How do you foster a culture of feedback and coaching for your leaders?

Providing regular feedback and coaching helps leaders to identify their strengths and areas for improvement and to develop new skills and competencies that align with the organization's strategic goals. It also helps to build trust and accountability between leaders and their teams and promotes a culture of open and transparent communication. Effective feedback and coaching involve active listening, empathy, and a growth mindset, and can enhance leaders' self-awareness and emotional intelligence, which are essential for effective leadership.

Feedback and coaching is imperative with associates because they need to know where they are versus the expectation. Realistic expectations should be identified with regular, productive feedback. The feedback should contain milestones on how to need the expectations, if they are not meeting expectations, and specific examples for how they are/are not meeting the expectations.

One thing I've found to be helpful when creating a culture of meaningful feedback and coaching is to ensure that you(as a leader) have created space for respectful and transparent feedback. I believe it's important to provide actionable feedback that is timely and realistic. I believe feedback should be consistent and timely. There should be a mutual expectation that follow-up should occur whether positive or corrective feedback is given. Even high performers need coaching and check-ins to ensure burn out isn't creeping in and to manage overall performance.

When trying to create a culture of feedback within a team or organisation there are two key perspectives to consider: 1. The feedback provider - help them learn how to observe another person’s behaviour and turn this into specific feedback designed to help the recipient to grow, become more self aware and successful. Focus on the behaviour rather than the person and on creating an environment where people feel comfortable to speak up and exchange feedback without fear of recrimination. 2. The feedback recipient - help them face into vulnerability by seeing this as a strength, empower them to own the feedback experience and support them to reframe when feedback triggers fight or flight. We’re all human after all.

360 or engagement surveys are the best to measure effective leadership. Exit interview can be as well, but the goal is to find the information before an associate leaves. Your workforce will be open to tell you more if you show a presence and consistency.

Leadership effectiveness can be measured through the below metrics: 1) Employee Growth / Development Index from time leader took the role annually. Lateral or vertical Promotions, Skills developed cross-functional, Talent Succession, internal move out to other departments. 2) Retention rate attributed to Work, Team Culture, Manager, Team and Growth (pay, org issues, etc to be excluded) 3) Visionary Organisation programs launched or ideated 4) Successful execution rate or Business results growth 5) Handling difficult or conflicts situations with ease and balance

Employee experience and engagement surveys can include items to measure leadership effectiveness and outcomes to provide an aggregate view across teams, functions, the organisation. Sometimes it’s the simplest questions that harness the greatest results - ‘if this team were to be created again from scratch, would you want to be lead by this person?’. Whatever the method of assessing and determining leadership effectiveness you choose, be prepared to follow through with action to yield greatest impact.

Understand the key leadership competencies that are critical for success in your organization and align with your strategic goals. These may include areas such as communication, decision-making, and people management. Develop a set of metrics that measure leaders' performance and progress towards these competencies, such as 360-degree feedback scores, employee engagement and satisfaction surveys, and objective performance metrics. Regularly collect and analyze data to assess leaders' effectiveness, identify areas of strength and opportunity, and provide targeted coaching and development interventions.

Set clear expectations for the feedback process and ensuring that leaders understand the purpose and benefits of receiving feedback. When giving feedback, focus on specific behaviors or actions that you have observed and their impact on individuals or teams. Use a combination of objective and subjective data to support your feedback and provide actionable suggestions for improvement. Use active listening and empathy to understand the leader's perspective and ensure that the feedback is well-received and understood. Provide ongoing support and follow-up to ensure that the leader is making progress towards their development goals and that they have the resources and tools necessary to succeed.

Coaching is a way to help leaders process and action the feedback they receive. It is not about influencing a leader to change how they operate or behave. Areas of focus: 1) Helping leaders develop self-awareness (e.g. how their actions/behaviors are being perceived) 2) Clarifying and prioritizing their professional/personal goals and aspirations 3) Identifying challenges/blocking behaviors. 4) Assisting them with developing their own specific solutions and strategies for achieving success.

We often gloss over the importance of rapport with coaching. You can’t coach someone who isn’t open to it. That being said, having a model like SBIR or GROW to guide your feedback and coaching can definitely help especially when coaching up.

Coach leaders to be great coaches themselves and recognise this as a core leadership skill. Focus on two critical skills - listening and questioning. As a coach, you exist to serve the coachee to enhance their awareness in order to build openness to learning, growth and change. The future of leadership centres on great listenership!

Clear performance goals, measurement criteria and transparent performance assessment process is a pre-requisite for helping improve competence and performance of employees through feedback and coaching. High Performing cultures are built on the premise of psychological safety - when leaders feel safe, they will give candid feedback and when employees feel safe, they will receive this feedback.

Creating a feedback and coaching culture also encompasses building trust, psychological safety, empowerment and accountability into individual relationships, team climate and company culture. When we talk about changing a culture it can seem overwhelming which could scare us in to paralysis and inaction, start small, break it down, step at a time. Go where the energy for change exists, experiment, build and refine. Sustainable change happens incrementally, think days, weeks, months in order to progress into years.