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Many of our beliefs and ideas about feedback are incorrect and counterproductive and have been long distorted by our experiences. Feedback doesn’t have to be a dirty word that brings up feelings of self-doubt. Our ability to give and receive feedback can take our productivity to another level, especially with the added complexities of communication in the virtual environments we still find ourselves in.
In this episode, M. Tamra Chandler, the co-author of Feedback (and Other Dirty Words) will explore how you can recognize—and minimize—the negative physical and emotional responses that erode trust and shut down communication. Learn how to better give and receive effective, focused and fair feedback – and put these ideas into action right away!
This Month’s Guest:
TAMRA CHANDLER is a nationally recognized thought leader, author, and speaker. She’s spent the majority of her career thinking about people, researching how they’re motivated, and developing new and effective ways for organizations to achieve the ultimate win-win: inspired people driving inspiring performance. Chandler brings more than thirty years of experience in strategically partnering with organizations across industries on varied and complex business transformation projects to her role as EY Americas people advisory services leader, principal. Prior to joining EY, she was the CEO and co-founder of PeopleFirm, one of Washington State’s fastest-growing businesses and most successful women-owned firms. Prior to founding PeopleFirm, Chandler served as Arthur Andersen Business Consulting’s managing partner for the Pacific Northwest practice, and as the executive in charge of people and solutions at Hitachi Consulting. In 2016, she wrote the acclaimed book How Performance Management is Killing Performance — and What to Do About It. Her second book, Feedback (and Other Dirty Words): Why We Fear It, How to Fix It was published in June 2019. @mtchandler
Our Host:
CELESTE HEADLEE is a communication and human nature expert, and an award-winning journalist. She is a professional speaker, and also the author of Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving, Heard Mentality and We Need to Talk. In her twenty-year career in public radio, she has been the executive producer of On Second Thought at Georgia Public Radio, and anchored programs including Tell Me More, Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. She also served as cohost of the national morning news show The Takeaway from PRI and WNYC, and anchored presidential coverage in 2012 for PBS World Channel. Headlee’s TEDx talk sharing ten ways to have a better conversation has over twenty million total views to date. @celesteheadlee
Additional Resources:
- Buy Feedback (and Other Dirty Words) at Book People
- Get the information you need to vote this year at Vote411.org.
- Register for the Nov. 11 Pennsylvania Conference for Women – featuring Viola Davis, Tara Westover, Iyanla Vanzant, and more!
- Register for the Dec. 10 Massachusetts Conference for Women – featuring Alicia Keys, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Awkwafina, and more!
Celeste Headlee:
Interestingly enough, you sort of started your book at least about feedback by trying to redefine that word.
Tamra Chandler:
I did.
Celeste Headlee:
Which is odd, because we all think we know what feedback is. Why did it need a redefinition?
Tamra Chandler:
That is a good question. Well, if we go back, my first book was about performance management.
Celeste Headlee:
Right.
Tamra Chandler:
We were trying to help the world rethink the way we manage people around performance.
Celeste Headlee:
And especially performance reviews, yeah.
Tamra Chandler:
And the performance reviews.
Celeste Headlee:
The dreaded performance review.
Tamra Chandler:
Abolish the horrible performance review. And so we’ve been out, my firm, PeopleFirm’s been out doing this work with clients for, well, since before that book came out, so since 2015. And when we get into really working on great solutions with clients, we would always hit this point where we would… One of the things that would be in almost any solution, while everyone is unique to each client situation, almost every time though, there’s going to be this idea of more frequent feedback as part of the more modern solution to performance management. And whenever we would get to that space, almost every client would say, “Oh, we’re horrible at feedback. Oh, we could never do that. Oh my gosh, we just struggle.”
As Laura and I, Laura is my coauthor on the book, as we were really starting to dig into why are people responding that way, we realized that there was a couple of things happening here. One is the way that we all thought about feedback is wrong. I mean, we just have this bad brand, this bad relationship. We just have had these horrible experiences that have defined feedback for us, and we need to step away and redo it. Now, when I wrote that first book on performance management, I literally, at the end of my editing, went through and tried to take the word feedback out everywhere I could. I replaced it with perspectives and insights and your point of view and all these other words, because I knew that feedback was such a loaded word.
But the more I was out doing this work with my clients, I realized we can’t get rid of the word. It’s just in our DNA. It’s just in our ethos. It’s everywhere, but what we needed to do instead was redefine it. We needed to reestablish it in a way that is helpful versus harmful, that we redefine our relationship with feedback.
Celeste Headlee:
This is really difficult, what you’re trying to do.
Tamra Chandler:
It is.
Celeste Headlee:
Over the course of the research that I did for completely different topics, one of the things I found interesting, because I write about conversation, so very interesting to know that conversations are good for you in all cases except for two. One, if they’re hostile, and two, if you’re getting any kind of advice. Even if the advice is sought for, even if you ask for the advice, your brain reacts to it literally as though you are being attacked. You’re nodding your head because you-
Tamra Chandler:
We agree with that.
Celeste Headlee:
This makes it really difficult to present feedback in a way, because when we say that people become defensive, neurologically speaking, that’s literal.
Tamra Chandler:
It is very physical, the reaction that people have to feedback, and so the subtitle to the book is Why We Fear It, How to Fix It. We spent the first half of the book just talking about the fear. If Laura was here, she would tell you we’re really trying to do two things. We’re trying to bring down the fear and bring up the trust, and if we can bring down the fear and up the trust, we can fix feedback.
Celeste Headlee:
Are they connected? If I increase trust, does it naturally bring down fear or are those two different actions?
Tamra Chandler:
It does.
Celeste Headlee:
Okay.
Tamra Chandler:
Yeah, they are connected. But first and foremost, we have to deal with the fear. Because as you said, it’s a physical response that we have, and our reptilian brain kicks in and we go into that fight, flight, freeze, appease mode, and when we’re in that space, we’re not in our best self. We tend to respond or not hear or shut down completely, and so we first need to get out of our heads and into our bodies. We need to shift the address that we’re responding from that reptilian brain into our smarter brain, and the way we can do that is actually just starting to feel our fingers and feel our feet on the floor, and start to get back into our bodies and out of that spinny space.
Celeste Headlee:
Is that the same as exercises that help you learn to be present?
Tamra Chandler:
Exactly. Very similar. Yeah, present and not spinny. We all know when you get in that spin.
Celeste Headlee:
Yeah, you go into a spiral.
Tamra Chandler:
You totally go in a spiral. We first need to learn that if someone walks up to us, whether we’ve asked for it or we’ve not asked for it, and says, “Hey, I’ve got some feedback for you,” to not go into that space. How do we actually manage ourselves, and even open ourselves up and say, “Okay, this is fine, and I can be ready for that”? That’s part of the work that we do in this whole feedback arena. Another piece though is really helping us start to think in that new definition, and this is my soap box. We need to get rid of that negative word that floats in front of feedback, which is negative, because we always think that feedback is bad, that it’s negative. And it’s interesting, because if you look at some of the research, it will say that everybody wants more feedback.
Well, here’s my spin on that. When I ask you, you’ll say, “Oh, yes, I want more feedback,” because that’s the right answer to say. We all want more feedback. The truth is, we really just want positive feedback. We really want encouraging, coaching, helpful feedback, and when we get that type of feedback, that’s actually what helps us grow the most. When someone helps us understand the progress we’re making, the strengths that we have, the goodness that we are doing, when people lean into that, that is where all the power is. So we’re really trying to shift us away from this, it always has to be negative. It’s not about negativity. It’s about, I’m providing you insights or feedback that helps you grow, improve, or advance. Now, sometimes that may be something’s broken, or it may be something that we need to correct. But again, with the idea of a better future, not with the idea of any punishment or anger or judgment that should be in it.
Celeste Headlee:
One of the things you say is that you need to have five positive connections for every one negative. Why is that? Is it because we’re all weak and we can’t take the-
Tamra Chandler:
No, no, no. We have to be careful with that, because what we’re leaning into is we’re leaning into Gottman’s research, and Gottman’s a marriage counselor. What he figured out was that he can predict the likelihood of a marriage staying together, and what he found was if relationships had five to one positive experiences, then they were stronger. Where if they tilted towards three negative to two positive, that marriage is probably not in a good space. And so when we talk about trust, if we go back to that, we’re saying in order to build trust, you and I have to have five positive connections or five to one positive connections. That doesn’t mean it has to be a feedback experience.
It can mean we go have a glass of wine and have a great conversation. We work on a hard project together and really get to know what we’re like in those moments of stress.
Celeste Headlee:
We laugh at a shared joke.
Tamra Chandler:
We laugh at a shared joke. Any of those types of things will build those connections, and once we build those connections, then we start to have a relationship. Then we can start to have more conversation. Then if we have a sit-down about any kind of feedback, we have a trust that allows us to actually move into that conversation in a way that’s helpful.
Celeste Headlee:
You talk also, since we’re talking about conversations, you talk about the conversation model known as connect. What is that?
Tamra Chandler:
That’s the model that we put forward for how to engage in a feedback conversation, whether you’re seeking it or extending it. Connect stands for the connection and really tuning into, and the core of it is one. Connect one, one thing. One thing that I’m noticing, and the effect that that is having. We really start with a conversation, and we think about, “How do I share the one thing that I’ve noticed that is having hopefully a positive effect, but maybe it’s something that is causing a disruption in a team or something?” But it’s a way that we give a very simple conversation guide for how do you walk through that conversation and help someone move forward, help someone advance, help someone improve.
But where it’s different, like we talked about the performance review, it’s not a, “Hey, let’s sit down and download on a whole bunch of things.” It’s how do we sit in a moment and say, “Hey, here’s what I witnessed today. This is the one thing I noticed you did during this presentation that was just stellar, and when you did it, it brought everybody in the conversation or everybody in that presentation forward. They all leaned in because they were tuned into where you were, and because of that, you had a significant impact on those people that were there.” You walk through that with them.
Celeste Headlee:
Is it ever okay to reject feedback you get?
Tamra Chandler:
Absolutely.
Celeste Headlee:
How do you know that you’re rejecting feedback because it is not useful to you or because you don’t like it?
Tamra Chandler:
One of the things that we spend some time on in the book is we talk about there’s three roles in this feedback game we play. There’s, first and foremost, the seeker, which we think is the most important role in feedback. There’s the receiver and then the extender, and at any one time, we are playing all three roles. But when you’re in that receiver role, and if someone comes to you with some feedback that it doesn’t land well, you don’t want to take it in, we say it’s absolutely your right to reject it. But before you do that, we really encourage people to ponder it. Consider if there’s any nugget in there that’s true that you can accept, or if it’s just meant to be biased or hurtful or one of those things, and you have spent the time thinking about it and you want to step away from it and say, “I reject this. I do not want to accept that feedback.” I think that is the right that people have. It’s interesting, because speaking at the women’s conference, I actually went and did some extra research thinking about women and feedback.
Celeste Headlee:
Because the feedback is so often biased.
Tamra Chandler:
It is so often biased.
Celeste Headlee:
The managers who are trying to make you behave like a male.
Tamra Chandler:
Exactly. Well, want you to behave like a male, but also are more likely to label you as aggressive or angry.
Celeste Headlee:
Angry, emotional.
Tamra Chandler:
“Your voice puts me off,” or things that are very labeling to women. It’s interesting when you look at the research. Men are two to three times more likely to be labeled with things that are drive or ambition or innovation or those types of things, and even if it’s a positive assessment, women get things like supportive and helpful and words that really are less about the business outcome or the impact you’re having, and far more about more of a bias label that we tend to take away.
Celeste Headlee:
This brings me back to feedback. I remember a story that Deborah Tannen wrote about in the Harvard Business Review, in which she was saying that male and female colleagues had given presentations. They get back on the plane to go home. The female colleague says, “Wow, you a really great job with that presentation. Nice work. How’d you like mine?” And then he proceeded to give her 20 minutes of critiques and criticisms about her talk, which was not what she was looking for. She was hoping to just get a match. So there’s this question of how we ask for feedback, especially as it relates to our different languages, and not only what we’re saying, but we have to think about what they’re hearing.
Tamra Chandler:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Celeste Headlee:
Right? How do you-
Tamra Chandler:
Yes, absolutely. It’s a really good point. I think that why we suggest being a seeker, and I think particularly for women, because we do get this vague feedback that isn’t really geared towards outcomes and those types of things, or it gets whatever’s going on in their head that they think they need to tell you-
Celeste Headlee:
Mansplaining [crosstalk 00:12:42].
Tamra Chandler:
Yeah, mansplaining and all that. I think that the most important thing we can do is take the role of seeker, but take it very seriously in the sense of asking for very specific, and being very clear about what you’re wanting and why you’re wanting it. I think the more that we take control of the situation, which you have control when you’re seeking… You don’t necessarily have control if someone just decides they need to offer that feedback to you. But even if they do at that point, I think it’s important for women to, if you’re in a conversation like that and he lays all of this down on you, maybe she should turn back and say, “What’s the one thing you think I should take away?” How do you get them back to, “Give me some specificity that is actually helpful to me, not a big diatribe of your whole perspective on life.”
Celeste Headlee:
I would probably say, “Was there anything you liked?”
Tamra Chandler:
Well, that would work too. If it was pretty brutal, that would work too, for sure.
Celeste Headlee:
When the advice doesn’t seem right, if you have a manager that, for whatever reason, perhaps it is bias… But this is the nature of unconscious bias. If it’s an unconscious, they may not realize it.
Tamra Chandler:
Right.
Celeste Headlee:
How do I handle that, if I’m getting with my superior who is the person who gives me performance reviews, because most businesses still do that despite your advice, how do I do that? Is there a way to address that with them or is my only option to go to HR?
Tamra Chandler:
No, I think first and foremost, you should try to address it with them, because I honestly think at the heart of things, people are trying to do their best. We’ve taught people a lot of bad habits over the years and a lot of bad strategies for management, and people still buy into these old ideas that a manager does hold the answers and that they can rate someone effectively. There’s a lot of that still out there. So I think if you’re caught up in one of those systems, the best thing you can do, again, is try to take control of the situation. Now, if there was a lot of judgment or bias happening, I would really start to ask a lot of catalyzing questions to that person, back to, “Can you give me examples of where you’ve witnessed this? Can you help me understand the one thing you would want me to do differently? Next time you see me doing that, can you point that out to me? Let’s pull me aside and talk to me about it in the moment, so I understand what you’re talking about.”
Or even turning back to them and saying, “As you’ve talked about all those things, it seems like,” if you’re courageous enough to say it, “It seems like some of that’s a perspective. In everything you’ve said, can you tell me what you know for sure is true? What is true in what you’ve said versus what is your assessment or a judgment that you’ve put in it?” I think sometimes people will be taken aback, but hopefully mature enough to lean into that conversation.
Celeste Headlee:
That’s what you hope for.
Tamra Chandler:
Yeah.
Celeste Headlee:
One of the things you suggest is that if you’re a person that really struggles to take criticism, even if you want it, you suggest they do self-affirmations before the criticism is going to happen. Why does that work?
Tamra Chandler:
I have this whole Stuart Smalley quote in the book, because do you remember why we talk in the mirror? “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.”
Celeste Headlee:
“People like me.” Yes.
Tamra Chandler:
I think that as humans, we are amazing at beating ourselves up. We talk about, in the science section, that we’re positively negative. Negative information processes faster. We hold onto it longer. We listen to it and put way more weighting into it than we do on any positive feedback we get. So my big, if I’m out there beating a drum, it’s like, A, we need to share a lot more about the positive things we see happening every day with the people around us. And then when we get that, we need to savor it and take it in. I literally have a folder in my mailbox called keepers, and on a bad day, I go in and I read them, because it’s like, “Oh, I am a good person, and I have done good work, and people like working with me.”
Celeste Headlee:
Gosh darn it.
Tamra Chandler:
Gosh darn it!
Celeste Headlee:
People like me. Gosh darn it, people like me. [crosstalk 00:16:59] You like me.
Tamra Chandler:
Exactly.
Celeste Headlee:
You really like me.
Tamra Chandler:
We all have those days where you just feel like you need that, and I think it’s really important to… We say progress, not punishment. Even when we fail, when we slip, when we fall, that was a learning experience, and if we can put it in context of, “I’m still moving forward. I’m still making progress. I may have had a little trip or a bump here, and I can take something away from that and move forward.” We have to be so much more kind to ourselves, I think, through all of this work.
Celeste Headlee:
It goes the other way though, too, because one of the mistakes many companies make is they solicit feedback from employees, but don’t listen to it or act upon it. How do I make feedback actually authentic? If I’m the manager of a company, and I’m in the habit of I’ll hold a meeting and let employees talk, but it doesn’t change my policies one single bit, or I have an employee comment box that… Yeah, you’re laughing already, so how do we change that paradigm?
Tamra Chandler:
Better managers?
Celeste Headlee:
Fire them all.
Tamra Chandler:
Actually, one of my favorite quotes is from Thoreau, and he talks about, “The greatest kindness someone ever paid me was asking my opinion and seeing to it,” and I think that is so true. I always, when I’m working with clients, I’ll say, “If you’re not going to do anything with this data, then don’t ask.” You have to be very clear before you seek any kind of feedback from a crowd or an individual that you’re going to do something with it, and that there is a commitment to that.
If you’re doing a survey or you’re doing a drop the stuff in the box kind of thing, there has to be a commitment before you even start that to what the follow-up will be, and how you’ll share what comes out of that with people, and then how you’ll share what actions came out of that. I think that that’s really important, and unfortunately, when it doesn’t happen, it really is just bad management. It’s just bad protocols that are driving that kind of thing, that, “Oh, well, they’ll feel better if I ask them, but I’m just going to not”-
Celeste Headlee:
How much of that is motivated by the same fear of criticism that employees have when they walk into a performance review?
Tamra Chandler:
It’s probably similar, I think. I’ve led organizations for 20-plus years, and I think as managers and leaders, it’s hard if someone is questioning the decisions you’ve made, or questioning the approach you’re taking, or the strategy or the culture you’ve built, or any of those types of things. But those leaders who can hear that and step back, and again, “What in it is true? What nuggets of what is being shared are true, and what things can we take action on?” I think that those leaders that do that are the ones that we all love to work for.
Celeste Headlee:
Let’s go back to the more common situation, which is a worker getting feedback. I found it very interesting that you said that of, and I’ll make sure I get this right, so correct me if I get it wrong, you said of fight, freeze, or appease, the most common reaction to feedback is appease.
Tamra Chandler:
Right.
Celeste Headlee:
Why is that?
Tamra Chandler:
It’s safe. Appease just means you can tell me something, I can smile and nod and say, “Thank you very much. I really appreciate it,” and I can walk away and do absolutely nothing with it. And it may have actually been good feedback. I don’t know. But appease is where we’re unwilling to either take it in or we refuse to take it in, but sometimes, I don’t think we actually sit and consciously decide what we’re doing. We just sort of shut down. We sort of [inaudible 00:21:06]. It’s like the Charlie Brown [inaudible 00:21:09], and we hear that and we go, “Well, thank you very much,” and we walk away and we don’t do anything with it. It’s the easy route.
Celeste Headlee:
Let’s talk about what we replace. I know this is going back to the first book, and I think the first book was called How Performance Management is Killing Performance.
Tamra Chandler:
Right.
Celeste Headlee:
But it was so fascinating to talk about what the alternatives are to the performance review, because I still to this day have never worked for a company that… Well, I work for myself now, and I’m an awesome boss, turns out.
Tamra Chandler:
And you give yourself great reviews.
Celeste Headlee:
I get high marks every time. But other than that, I’ve always had performance reviews. What do we replace the performance review with?
Tamra Chandler:
Yeah. Well, it’s not an easy answer, and it’s interesting. Back in, I think it was 2015, 2016, Josh Berson who’s a thought leader in our space said, “Oh, 2016 is going to be the year of performance management, and every company is going to redo it and do something different and modernize it.” Well, we’ve been collecting data ever since then, and we still find that about 75 percent of organizations are still using the old traditional performance management models, and it’s because there is not one super easy answer. If you look at my book, you’ll see that there is a big knot at the top on the front of it, and that knot represents that we’ve tried to pack all these different ideas into one process.
The first thing we say you have to do is you have to start to pull all that apart and get really clear with, what is it you’re trying to do with performance management? What are your goals? There’s always three common goals. There’s, “We’re trying to drive organizational performance, so we’re all rowing the boat the same way. We’re trying to develop people, so we’re growing leaders and we’re growing our people. And we’re trying to reward equitably, fairly. Equitably, not meaning that we all get equal pay, but you feel like you’re paid what you’re worth in the market.”
Celeste Headlee:
Well, let’s go through each one of those, because it looks like your research shows the first one, it’s doing the opposite of that.
Tamra Chandler:
Well, interestingly, if you look at traditional performance management, it’s actually failing in all three.
Celeste Headlee:
All three of them.
Tamra Chandler:
All three, yeah. People will think that they’re developing people, but what we know is that performance management, particularly performance reviews, usually disengaged people more than they engage people, so we’re not developing people or giving them strong engagement. Often, it’s disconnected from the corporate strategy and connected to that in any way that people find meaningful. Then the rewards, we have all these outdated, crazy things we do in pay and performance that actually don’t work, but we continue to do them. And so when you pull it all apart, employees don’t trust it, managers hate it, and we’re not delivering on any of those goals.
Celeste Headlee:
And yet there’s still this idea that you can’t reward what you can’t measure, and so therefore, what do we base our reward systems on? You can measure how long someone’s in the office, right?
Tamra Chandler:
Yeah. We trademarked a term that is called “pay for capabilities and reward for contribution.” What we’re trying to do is say, “Hey, we need to just get back to the basics.” When we hire people into our companies from the market, we’re pretty good, usually, at paying them market rates, like what they’re worth. Then we bring them in, and then we start adding these merits and we start doing all this stuff, and pretty soon, we’ve completely lost connection to the market. And if the market’s growing quickly for a particular role, often that person who is hired is now way underpaid to the market, so they leave because they can go get more money somewhere else. Or the opposite can happen, or if someone has a great year, you give them a big merit bonus, and then suddenly they’re overpaid for their role.
So what we say is let’s strip it down and let’s get really clear with what the roles are on the organization and peg those to the market. That means annually, you have to do market study or whatever for compensation, and you have to be really clear about what the roles in the organization are and what the expectations are against those roles. But that can all be transparent, which brings the trust way up as soon as we can start to make that very transparent to people and say, “I can empower you to make your own career choices. Here’s all the roles we have in the company. Here’s what the expectations are. How do I help you move from this one to that one? That’s what I’m here to do as a manager.” We can start with that.
Then we can start to think about, “Well, what does contribution look like in a company? How do I and PeopleFirm define contribution, and then how do I want to recognize that?” I’m a big fan anymore of really leaning into peer recognition. Anytime we can invite everybody in the company to recognize the people that they work with, because if you and I were working side by side, you would have a lot more view into what I’m doing than probably my manager, right?
Celeste Headlee:
Yep.
Tamra Chandler:
Then we can also, even as managers, start to do more micro-type rewards. We have an 18-month project but we have a set of milestones, and as I see you over-delivering and hitting those milestones, I can recognize you for that. Then you understand what you’re being recognized for, because it was tied to something real. Suddenly, we can clean up this whole pay for performance stuff, and-
Celeste Headlee:
By the way, help to shrink the gap, because transparency ends up helping.
Tamra Chandler:
Transparency helps. I tell a story. We have always been transparent around our comp bands at PeopleFirm. The first time we did that, we laid out the comp bands for the roles that we had, and I had two people that came to me and said, “Tamra, I’m underpaid.” And we looked at it and we were like, “Damn right. You’re underpaid.” What it was, it was two of my strongest performers who had come in… They didn’t come in through traditional paths. So when they came in, they started really low, because we were like, “We don’t know what they can do, but we like them.” And so we hired them and then they grew, and they grew like crazy because they were crazy smart and fabulous consultants and all that, and we just hadn’t had the courage to keep up with their growth, yet we had recognized them as they had progressed.
And so once we looked at it, we were like, “Yeah, we’ve given you big pay increases, but they haven’t been big enough. We haven’t kept up with where you would be based on the role you’re playing within the organization right now.” I always say, good honest. The transparency actually fixed that problem, because they were able to call us on it.
Celeste Headlee:
How far would you take that transparency? Do you think everyone should know what everyone’s making?
Tamra Chandler:
I don’t think everyone should know what everyone’s making. I think that starts to become weaponized and can get pretty dangerous. But what I think you can do is I think you can publish salary bands for key roles and define those key roles within the organization, and then an individual can understand where they are within those salary bands. They don’t know where everybody else is who’s in that same role. Because most of us, you progress through a particular role. You start. You’re still learning. You get pretty proficient, and then ultimately you’re probably at the top of that band, and I think giving some room to move people through it is good. But I think the more transparent you can be with the bands, the better.
Honestly, I think it’s not only better for the employees. It’s better for the employer. Because most of the time, in my experience, if someone is upset about pay, they’re often misinformed. They got some piece of data from somewhere that was incorrect, and it just sent them spinning. And so the more transparent we are, we can stop some of that spin as well. There’s more of that now with Glassdoor and that, but you still have to be a little bit careful with that, because that’s all self-reported. I think we need stuff that really is being authentically reported by the organization.
Celeste Headlee:
Glassdoor is the website that keeps track of people’s salaries in different roles at different companies. But again, as you say, these are not companies saying, “This is what we’re paying people.” This is what employees say, “This is what we’re making.”
Tamra Chandler:
Right.
Celeste Headlee:
How are you at taking feedback?
Tamra Chandler:
That’s a really good question. I fessed up in the book that I’m not the best person at feedback. In fact, when I first started to write this book, a few people were like, “You’re writing a book on feedback?” But it was actually a little bit of my own learning through it, in that I think a lot of people still think of… I’m not very good at being mean. I’m not very good at being super critical, and I think a lot of people think, again, that feedback means, “Oh, if you’re a good manager, then you give that harsh feedback. You’re really candid and”-
Celeste Headlee:
They think it’s a way to be strong.
Tamra Chandler:
It’s a way to be strong. As I was dissecting this, I started to think about, well, what we know about all of this space. There was a great study that came out from i4cp and CEO this past year that talked about, in the performance management, for example, of all the things that we’re doing, what matters the most, and what they really found out was it came down to one thing. They correlated higher profit and revenue and engagement scores and all that to one thing: development feedback, growth-oriented development feedback. When I got down to that, I realized I’m good at that, because I really am good at grabbing people and helping them progress.
What I’ve started to do now is when I work with someone new who’s not used to me, I say, “Look, you’re going to get feedback from me all the time, but you’re never even going to realize it’s feedback.” Because we’re just going to be working together, and I’m going to be saying, “Hey, how about if you tried this? Have you thought about doing that?” Or, “Hey, that was a great meeting.” You’re just going to be getting these little bits of things all the time that are feedback from me, but it’s not a big, heavy put a box of Kleenex in the middle of the table and we’re going to have a big conversation. I’m not so good at that stuff. I have a high, high degree of empathy, so I’m a little bit of a wimp when it comes to those really hard conversations. But when they’re necessary, I’ll have them.
Celeste Headlee:
Tamra, your company is… What is your company called?
Tamra Chandler:
PeopleFirm.
Celeste Headlee:
That’s right. Your company’s called PeopleFirm. Tamra, thank you so much.