Great on the Job by Jodi Glickman

Author:Jodi Glickman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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Create Mentoring Opportunities

• By soliciting feedback, you acknowledge that you value the other person’s judgment and opinion.

• The message you convey is “You have wisdom to impart” and “I’m open to self-improvement.”

• Oftentimes, this dynamic can serve as the beginning of an invaluable mentor/mentee relationship.

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I spend a good deal of time in front of corporate and business school audiences presenting the Great on the Job strategies. I also spend a lot of time asking for and analyzing reviews and feedback on the course. I do something else too. About halfway through every presentation, I call on an unsuspecting audience member and ask him how I’m doing.

Guess what people say? To this day, I’ve never gotten a bad review. Good for me. As much as I like to think that each and every person who sits through a Great on the Job presentation finds the material as powerful and helpful as I do, I do know better. I’m usually at about a 90 percent success rate in people’s reviews of my presentations. But when I call on you in front of a room full of people, 100 percent of the time you’ll tell me I’m doing a great job.

Who can blame you? I’ve just called you out in front of over a hundred people and asked for some feedback on the spot. I didn’t give you a heads-up. I didn’t pull you aside before the presentation to let you know that I might want some feedback along the way and ask that you please pay attention to some aspect of the presentation.

I didn’t do myself any favors either. If that spontaneous, on-the-spot, in-front-of-a-hundred-plus-people feedback were the only feedback I solicited, you can imagine I’d have a hard time continuously improving my content.

Here’s the deal—feedback can’t be asked for on the spot. Feedback is a tool that can make you better at your job, but it has to be given and received with anticipation. It is also not to be given in a public forum. Feedback should be asked for or offered off-line and behind closed doors, period. Giving someone your thoughts on how they’re doing in front of others, no matter how well-intentioned you are or how timely the comments may be, is a bad idea. Absolutely no one can be expected to effectively receive constructive criticism in front of others.

Let’s revisit the situation with our banking analyst Jeff and his VP Karen.

1. Jeff worked on some technical analysis for Karen and did a good job.

2. Jeff presented this technical analysis to the client and didn’t do a good job.

3. Jeff asked Karen how he did presenting to the client.

4. Karen lied and told him he did a great job.

What went wrong? Jeff’s on-the-spot and after-the-fact inquiry didn’t give Karen the time to collect her thoughts to prepare or deliver honest and thoughtful feedback. It was a lose-lose situation for Jeff and Karen, with both of them at fault.

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There are two overriding goals of getting constructive feedback—they are both equally important and neither trumps or negates the other:

1.

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