Offering Feedback the SL Way

 “I owe it to you as a Partner to tell you……”

How do you handle it as a servant-leader when you need to give someone with whom you work corrective feedback? Further, how do you handle it when that someone with whom you work is your boss? Servant-leaders have the courage to respectfully keep self and others accountable, regardless of position and rank. The guiding message is to be able to do this in a respectful way that honors both parties in the conversation. In a recent Servant Leadership skill building session at TDIndustries, Ben Simmons, Executive Vice President Multifamily shared a great story of how JimBo Bunnell, who at the time reported to Ben, found the courage to consistently offer constructive feedback, information which a supervisor typically might not hear from a direct report. Of note is that his story is about how one of his direct reports was able to graciously give him (the boss) valuable feedback in a way that proved effective and beneficial for not only the two of them, but for the entire corporate culture. When scenarios such as the one below occur throughout an organization, each instance and each person involved serves to support a servant led environment, an example of how the sum becomes greater than the parts. Here’s the story:

“Rather than JimBo (the direct report) talking to someone else at the water cooler about my performance, JimBo took the leadership role and came straight to me where there was opportunity for positive and immediate change. This happened more than once. He would come to me and ask for a private conversation. Then he would say, “Ben, I owe it to you as your TD Partner to tell you XXXX.” By using this introductory phrase it reminded me that he was honoring me with feedback I might not otherwise hear and it was feedback from which I would benefit and grow as a leader myself. It was always apparent that his concern and approach was genuine (a must). It was not always comfortable to hear his feedback, but I always appreciated having the benefit of his counsel. There are too many non-useful and negative surrogate conversations that can take place in a company. JimBo modeled the way to replace those.

The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness

I recently read a fascinating book, The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness by Christopher M. Bache. For those of you interested in work on generative dialogue and ways to bring a group of people into synergistic ways to think, learn and create together, this book is well worth the read. In business leaders often move from department to department, starting over as they grow a new team to identify challenges, vision stretch goals and then work again a plan to realize these shared goals. One of the phenomena that most interested me was his reporting on energy fields and how a new class would seem to pick up where the former class left off. How can that be? Yet well-known research with rats done decades earlier suggests that once new learning is discovered it becomes like an energy field, there for all others to tune into.

I’m always hungry to keep stretching my own capacity to learn, lead and team effectively as well as to bring to all our clients some of the most powerful ways to leverage the collective intelligence possible and strategies to grow learning organizations. There are plenty of fresh insights one can experiment with by focusing on the ways we team within our families, work place and communities. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline cites that Bache leads us to rediscover our hidden connectedness. If you choose to read this engaging book, you will become keenly aware that we can’t harm others without it coming back to us. The illusion of being separate beings is just that, an illusion. And that has huge implications as to how we lead and nurture all those in our work places and lives.

Ann McGee-Cooper