Could your feedback be killing off good ideas?
Have you ever brought a new idea to your manager, a little nervous and excited and had it shot down so quickly it barely saw the light of day? I recall writing a recommendation for one of my bosses at a start-up I use to work at. His response was “this is stupid’! Blunt, ineffective and highly de-motivating feedback. Now for a moment, be honest, we’ve all thought that about an idea brought to us right – and your tone probably indicated it! In fact one of the complaints I hear from my clients before we start to work together is that their team members don’t bring them a lot of good, bold thinking or new ideas. Here’s the insight – these two things are connected. The perennial challenge for a busy leader is giving a new idea some airtime and consideration before criticizing it, or shutting it down. We are unable to park our judgements and negative reactions, or even step back and look at something from a completely different perspective than our own. In fact research tells us that our brains are in fact designed this way. Evolution has made us humans predisposed to being skeptical or even fearful of new, bold ideas.
It’s not wrong to have a critical reaction, however, the problem is that most of us are completely unaware that we are having a reaction at all, and instead we operate like our perspective is the truth. As a result, we are killing off some good thinking way too soon by providing bad feedback to our colleagues, employees and anyone else who has the courage to share their wild ideas with us. But here is the good news, there is a way to not only solve this problem, but an approach to giving feedback that will boost your team’s engagement, creativity and motivation to perform. It’s called the PPCO approach, a method that starts with you exercising affirmative judgment to express the positives of an idea to ensure you don’t crush its potential (yes, you will find some if you try!). Only after that you can talk about your concerns, and any ideas you have to evolve the idea. PPCO is an acronym that breaks down as Pluses, Potentials, Concerns and Overcomes. It might feel a little mechanical at first, but with practice and time, it will feel as comfortable to you as saying supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
Click below to download The PPCO Approach. This helpful tool to navigate your feedback process for much better results. We use it in our my design thinking programs because iteration is built into all of the work of a design thinker, and giving and receiving feedback frequently is key.