Effective feedback starts with commitment between believing that both individuals amount to something, and neither is any better than the other, that it is natural that both be open and honest with one another. Working from this hypothesis there are all kinds of wonderful results that can be obtained by interaction between these two conversing persons.
Feedback is response to another person, the act of speaking directly in response to a statement or question meeting the speaker where he or she is. Feedback requires creative listening to be valid. Its meaning is important. You have heard what the speaker is saying and you understand. There may be details, however they are not quite clear. Feedback in response is usually given as a request for some kind of clarification or evaluation. It is also used to correct errors that might have crept into the transmission of the information from one to another. You can look on feedback as a means of monitoring the communication bond. The purpose is to double check the effectiveness of the communication and to assure that the correct meaning is shared.
Feedback can be descriptive or it can be evaluative. However, no judgements should be made, no labels pinned. The listener should simply clarify what the speaker has said without adding argumentation or persuasive elaboration or embellishment. The listener should not project any judgement about a statement. The pinning of a label can be regarded only as a hostile response that can put the speaker in your case, the investor, into a defensive posture. Investors don’t like being placed in such a position and would be quite prepared to walk – irrespective of how powerful the opportunity might be.
Effective feedback needs careful attention
To be effective good feedback needs careful attention to all five of the following points.
- It must be specific. You should never pull any punches or try to evade the truth. Feedback should avoid vagueness and ambiguity. Your response should be narrow in scope and it should focus exactly on what the speaker says, rather than on what the speaker might have said or could have said.
- Must be immediate. Feedback should never be after the fact. If it is not immediate, the bond of communication between speaker and listener will be broken. If it is not immediate the actual thoughts tend to blur in the distance of time.
- Must be directed towards feelings and actions. These feelings and actions must be controllable as opposed to considerations that are beyond control.
- They must never be sympathetic. Feedback should never offer any kind of help. If it does sympathise, feedback becomes a kind of wailing wall technique of stroking that gets the speaker nowhere.
- Must be a simple link in conversation. Feedback should be part of creative listening that assures the speaker that the listener knows where the conversation has come to, where it is going, and understands it. It should be a statement in reverse that assures the speaker that both communicator and listener are in sync and ready for the next step in the communicative process.
You must always look at the person with whom you are communicating. You should always look at the person squarely and directly. Visual contact is not only important when you yourself are speaking, but also when the other person is speaking as well.
Visual contact is the best way to establish a bond between you and the listener. You should continue to work solidly on this connection once it is established. Without it, you will lose contact and you would dilute the quality of the bond and lose all the positive gains established to bring your business association to a successful conclusion.
Having said this, don’t stare at the person with whom you are communicating! Look at the person and let him or her know that you are there all the time and that the act of communication is going on.
In summing up then, you should listen not just with your ears but with your eyes as well. If you fail to look the speaker in the eyes, you will never know what thoughts or ideas he or she may be trying to communicate to you. The eyes can say a lot.
Verbal interruption
Just because a person stops talking does not necessarily mean that the topic of conversation is over. You must let the speaker have time to think something out. A pause may mean that the investor is gathering thoughts or mentally formulating meanings.
The point being that a moment of silence in a conversation is not necessarily a bad thing. With continuous dialogue and snappy comebacks, what might be what you see on television, it’s not really how true conversation flows.
Do not try to fill up with an interruption when you are in conversation with somebody by an immediate interjection of a statement of your own. You may be killing an entire thought process of the fellow business person. Worse than that, you may be in the process of making an important pitch and inadvertently lose it by breaking your investor’s concentration. Or the investor may be at a crucial point of a difficult resolution of a problem. By your interruption you may kill the approach that’s beneficial to you.
Imposition of meaning
Each individual faces feelings and thoughts that no one else experiences. It is quite difficult to express some feelings, particularly emotional ones that may occur in business dealings as well as in others. You should never allow yourself to place value judgements on another person’s innermost thoughts.
It is not necessary to agree with everything another person says. You can argue or discuss any point at length. But a good listener, a creative listener, never expresses value judgements such as ‘You can’t mean that!’ or something like that.
Avoid value judgements and labels. Value judgements are a very destructive force in normal conversation. A value judgement is an instant label. A label is a stereotype. People are individuals, no matter how we may think they may seem to fall into specific categories.
I also think of a label as a serious detriment when you apply it to yourself. That is even you think of yourself, even secretly as a loser, you will be a loser. If you think of yourself as possessing an inferiority complex, you will have an inferiority complex. If you think of yourself as a difficult person, then yes, you will be a difficult person.
What labels do to people is to categorise them and put them into a specific box. It is a most difficult job to get them out once they are packed solidly in that little or even big box.
In listening and responding to someone else who is speaking, watch out for value judgements, labels and snide remarks.
• Never judge
• Never give a verdict
• Never pass a sentence
Until the next time.
Link
http://www.go-between.co.uk
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