Welcome back to Giving Helpful Feedback. It's time to dig into the fifth essential skill for giving feedback, ensuring understanding. Let's go ahead and get started with a quote and then a definition. According to George Bernard Shaw, the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. A lot of times in giving feedback there is an illusion that has taken place, so let's examine this. Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you were 100% clear but it turns out you were not? This happens a lot when we give directions to one another. So for example, you say to a friend let's meet at that small, funky cafe on York Street. You think everything is fine until you spend the next half hour waiting for your friend only to discover they were at a different cafe. To avoid this, we ensure understanding in our feedback. The definition then, of ensuring feedback is very simple. It means to verify that you are understood. Verifying that you are understood has three steps. First, you ask the person receiving the feedback to tell you what the main points were of the feedback conversation. You listen, and then you verify that the main points were understood. If you don't hear all the main points, then let them know what was missing. Also a good idea to have them say them out loud again. Unless you literally hear the main points repeated back to you, then you can't be sure that the feedback was received. I know, this sounds really awkward, and it could be embarrassing because it seems like you're quizzing the person, and it could be a person you respect a lot. Would you please give me the three main points, like it's a test. But really there are ways around that, for example you could say I want to ensure we're on the same page. Would you tell me your understanding of the most important points in our meeting? Let's move on and look at some examples of what this looks like. To begin, let's continue with our funky cafe example. And I'm going to relay a conversation that shows you how this would work. You would say to your friend, let's meet at the funky cafe on York Street. Your friend would go, great. And then you'd say, do you know where it is, exactly? And I'd say, sure I do. And you say, well, just to be sure, would you tell me where you think it is? And your friend would say, well, it's on the corner of Mulberry and York, and it's near the taxidermy store. If that's right, then you're ready to go. Here are some more situations where ensuring understanding might have been helpful. You go to the barber or you go to the hair stylist and you tell them how you want your hair cut, but then you end up with a completely different cut. You split the work among team members, everybody goes off and does what they were told to do, but when you get back together again, one of the team members has done the wrong thing. You're at a restaurant. You ask for a change to one of the dishes on the menu. When the dish arrives, the changes aren't there. Finally, you have a dispute with a friend and then you ask them if they understood your point of view. And they say it out loud, and you realize they really have not. All of these situations are where it would be a good idea to ensure understanding, because very often the message doesn't get across. That's the main idea on this skill. There are times when people have a tough time absorbing information, and often its when they don't really want to hear it. So to make sure the points were understood you verify and then you correct if necessary. Why is it that ensuring understanding is so important? The psychology here is complicated, but we do know that people will resist information that doesn't fit Into their self-concept. We tend to think we're a little bit better than we actually are. So when someone gives us feedback that we need to correct three things in our life, three behaviors, there is really a good chance that not all three will be remembered simply because we don't want to remember them or it's too offensive to us in someway. We also tend to hear things from our own point of view or our own frameworks. Distortions are introduced by different points of view and this is fundamentally what the children's game telephone is all about and what makes it interesting and fun. As you may remember, in this game, a simple message is passed from one child to the next, and by the time it reaches the last person in the chain and it's said out loud, it's often completely different than the initial message. We've introduced our own points of view into a complicated message. Same thing happens in these feedback conversations. Perhaps you've noticed that even in email messages there are distortions, or the emails are misinterpreted. One of the reasons is that we don't ensure understanding in emails. That process is delayed or it's nonexistent, that's because an email goes out, and there's not a dialogue that happens in real time. In the case of emails, distortions are systematic and have been studied. Research shows that people routinely interpret emails intended as positive as more neutral, and then emails that are intended as neutral as more negative. The message here to you is that if you want to be sure that you're thinking the same thing as the person in the room with you, have them verbalize it. Practice makes perfect so let's practice this skill. It tends to be the one skill we're most likely to forgot to do, and I've seen this again and again. It's probably because it's awkward, and it probably is because by the time we're at the end of a feedback conversation, we just want to get out of the room and the meeting, so we forget to do it. Okay, so let's say you've just been through a session with an employee and you've given them specific direction. They need to return phone calls more quickly, they need to not text at work, and they need to wear more professional clothing. What do you say at the end of the meeting? Now I want you to think about this and put it together. Here's what I recommend that you say. Would you let me know what you think the main things are that you're going to work on going forward? I just want to make sure we're on the same page. If the employee mentions texting and returning phone calls more quickly, what will you say? Yeah, we talked about texting and returning phone calls more quickly, but we also talked about wearing more professional clothing. Do you have them all now? In summary, ensuring understanding is critical. People will distort and forget information that attacks their egos. You'll be surprised how often the message doesn't get across. That ends the fifth skill in our series. I hope you get a chance to go and practice this skill today on the job. [MUSIC]
