Putting Your Feedback into Action
Lesson 7 from: How to Realize Your Leadership PotentialTaavo Godtfredsen
Putting Your Feedback into Action
Lesson 7 from: How to Realize Your Leadership PotentialTaavo Godtfredsen
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Putting Your Feedback into Action
Now, let's totally shift gears here, okay? So, I think we've, got a good handle on the importance of feedback, asking for it, and why it's so important. Now, let's shift gears, now, once we get feedback, what do we do with it? How do we actually put it into practice? What do we actually do? And so as I mentioned we get into bad habits, and so we need, we can need help. There's a great book out there, by Atul Gawande, It's called The Checklist Manifesto, and what I wanna suggest to you is a process around how we can get better as a leader, and help align our intentions with our actions, and in The Checklist Manifesto, what they did, what he did, is they did a study with about eight different hospitals, and what they did is they had a checklist that doctors would go through before surgery, and it's about 20 items, and you know, the nurse would be there with the doctor, and the nurse would ask, would go through this 20 item checklist with the doctor, around some things that are really imp...
ortant, like the person's name, and the procedure that they're gonna be doing, and one of the questions is did you wash your hands. Guess what the most common answer from these doctors, right, these surgeons, who are about to perform surgery, guess what the most common response was when they asked, when the question was asked, did you wash your hands. Nope, I don't remember. I don't remember. They're so busy, right? So we all need checklists to help us, and look what happened, right, when they instituted these checklists before surgery. Complications from surgery fell 36%, deaths by 47%, and we just went through this answer. So just think about, if this works so well in this context, imagine what work would be possible in a leadership context, And so what I want to do, and this is kinda the, your final handout, is, you've got your Create Your Leadership Checklist. So what's gonna happen is, what's gonna happen is, what I want you to do is, I've given you a list of about 30 potential items. You can totally create your own, think about what you want to work on and improve as a leader. So the process steps with this is, this is something you're gonna do, most likely, after you get feedback and input on how you show up as leader, and you make a decision on what you want to improve in, and what I want you to do, is you to think about what you wanna improve in, use some of these checklist questions to maybe help you out. I just provided a sample here, right, which is, for example, if you're working on listening, did I cut anyone off before they had finished expressing their idea, right, yes or no. These can be yes or no questions, they can also be some one to ten questions, so for example, how well did I leave people feeling energized after speaking with me, right, on a scale of one to ten. So what I want you to do, and a really simple process for doing this, we've got Outlook, right, why don't we use, or whatever meeting software that you have, or calendar software, use that software to help you. So at five o'clock each day, or noon, or maybe you wanna prefer it in the morning, you put these checklists questions in there, as a meeting, and it pops ups, and maybe it's just a five minute meeting that pops up, and what you can do, is again, we're so busy as leaders, we don't take a lot of time for reflection. So if I ask you right now, where do you do your thinking, what would you say? Where do you do your thinking currently? Time to think. Shower. Shower. Running. Running. Driving is the one I here all the time. Shower, running, in the car. Why aren't we carving out some white space, at work, for some reflection? Right, where your hired for this wonderful brain that you have, and we're not leveraging it because we're so consumed in this busy work. Take time to think, reflect around what we can be doing better, strategically, and with our leadership and so this is just a really simple mechanism to help you do that, and so again with this list, you know, pick four or five, that you think will make the biggest difference, for you, it can be personal, work related. The most important thing is that you pay attention to it, right so again, we get into bad habits, this is, this is one simple process that helps keep you on the rails, and speaking of rails, I'm gonna tell you a story. This is an actual leader that I worked with, years and years ago, this person, she's in a COO role, currently, and, what I would do, as part of my coaching process and working with leaders is once we identify this goal, you can see this is this person's leadership action plan, right, so her goal is to build higher levels of trust, and these were some of the things she was working on, so part of what I do in working with leaders, is I'll ask them, just like I'm asking you, to look at it each day at a certain time, and you can do yes, no, or one to ten questions, one to ten, and at the end of the week, I'll ask them to send it to me, and it becomes part of the basis for our coaching conversation. So in this particular case, with this leader, showing respect for other's time and responsibility, came up three no's in a week. So we did a debrief and a deep dive, okay what was this about, what was going on, what, you know, what was the context, why do you feel like it was a no, and we went through it, and it was really fascinating. So, where we landed in this conversation, and where she landed, was this realization, that, the reason that she had three no's, was because, we talked about it earlier, right, she was in back to back meetings all day, every day, and so she just made a decision, in this coaching session, she said, Taavo, that's it, I'm gonna make a rule, no more back to back meetings. Part of my message to you is this really simple process, can actually spark innovation in your own leadership. Okay? It forced her, in particular, to say, look I need to do something differently, and for her it was having, it was saying, it was making the decision that I'm not gonna have any more back to back meetings, and it was really hard at first, and so what did it force her to do? It forced her to prioritize, right, and now what would happen previously, because she was in back to back meetings, and why this was no's, is because, people would send her this work, they'd show up in meetings with her, the people on her team realized she wasn't reading what they were sending her, they felt devalued, demoralized, and they're doing all, you know, they're doing all this work and they just felt deflated, and so she changed the game with this rule, and it helped her being much more time efficient, helped at her prioritize, and it also, believe it or not, helped her to learn how to delegate more effectively, so going, she'd reach stuff that people were now sending her, and she now could think about how she wanted to delegate in a different way, and the key insight, the key aha for her, from this experience was if I move slower, I can actually move faster. If I move slower, I can actually move faster. So she was making better decisions, and having a much greater impact. Okay. So, part of this process, just wanna show this one last thing for you here, is around this idea of creative commitment devices. This is another leader I work with who is looking to delegate and empower more effectively, and they needed to be reminded, this person loved to jump in and provide input in the moment, to folks, and so what this particular leader did is said, look, I need to remind myself, that I need to pause. So, this person, quite literally wrote this down, I had her take a picture of it, and this is the picture that she sent, and so she had this in front of her in meetings, and she did it deliberately, and people are saying, what is that, what is that pause sticky, and she, and it represented an opportunity, to say, hey this is what I'm working on, I'm trying to do a better job of listening before I respond, and also taking in what you're saying to me, so I can be better at what I'm doing. So these little creative commitment devices are great, and so put something on a yellow sticky, to kinda help what you're doing.
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Ratings and Reviews
D'Ann Lapenias
I thought the class was very insightful and beneficial in helping each and every one of us discover and pinpoint our weaknesses. It was also helpful in making us reflect on what elements make up a good leader. Not only this, but it gave us tools to put the lessons into practice, not only in our workspace but also in our personal lives. Additionally, I hadn't realized how difficult it is to self assess your own strengths and weaknesses and the importance of asking others for feedback. Take this course!
D'Ann Lapenias
Taavo is incredibly inspiring and keeps it real. Everything that was discussed in the class is applicable at all levels of leadership. I enjoyed and learned alot!
Michal Levi
Did not expect to find this so relevant, but it was great. BRAVO! So glad I dropped in to this on air session during my lunch break. : ) Love what he is saying about getting feedback!!!!! Wish more leaders would do this!