Feedback - A gift or a curse?

Giving and receiving feedback is tricky business and an art. It is probably one of the most important leadership traits, and can take a lifetime to learn. It can differentiate good leaders from mediocre ones by  demonstrating several important leadership characteristics - good judgment, clarity and organization of thought, courage, maturity, sense of humor, crispness of communication, sensitivity, caring, coaching abilities, humility, and emotional intelligence all in one.

We all hear about feedback being a gift. It can be, if done well. We need to take several factors into consideration and do some pre-work and thinking to do both giving and receiving fedback well. Here are some things to think about:

 

Giving feedback:

• When is the right time to give feedback?
• Is the person ready to receive it?
• How do you prepare the person to receive the feedback as you intend?
• What is the best way to deliver it?
• How frequent is frequent enough?
• Who do you give unsolicited feedback to and why?

Receiving feedback:

• Who do you ask for feedback?
• How often do you ask?
• How do you react to the feedback?
• What aspects of the feedback do you choose to act upon and what do you choose to ignore and why?
• How will you deal with unsolicited feedback?

As with most things in life, the answer for most of these questions is, "It depends" (on the people involved, their situation, and the need) and is very personal. But the better prepared we are with answers to these questions before attempting to give/receive feedback, the better results we will get. 

As a giver of feedback, there are a few things to keep in mind. Most people take feedback very seriously and try to act on it. So, if your assessment is based on a short interaction with the person you are giving feedback to and you are not sure your assessment is complete or accurate, it will be better to say that upfront. Otherwise your feedback may have unintended results such as lowering someone's confidence, demoralizing them, or changing their behavior for the worse. Also, if you are simply passing on someone else's comments rather than giving feedback based on your own observations, you should clarify that as well. In addition,it is almost always better to keep the feedback as real time and on-the-spot as possible rather than holding any thing back for a later time.

As a receiver of the feedback, the most important thing is to focus on the intent of the feedback. As stated above, giving feedback is an art that takes a lifetime to learn and even the most seasoned leaders sometimes struggle to do it properly. It is just as difficult to the person giving the feedback as to you as the receiver. Assuming you trust the feedback giver, both in intent and ability, help him/her out by focusing on the message rather than the specific words used or how it was delivered. On the other hand, if you don't fully trust the person giving the feedback because they don't  know you very well, or for any other reason, try to validate the feedback with another trusted adviser before acting on it.

If we keep these simple things in mind and prepare well, feedback - both giving and receiving - can be a gift rather than a curse!

The Happiness Theory

Why are some people happier than others? Why are we happy some times and not at other times?

These are age old questions. In spite of the millions of dollars spent on research in finding the answers to this, we still don't have any satisfactory conclusions.

It is clearly not money that makes this difference. We all know people that have far less money and resources but are still happier than some ultra rich people. Even in our own lives we may have experienced the phenomenon that our happiness doesn’t increase proportional to the money we make.

Is it friends, families and communities that make the difference? Perhaps. Those factors certainly seem to play a bigger role than money does. Support from friends and family are certainly key in recovering quickly from tough and unhappy situations. Being around friends and family also brings joy (in most cases any way!).

But what causes happiness or unhappiness inherently at a very personal level in the first place?

Maybe, it has been so difficult to find an answer to this quest because there is no single answer. Maybe, it is so personal to each of us that we can't generalize it. That is a possibility.

But then, that doesn't explain why we can’t stay happy forever, once we figure out what makes us happy at a very personal level and actually achieve that.

No. Happiness appears to be a dynamic and living thing rather than in a static state. That is why there doesn't seem to be a such a thing as "achieving happiness".

As I look into my own life and examine my happiness patterns on a day to day basis, I happened upon a rather simple explanation, one that both satisfies my curiosity and seems to fit and explain the reasons for my own happiness and unhappiness. It may seem too simplistic at first, but think about it and apply it to your own situations and see if it works for you.

Simply put, happiness in any given moment seems to be inversely proportional to our own expectations and nothing more. That is, the lower our own expectations are in any given situation, the higher our happiness quotient will be, and vice versa. In that sense, it is a continuum rather than being binary.

We have all probably experienced this phenomenon in some simple situations. For example, when we go to watch a very popular movie, we sometimes notice that we don't enjoy or derive as much happiness as  we expected too much, based on what we heard about the movie.

This same concept can be applied to everything. If you get a pay increase higher than what you expected you are happier, if you got less than what you expected, you are less happy.

Like I said, it seems to explain the mystery behind my own happiness and unhappiness in almost all cases that I tested.

In the end, it is all about how we manage our own expectations. Easy, right? So, how do we do that?

Well, I "expect" that I will crack that code in the remainder of my lifetime :-).