The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 304 - Appreciation

Transcript:

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Hi, Peter.

Pete: I just want you to know, I really appreciate the way you show up and roll with all of my ridiculous unprompted thoughts every time we record a podcast.

Jen: Ah, ditto.

Pete: Ditto, indeed. And I say the word "appreciation" because it's actually the topic I want to talk to you about today. We have done five episodes in total about specifically feedback. And I want to talk to you about one specific type of feedback within that umbrella of feedback, which is appreciation or recognition, I feel like they come hand in hand. And I just really want to understand, from your perspective, how you think about it, what you do with it, whether you utilize it, and how we might all leverage appreciation / recognition.

Jen: Well, thank you so much, Pete. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Okay. So this is one of those topics that's been part of my life for so long, in so many different outfits, framed in so many different ways, dressed up in so many different things that I didn't kind of realize it until really recently. I was in New Zealand, at a bar in Auckland, and I caught up with an old colleague of mine who happened to be in Auckland at the same time, still working for the same company that I used to work for when I was working with him. And he just went on this great riff / rant about how he thinks about recognition in a corporate context and leadership. And we kind of went off on this crazy tangent, and it just illuminated so many things for me as it relates to appreciation / recognition.

Jen: So I feel like we should link to some of our previous feedback episodes in the Box O' Goodies. But I'll just give the little primer, which is, according to Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, who wrote the book Thanks for the Feedback...which is a must-read, amazing, incredible.

Pete: So good.

Jen: Everybody, please buy this book. There are three kinds of feedback: appreciation, evaluation, and coaching. Appreciation, being the positive affirmation. Evaluation, which essentially lets you understand where you stand. And coaching, which is designed to help you get better.

Pete: Beautifully said. And the other context I didn't mention is, I recently ran a workshop about giving and receiving feedback with forty senior leaders, and I used those three buckets as a way to frame the workshop, to introduce them to the different types of feedback. And what I found so fascinating is everyone was like, "Oh yeah, evaluation. I totally get that. We do that all the time with our KPIs or with our performance reviews. Oh yeah, coaching. I mean, we're trying to develop a coaching posture, and we're coaching people, and we're asking questions." And the one that was like the groundbreaking aha moment for so many of them, which I was blown away by, was appreciation.

Jen: Hmm.

Pete: And there was this kind of collective recognition of, "Wow, we don't appreciate each other enough around here, as a senior leadership team."

Jen: Wow. Yeah.

Pete: And so I literally got them in breakouts of two, for five minutes, and I said, "I want you to give some appreciation to the other person in your breakout." And we did that like four times, and it was like everyone came back like, "Oh my god. My senior leader, who I've worked alongside for ten years, just told me something that she appreciates about me that I never heard before." And it's like, what? That's so wild.

Jen: Wow.

Pete: So wild, so wild. So this is relevant for me because of the workshop that I ran, but also it's relevant to me because so much of what I do...and this is, again, me like slowly piecing this all together. So much of what I do, working with leaders and corporates, is trying to help them change their own behavior to be more effective, and in turn, as a leader, create the conditions for others to thrive, and in thriving, demonstrate certain behaviors. So if I'm a leader and I want to be developing a coaching culture, i.e. the rest of my team is coaching one another, then I need to be modeling that. But also, what I should be doing is appreciating when I notice someone attempting to display that behavior. Now this feels really obvious for me to say out loud, so feel free to say, "Pete, this is really obvious for you to say out loud," but it crystallized because of the impact this one workshop had...and then, the conversation I had with my colleague, which I'll get into in a second. But like, is it making sense?

Jen: Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Pete: Like I feel like the PSA, which I've started adding to so many more workshops, is, "Okay as a leader," so many leaders already have clarity, "this is what I want my team to be able to do. These are the behaviors, these are the skills, these are the functions I want my team to be doing on a day-to-day basis. That's what our high performance team looks like." And the question I just want to ask them is, "Are you rewarding and appreciating and calling out when you see these behaviors?" And it blows my mind how often the answer is no. Like, it's wild.

Jen: Hmm.

Pete: To the point where, back to my colleague, the company I used to work for essentially was a consultative company, where we would create behavioral change programs, i.e., "What are the behaviors you're trying to foster or cultivate? And how do we create recognition, incentive, and reward programs to develop those behaviors?" My colleague the other day (my ex-colleague) gave me this analogy, which I just thought...and again, this feels obvious, so maybe it is. But he gave me this great analogy, and he was like, "This is the analogy I've been using lately. When you watch a game of tennis, do you only applaud at the end of the match?"

Jen: Right. No.

Pete: Invariably, the answer is, "No. You essentially reward every single point. You applaud every single point. But not only that, you applaud the effort that goes in to especially those amazing rallies where it's like forty shots back to back to back to back. And sometimes, you get on your feet and you go, 'Holy crap, I appreciate the effort you all just went to.'" And he's like, "That's what leaders should be doing in organizations, appreciating and calling out the effort that people go to, to maybe get the outcome they're seeking, but maybe not." Now, I say all of this in my context, hopefully some of that makes sense. The thing I'm curious about with you, knowing how often you're giving feedback (i.e. every single day), how do you use this tool of appreciation? And just saying it's a tool even feels kind of gross. But like, how do you think about recognition / appreciation to drive certain behaviors?

Jen: I don't feel gross about calling it a tool. I'm just going to say that out loud. I'm okay with calling it a tool, because it is a tool that helps people make progress toward the things that they're trying to achieve.

Pete: Right. Right, right, right. Yeah. Good point.

Jen: Okay. So in my context, I have to be...this is such an interesting flip side of the coin. I have to be careful about using too much appreciation in my coaching.

Pete: Oh, interesting.

Jen: So let's just out of the gate say, I have the greatest job in the world, because the best singers in the world come into my studio and sing for me.

Pete: It's true.

Jen: And I could literally sit there all day and just say the truth, which is, "I'm blown away. That is the best thing I've ever heard in my life. It's incredible." But that's not what they're there for. They're there to get better.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And I will always call out good work when I see it. But I also have to remind myself that the reason they're coming to me is because something is sticking or they're trying to make progress in a certain area. So I do need to affirm the work and the effort, but for them, the reason they're coming to me is for the coaching kind of feedback. And so, I use appreciation as a way to prepare them to hear the coaching.

Pete: Nice.

Jen: So it's like, we're more open to try new things when we feel valued and seen and heard.

Pete: 100%.

Jen: So, I use appreciation as a way to help that happen. And I'm thinking right now about a client you and I have shared in the past, who is literally the greatest singer I've ever heard sing live. And I've said this to him, so if he's listening right now, he knows that it is him. But he does not like me to tell him that.

Pete: Hmm.

Jen: Because everybody tells him that.

Pete: Interesting.

Jen: And he's looking for something else.

Pete: Wow.

Jen: He wants to be appreciated for something other than being the greatest singer I've ever heard sing live.

Pete: Wild.

Jen: Which, is really interesting. So if I say that to him, I might lose the opportunity to coach this moment, because he's hearing it as, "This old thing again."

Pete: Isn't that wild? Isn't that wild?

Jen: Yeah. So I'm thinking about it now in terms of environments like the one you're talking about, where appreciation is not built into the culture and people are craving it, versus the environment I'm working in, where appreciation is so part of the culture that people are already fully sated in that area and they're like, "Give me something else."

Pete: Right. I totally agree. And it feels like one of the takeaways is regardless of which of those you're in, too much of the same type of feedback becomes ineffective.

Jen: Right.

Pete: Like the corporates will always over-index on evaluation, because everything is evaluated against KPIs, against shareholders, against, you know, incentive structures. There's always a metric that we are measuring against, and so we're always evaluating against that. Then, the good leaders do a bunch of coaching, which is great. And I would say third in the hierarchy, if I was to create it as a hierarchy, would be the appreciation. And so that becomes the one that people crave, because it's the one they don't experience the most. Yes.

Jen: Yes. Oh my gosh, that was a big aha moment for me. Because these same actors that I'm working with, in an audition context where the whole thing is evaluative, they would give anything for someone to say, "That was beautiful."

Pete: Yes. Isn't that wild?

Jen: Yeah. Wow.

Pete: The other thing which feels important in what you shared is a clarity in what I'm coming to you for, like, you know, that this singer is coming to you for coaching. And in a corporate context, it's so rare that people know why they're coming to the other person. And it's so rare for the person to even know what they need, perhaps. And so, it's kind of left as this unspoken thing. And what ends up happening is the manager / leader maybe just defaults to what they know. Which, like I mentioned, is often evaluation, when the person was like, "I just really wanted...," and maybe they didn't even know that's what they wanted, but they really wanted to feel seen and to feel heard and feel like their contribution matters, i.e. they wanted some appreciation. And so you just get so many mismatches in conversations, where someone gives something that the other person didn't necessarily want or it's the opposite of what they wanted, and so there's like just misconnection after misconnection after misconnection because of that. Hence, people struggle with giving and receiving feedback, because it's like we're having two separate conversations.

Jen: Wow, I'm having a lot of aha moments during this conversation, Pete. So, thank you for that. (That is my appreciation for you.) So, this idea of everyone speaking a similar language about the three types of feedback is very much baked into our culture at the studio. I talk about feedback a lot. I talk about these three types of feedback. And I always try to empower the people I'm working with to ask for what you need, "Ask for what you need. So if you're going to send me a video of something for me to look at before you send it somewhere, tell me what kind of feedback you're looking for. Tell me what kind of feedback you need. Ask for what you need." And I feel very fortunate (so, appreciation to my clients) that they're very good now at saying, "I need to know, is this tape competitive? I need the evaluation piece." Or, "I need to know how can I make this tape better." That's the coaching piece. But I have had...I may have told you this story before, and now this has happened more than once. Clients get up in class and say, "I'm just in this creative rut and I'm feeling bad about my work, and I just need you to tell me the things I'm doing great today."

Pete: Amazing.

Jen: "I just need to know the good things." To the point, Pete, where I have borrowed this exercise from a teacher of mine from like twenty years ago and I modified it for my classes, where you have the person...this makes people so uncomfortable. You have the person get up in front of the group, they do their work, and then everyone who has observed their work has to offer them a piece of appreciation, a compliment.

Pete: Love it.

Jen: And the person who has just performed the work has a script, and the only words they are allowed to say are, "Thank you. I know."

Pete: Oh, "I know." Agh, that's so...

Jen: "Thank you. I know." Because I want them to internalize the appreciation. Not deflect it, but to like take it in and be like, "I know this to be true about myself. That was beautiful. Thank you. I know."

Pete: I can get down with the, "Thank you." The, "I know," makes me squirmish. That's good. That's good. Interestingly, you're reminding me of...I've been part of, I would say, world-class teams in the past. And there's this one activity that we did, which I borrowed and did with other groups, which is very similar. This was virtual, so it was on Zoom, and we would use chat. And we used to call it "good finding" in one particular team, which is essentially the same thing. And we would say, "Alright, everybody, put in chat something or the things that you love about Jen Waldman or you appreciate about Jen Waldman." And we'd get like two or three minutes, and there was twenty-odd people or sometimes forty people on the team, depending on what we were doing, and you would just get the stream of appreciation in chat. And the Zoom was quiet, and the person would just have to sit there and read it, and naturally feel pretty uncomfortable about it. But it was so powerful at making people feel uncomfortable and seen and heard.

Jen: Yes. Yes, I love that. I'm going to borrow that.

Pete: Yeah. I mean, my confession to you and the listeners is...I feel kind of gross saying this, but I copy and pasted the appreciation that I got in one of these activities, saved it as a Google Doc, and when I'm in that creative funk that you just described, I still to this day (this was years ago) go back and read it.

Jen: Yes. Yes.

Pete: Just to remind myself of like, "Okay, there are things you're doing that are good." I mean, I'm still a human being. You know, we're all flawed. And so yeah, that's something I do. I actually go back and read it.

Jen: Nothing flawed about that, Peter.

Pete: But also, I mean, it reminds me, recently I saw Jerry Seinfeld in Melbourne do a stand-up show. And I mean, there's probably an episode in just like what's it like to see some sort of genius in total flow in front of eleven thousand people, because that's what it felt like watching Jerry Seinfeld live. And he does this riff, which I won't even try and copy or articulate. But the premise of it, the punchline really is humans, like our brains are just this dumb reward center that constantly is seeking reassurance and reward. And so, like his punchline and one of the jokes that he makes about it, he's like, "You've got to give it...," you know, and I've heard him talk about this with writing, is like, "If you show up and write one day, don't then judge your writing on the same day. Give yourself the reward that you did the thing, i.e. you did the writing. And get the editing and the judgment and the like proofreading, that can come another day. But for right now, just reward yourself for doing the thing."

Jen: Ooh, self-appreciation.

Pete: Right, right.

Jen: I love it. I'm into it.

Pete: Yeah. Like, you know, you have this process that you're seeking to maintain as a creative. And so, how do you just reward yourself when you do the process, regardless of whether it was good?

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: Self-appreciation, yeah. My oversimplified summary of this is, as a leader or as an individual (like you said, self-appreciation), what are the behaviors or the skills I'm trying to develop or model for my team? And then, how am I rewarding / recognizing / appreciating / calling out or calling in these behaviors? Because the appreciation that I see you doing that thing means it's more likely to happen again.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.