Talking to the void

You may have noticed a drop off in my regular flow of blogs - I have all the usual excuses .. too much to do, working away, living in hotels, a new computer etc. But truth be told I've become a little dispirited of late with my blogging as its become a bit too much like talking to the 'void' .. putting out your thoughts into cyberspace with little or no feedback. Net result a tail off.,

Now I don't think I'm alone in this. Too many of us work in organisation where we get little or no feedback. It gets so we'd rather hear something, even if it is negative, rather than nothing. Net result .. a gradual disillusionment and disengagement from the organisation.

In my experience, really excellent organisations have mastered the art of 'little and often' feedback, telling people what they are doing right as well as what they are doing wrong as they go along.  Net result .. mistakes get corrected quickly and the positives get reinforced, but best of all we feel like we matter.

So would it really be so hard to press the 'like' button?

Selective hearing - issues in coaching

Having delivered a lot of 360 feedback to people over the years I've noticed how often people seem to selectively pick out the messages they want to hear and reject or rationalise away the rest. Not too surprising at one level, but given the intent of 360 feedback is (in part) to puncture our self-delusions not reinforce them, this form of selective hearing seems worth paying attention to.

William Swann*, US psychologist, talks about two competing motives that tend to preserve and reinforce our view of ourselves: the self-consistency and self-enhancement motives. Those with a stronger self-consistency drive need to see themselves as essentially unchanging - even if it means clinging to a poor self-image. So when faced with good feedback they will often diminish or minimise it, whilst lapping up the bad news. A stronger self-enhancement motive shows up as people wanting to enhance their view of themselves - so guess what - the good news gets heard and the bad news gets rejected. This makes it tough work for the coach trying to increase a client's self-awareness but understanding these motives does help.

So what do you find harder - the good new or the bad news?

* Swann,W.B. et al (1999) The cognitive-affective crossfire: when self-consistency confronts self-enhancement, in: Roy F. Baumeister (Ed.), The self in social psychology, Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Click here for a link