Your First Leadership Job: How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best in Others

Your First Leadership Job

Mastery and Leadership Skills15 Feedback FundamentalsSpecific, Timely, and Balanced

Pre:Think

We've all had that bit of feedback in our career where we said, That was insightful. And days or weeks later, we even stopped to thank the feedback provider. Think about it: Do people in your organization get enough feedback? How confident do you feel about giving both positive and constructive feedback? And, most importantly, does your team's performance suffer because people don't get the feedback they need to perform to their potential?

Sometimes, it's just as good to receive as it is to give.

That was the situation facing the Apollo 11 crew on their legendary lunar mission in 1969. Midway through their flight, the crew was way off course, and their fuel was almost gone. In this situation astronauts could have ignored the data (feedback) they got from the flight controllers and computers. Neil Armstrong controlled the command module, and he could have steered it anywhere he wished. But he accepted the data and made the course corrections that enabled him to hit a moving target a quarter of a million miles away from Earth.

While exchanging feedback in space can be a life-or-death proposition, the principles of effective feedback apply just as well here on Earth as they do up in space. (Though for most of us, these conversations won't have such dramatic consequences.) ...