The Workplace Coach

This week I’ve been doing a fair bit of coaching with senior managers and debriefing them on their LSI 1 and LSI 2 profiles. Essentially, this is an assessment tool that includes a comprehensive self-assessment plus a 360 assessment against 12 behavioural styles.  It is designed to help people get a better understanding of how and why they act (or react) the way they do and to give them a very clear picture of how their behaviours, management, leadership and communication styles are landing with the people they interact with at work and who provide the feedback in the LSI 2. 

I don’t want to go into the tool and how it works here but I do want to make an observation about how some people feel about the 360 feedback they get.  I was going to say I was surprised about how upset some of these managers got when they find out that their respondents don’t see them the same way that they see themselves… but I guess it’s not really that surprising.  It does however confirm a few things that I have been saying for years now:

1. We all want to be liked by the people we manage.
2. We all want to be doing a great job of managing our people.
3. None of us set out deliberately to upset, annoy or demotivate our people.
4. Very few of us have the self-awareness to understand how we land with our people. See What is it like to work for you?
5. Most of us don’t take feedback as well as we think we will.

Okay so some of the feedback this tool will give is not just whether your people see you the way you see yourself, but it gets down to specifics.  There are 240 assessment items that relate to 12 different behavioural styles. Responses are aggregated so you won’t know exactly who said what but you do get the general gist of what your people really think on things like:

• Are you trustworthy? 
• Are you approachable? 
• Do you blame others for your own mistakes?
• Do you care about your people? 
• Are you task focussed or people oriented?
• Are you ready for promotion?
• How effective are you in your role?
• Are you hostile or aggressive?
• Are you indecisive?
• Are you open to suggestions or input?

Some of my clients this week experienced a full range of emotions when faced with some of their feedback. A few of them travelled all the way from disbelief to anger and outrage, to sadness and disappointment, to frustration and tears and then all the way back around to denial.

They missed the point. What is important here is that we almost never get the opportunity to get honest, unfiltered feedback about how we operate in the workplace and what people really think of us.  One of the biggest challenges that my clients face in terms of managing people is ‘how to have the difficult conversation’ about performance or behaviours.

So, when you do get some raw feedback it’s a rare gift and what you do with it is entirely up to you.  You may use it the way it was intended and decide to modify some of your behaviours to become more effective in your leadership style, or you might decide that none of them get you and its time to look for somewhere else where they will appreciate you for who you are.  You may even decide to share the feedback with the team and ask them what they would like to see more (or less) of.  You might even work with a coach to get a deeper understanding of what the feedback means and how you might leverage it for some real personal growth. 

What I’m saying is that anytime you get hold of some real feedback, that hasn’t been wrapped in cotton wool and sugar coated, you should be thankful that you finally have some honest information that you can do something with.  It may sting a little at first but you can get past that.