with eyes extend practicing actively non-verbal communication to a different level getting deeper. All these approaches also have to factor along with the geographical cultural components so that your clarifying questions and interpretations are not misleading.

Listening with eyes can also be practiced in written communication where the use of color in fonts, emphasis using bold, use of upper case letters, balanced use of emoticons to soften the message, use of proper white space to give breathing room for the reader, etc. There is a reason why there is a saying "read between the lines" exists.  Practice these communication approaches even when people are not talking to you such as in osmotic communication.

So, don't just focus on creating status reports and publishing emails. Factor as part of your management style "listening with eyes" actively. A good communicator is not always the good writer but the good listener.

Please respond with your thoughts.