couldn’t imagine himself as a good listener. The goal of becoming a good listener was, for Robert, an end goal. It was a very big hurdle and would be achieved only as the result of a series of smaller goals, called performance goals. (If the end goal is the top of the staircase, the performance goals are the stairs.) We learn later that good coaches focus only on performance goals.
I asked Robert if he was willing to let me help him improve his listening skills. He said he was, but then added, somewhat skeptically, “Many have tried.” We narrowed the goal down to giving people who report to him his undivided attention when they came in to see him in his office.
I started the coaching session by asking him, “Who do you know who is an exceptionally good listener?”
He immediately responded, “Monique, my wife.”
I thought, Well, she has to be. You’ll notice I wrote, “I thought”—I did not say this out loud. I didn’t know Robert well enough to throw out a quip at this early stage in our relationship. It was important to manage my own ego and curb my need to be clever and possibly contaminate the coaching environment. (We discuss the need for the coach to selfmanage in the next chapter.)
“Okay, Robert,” I said, “I want you to be you and I will be Monique. I want you to coach me in acting and behaving the way Monique does when she is really listening to you. I want to know specifically what she says and what she does that make her such a good listener.” Then I walked to the other side of the room and stood with my arms crossed.
His first comment was “She wouldn’t be way over there.”
“Then where would she be?”
“Over here, closer to me and on the same side of this table as I am,” he responded. I moved over beside him and started glancing around the room. “She wouldn’t do that; she would look at me.” I looked at him and then looked away. “Oh, she wouldn’t ever do that,” he said quickly, then added, “She locks you in. When you are here [motioning with both arms to indicate a narrow corridor of eye contact between us], you do not want to be caught looking anywhere else!”
This bit of role-playing told me that Robert was beginning to get it. He was starting to be able to imagine what good listening looks like. But he thought he was done. “That’s about it, Peter,” he said.
“But, Robert, how do you know she is listening?” I asked him. “What does she do or say that lets you know she is paying attention?”
After a few seconds of thought he said, “She grunts a lot—you know, things like ‘aha,’ ‘oh yeah,’ ‘uh-huh.’” I asked him what function he thought those “grunts” served. “Well, she’s with me, she’s encouraging me and letting me know she’s following along.”
I then moved to the most difficult part, asking him, “How do you know she understands you?”
It took a few minutes, but eventually he said, “Every once in a while she says, ‘Robert, shut up. Robert, shut up!’ and when I stop, she says, ‘Let me see if I’m getting this,’ and she summarizes in her own words what I said. If I say, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ then she says, ‘All right, go on,’ and I continue. If I tell her, ‘No, that’s not it,’ she asks me to go back and repeat, in a different way, what I’ve said.”
We had to tone down the “Robert, shut up” part, but by now Robert had a very clear picture of what listening to a person might look like. I asked him, “When people come in to see you in your office, do you think you could go around to the other side of the desk, sit in a chair, lean forward and make eye contact, grunt, and every so often summarize in your own words what you hear them saying?”
“Yeah, I can do that!” he declared. (He couldn’t listen but he could do that!)
Robert’s company probably spent a good $10,000 to send him to the leadership program at Queen’s. If, when he gets back to work and someone comes in to see him, he engages in the listening behavior described above, do you think he’ll have a different relationship with his people? You bet he will! Coaching is all about the little things that make very big changes down the road. It’s about the performance goals—what Buck-minster Fuller referred to as “trim-tab adjustments.” If the Titanic had turned half a degree south as it left England, it would have been in an entirely different place days later.
Metaphorically speaking, it’s as if Robert and I went into a darkroom and developed a picture of what good listening looks like. And as I asked questions and actively listened to his responses, we gradually created a picture of listening that he could imagine himself doing. The skills of asking and listening are very important ones for anyone who wants to trigger the Third Factor.
Give Competent, Relevant Feedback
Now here’s a vital skill that has been worked over in numerous ways and made much more complicated than it needs to be. I read several books on the subject a few years ago, and when I finished I was more confused than when I started. My friend Diane Abbey Livingston drew the following simple diagram on a cocktail napkin and said, “Peter, it’s not really that complicated. The fundamental principle is that you learn to tell people what you feel, see and hear, and not what you think.”
This was a brilliant piece of feedback for me on the concept of feedback. There are other guidelines, but learning to separate out what you are seeing, hearing and feeling from what you think—your interpretation—is at the core of developing your skill in giving effective feedback. And, boy, is that ever hard to do! I frequently teach this skill, and it is astounding how often I fall back into telling people what I think—giving them my interpretation. I was particularly guilty of this with my own children on the subject of the cleanliness of their rooms (or lack thereof!). I would fall back into using interpretive phrases like “You don’t care” or “This is the biggest mess I have ever seen”—guaranteed, of course, to bring about immediate and lasting change in the child’s behavior—not!
The truth is that when we give evaluations, the other party takes exception to our evaluations and rarely hears the message. However, if we are able to describe what we see and hear and how that makes us feel, it is far more difficult for them to dismiss our feedback. If, for example, someone pushes their chair back in a meeting, gets red in the face and starts shaking their head from side to side, my feeding that observable data back to them (“I saw you push your chair back, your face got very red, and you were shaking your head from side to side; what was that all about?”) makes it very hard for them to argue. It’s far more effective than offering up your interpretation (“I see you lost it in the meeting”), which they are much more likely to dispute. (You can add the feeling part if you need to let them know the impact they had on someone else.)
Let me say once again that this is much harder to do than it appears, especially when the feedback is corrective in nature. We are used to telling people what we think, giving them our interpretation of what has occurred, and it’s a tough, tough habit to break. For most of us, capturing a group of behaviors under a single label is something we have done thousands of times. We are used to summarizing in our minds and labeling behaviors as rude, inconsiderate, evasive, uncooperative, bad, excellent, great, ineffective, et cetera. Not one of these interpretations, when fed back to a performer, will in any way enable them to get better at whatever it is they are doing.
The Four Rules of Effective Feedback
There are four simple rules for giving effective feedback. (I started with the second one, describe versus evaluate, above, because it is such a challenge.)
1. Be specific versus general.
2. Describe versus evaluate.
3. Focus on the behavior versus the person.
4. Maintain the relationship versus indulge in self-serving behavior.
The first rule, that feedback