Summary:

In this episode of the HR Impact show, Dr. Jim interviews Eric Kauffmann, a talent development leader at Anthesis Group. They discuss the importance of embedding feedback in all areas of an organization and building a high-trust culture. Eric shares his insights on the role of trust in building high performance teams, the power of ongoing feedback, and the use of technology to support feedback initiatives. He emphasizes the need for transparency, open communication, and timely action in creating a feedback culture. Eric also highlights the importance of minimizing burdens, automating processes, and ensuring inclusivity in feedback programs.

Key Takeaways:

Building trust is essential for high performance teams.

Feedback should be ongoing and balanced, with a five to one ratio of positive to constructive feedback.

Technology can support feedback initiatives, but open communication is crucial, especially in remote or less tech-savvy organizations.

Chapters:

0:00:00] Introduction to the importance of feedback in organizations

[0:01:43] Building trust by engaging with all levels of the organization

[0:05:21] Building trust and continuous feedback for high-performance teams

[0:08:27] The aid model for effective feedback and removing bias

[0:11:39] Responding to the assumption that feedback is more optimized for in-person environments

[0:15:08] Using post-program surveys to improve training programs

[0:17:55] Principles for building a feedback culture: minimally burdensome, timely, automated, and inclusive

[0:21:34] Focus on progress over perfection and use available technology

[0:23:18] Key takeaways: embedding feedback culture across employee lifecycle, automating processes, and maintaining consistent engagement

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Eric Kauffmann: linkedin.com/in/erickauffmann

Music Credit: winning elevation - Hot_Dope



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He's a talent development leader focused on the enablement of staff to reach their full potential. He partners collaboratively with various subject matter experts, leaders, and other colleagues to design, develop, implement, evaluate, and involve the learning experience, as well as the development, engagement, and retention of staff.

Eric Kauffmann: Hey, Dr.

Jim. Nice to be here.

Dr. Jim: I think we're going to cover a lot of ground. What did I miss in the intro that you feel is important for the listeners to know about you?

Eric Kauffmann: I think it's important to understand that one of the key takeaways that I pride myself on, and in my role over the last five, 10 years is connecting with all audiences, all levels of an organization.

And so that's going to. Be a key theme here in our discussion today.

Dr. Jim: Why is it important to engage at all levels of the organization whenever you're trying to be effective in building high performance teams?

Eric Kauffmann: I think at the crux of it, it's building trust and having that candid openness and the connections with.

Dr. Jim: Great point, Eric. And I appreciate you sharing that now.

I want to get the listeners really dialed into your perspective and background. First things first, when you look at your current role share with us a little bit about the company, but most importantly, tell us a little bit about what you're most proud of in your current role.

It's really being able to pull the data out so that I can create useful and actionable balanced scorecards and KPI dashboards. So that's something I recently did back in January of this year. So it's taking leadership engagement to the next level. And for me personally, this was a meaningful juncture in my personal career with regards to the use of data to drive decisions.

Dr. Jim: So building a data driven organization in terms of the quality of decision making is important. So when you take that and you think about what's down the road for you in the next year or two, what does shooting the moon look like for you in terms of the things that you want to impact and accomplish in the organization?

Dr. Jim: I really like the answer that you said there, because it's it points to 1 of the gaps that we've heard from other senior people leaders across a number of organizations is that, hey, we have all of this data. We can build sort of models of what we need to do, but then how do we bring that to life and make it real and make progress towards the goals that we're achieving?

So I like that integration of both not only understanding what. Is going on, but how do you impact it going forward? When you think about your current role at anthesis, what's the most fun aspect of the role?

Eric Kauffmann: This is an easy answer. It has to be working with all these amazing, smart, and talented colleagues on some very interesting talent development projects. To me, it's just so exciting to get to partner with them and hear their stories and then ultimately receive the feedback from them.

Eric Kauffmann: You really can't have high performing teams without building trust. And one of the easiest ways that I've found to build trust and throughout various roles that I've held is one to be transparent and two is to continuously ongoing ask for feedback. And use that in everything that we do. I feel this is so important because when you're thinking about how to develop a high performing team and you're trying to prioritize what you work on, you have to be able to trust each other.

It all starts with having the trust and continuously asking for the feedback and from what I've seen, it gets the. Employees to feel like they're already bought in because they're the ones that are helping you get to the answer.

Dr. Jim: There's a lot of different directions that we can go with that conversation, but I'm going to pull on two of the major threads that you just hinted at.

One was trust. And the other one was ongoing communication as a habit that you build. I'd like you to tie that together. In the context of where many people in organizations struggle with that feedback culture, the communication culture, why is the concept of on demand feedback repetition? Why is that important ?

For every one constructive or negative feedback item, an area of improvement, and it's really important to note that the five so you should be always giving thanks and say and sharing what somebody did well, and that gets a little bit of brain science here, but it gets the dopamine flowing in the brain.

That's where you want to repeat those great actions. On the flip side, that one in the ratio is so important though, because without that, you're not going to continuously improve. When I built the feedback mechanism and the feedback framework at this company, we're really like harness that five to one ratio so that we can continuously improve while also building the trust through the positive feedback.

So that it's not so jarring for the person that's listening. Why is that framework particularly useful for those leaders who are new in the role?

Eric Kauffmann: There's a lot to dig into on that question there, Dr. Jim, let's start with the compliment sandwich. I just want to start with that for a second, because there's actually studies out there that say a compliment sandwich does not work.

And the reason is because if again, if you're trying to drive high performing teams. And build trust a compliment sandwich. Typically in the brain, they're going to remember the last thing they hear. And so if the last thing that they hear is something positive there, the dopamine reacts and they're going to repeat the positive thing and forget what the constructive thing that was smushed in the middle.

And so we one of the other thing that's great with that model of feedback is that it removes bias at least as best as you can. There's always gonna be some opinion and feedback. But when we use that aid model It's really going to help to remove the feedback, remove the, or sorry, remove the bias, remove the opinion, focus on the facts, and then give meaningful feedback and meaningful coaching next steps as part of that last part of the aid model. And now from the new leader, a new manager perspective, that five to one ratio obviously comes into play quite substantially and the way that I perceive this and I think my view is that the five, again, the positive side of that feedback is so important for.

Finding new ways to do things, improving the areas that are priority to them and to the business. And I think maybe one last piece that I'll add to this is in alignment with the 5 to 1 ratio. But more generally speaking, it's related to just the way that we deliver feedback as managers.

And it's one thing to be very open and candid, but you Might not be able to get there yet if you haven't built the trust yet, so it might be one of those slow progressions where you start off giving the more positive feedback, building the relationship, and then any constructive feedback that you give is extremely factual.

Dr. Jim: I really like the point that you're making about creating space for the constructive conversation.

You can't just drop those things on people. So I think it's important, especially when you talk about the aid model and the 5 to 1 model or framework that you described. Thank you. It actually helps you lay the foundation effectively to have that constructive conversation. Now, there might be some folks that are listening to this and thinking, okay this sounds great.

They might be sitting and thinking this would have to mean that this is more optimized for, in person environments or onsite environments. How would you respond to that assumption or critique

Eric Kauffmann: my gut reaction is that nothing's impossible, especially with the technology that we have at our fingertips these days.

You just do a quick search on the internet, and you'll be able to find a plethora of options to help drive feedback culture, to help drive and build trust, but ultimately making things more efficient for you and for the broader team. So taking that now forward, when I think about.

The fact that I have been in a remote centric organization for two and a half years, it's, I find that it's really important to build automations as best as you can. And the way that we've been doing this now is through one of our platforms. It's Microsoft platform, and we use power automate. So when you think about this feedback loop, we drive feedback into the culture literally from day one.

Dr. Jim: I like how you've operationalized feedback and embedded that throughout the entire employee life cycle. I think that's really important. One of the things that I would imagine would turn off. Employees is if you're in this feedback culture, this communication culture, but there's no action behind it.

So what are the things that you've done from an L and D perspective and from, just an advocacy perspective to make sure that this data and all of this feedback that you're getting is actioned into something meaningful.

Eric Kauffmann: On the organization wide approach, I partner with my HR colleagues. We call it P and D or people in development. It's a combined team of HR and learning development. And most recently was late last year.

What are they asking for? What are they concerned about? And ultimately we made changes. So that's the action that we had. And it's important to communicate those changes at the organization level. Because of you saying this we heard you say now we did. And so that's one of those organization wide feedback loops, taking the action from an individual program lens, every single program I push out, I always have post.

Program surveys. And one of the most recent ones that we're doing is actually partnering with a third party training provider. And the feedback survey includes the thoughts on the instructor and the vendor, as well as the content in the program, as well as the outcomes. Are we achieving the objectives that they expected?

Dr. Jim: 1 of the things that I was thinking about when you're giving your answer, a lot of what you're talking about can come across as being delivered from an organization that has a pretty mature tech stack.

So I want to break this down a little bit differently and get your input on if there's an organization that isn't as mature from a tech stack perspective, what are the things that they should be doing? To embed that feedback culture as a mechanism to build a high trust organization,

Eric Kauffmann: That's actually a pretty tough question. And I think the reason I'm thinking that is. Because my current company, I don't actually perceive us to have that mature of a tech stack.

One of the most important pieces to drive that feedback culture is open communication and having. Your line leaders or line managers continuously have the check ins. And there's some models in place when it comes to performance evaluations, where it can absolutely not be a once a year activity.

And I think this is pretty common knowledge these days. But how do you formalize that? And how do you take it to the next level where we're not just waiting until the end of the year to do a performance review and that's where these check ins come into play. And so one of the things that we're, we actually have done now without technology, I will say that we.

We plan to digitize this very soon, but one of the things that we're doing now is these micro check ins or maybe that's not the right word, but check ins on more of a monthly or bimonthly basis where you're still documenting performance, but very informally, it has to be documented though, for various reasons.

Dr. Jim: Really great conversation so far, Eric and before we wind things down, I want to get a little clarity on a couple of things. 1. I'd like to get your input or line of sight into where can all of this feedback and trust building go wrong?

And 2. When we're thinking about putting this into place, how do we do it? What are the principles that we need to keep aware of or frameworks that we need to be aware of That we can take the these concepts that we've talked about and put it into action.

So my first is saying, make sure that whatever we develop, whatever we put forward is minimally burdensome. In other words, it shouldn't take people a lot of time. It should not. Require this massive procedure guide to follow through and complete the task. So minimally burdensome. The next is timely.

And when I say timely, it's actually dual fault here. So timely in the sense that you're putting the initiative and you're getting this, you're getting some momentum going at the right point in time for the business ongoing as the business is going, , making sure you're not overlapping with too many other initiatives.

mAybe the third piece here is when you're building something around feedback culture or any program that you want to make sure you don't. Fall into the potential hole here is making things automated. So I touched on power automate earlier, which is a tool that I use for asking for feedback.

And that has been such an amazing. Piece to the puzzle here, where it's something that it's hands off does what I need to do, and it communicates to other people on my behalf. And it actually looks like it comes from me. So that I've been getting lots of the feedback that comes through is related to this automated process.

Once that focus group. And I have come to our, we'll call it the initial draft or final draft, whichever you want to order it. Then we actually do a pilot with a small group of boots on the ground staff. And that's where we get additional feedback and we come full circle with the the closing out that initiative pre launch.

And the last thing that I'll add, which is so important, especially at growth organizations is initiative overload. And so when you think about having a feedback culture at an organization that's growing rapidly, you have to really control how many initiatives are being put out, but understanding.

And that's where you have to be able to flex and be agile with with the initiatives that you're putting out.

Dr. Jim: Eric. Really great conversation. The stuff that you're talking about really doesn't lend itself to a 30 minute conversation. It probably should be a 90 minute conversation, but we got actual jobs to do and things like that I'd like you to take all of the stuff that we've talked about and distill out.

The two or three main things that listeners need to pay attention to when they're trying to build an embedded feedback culture.

Eric Kauffmann: Number one don't do too much. And actually, there's a phrase I like to use. I'm sure everyone has heard this phrase before progress over perfection.

And so even with the feedback culture, if you can just get one part of that moving forward, it's going to start to build the trust and the transparency right away. So you can be on your way towards that feedback culture. And then number two, I would say is Use the technology that you have at your fingertips.

Dr. Jim: Where can people find you if they want to continue the conversation?

Eric Kauffmann: The best place to find me is through LinkedIn. I might be one of the only Eric Kaufman spelled this way, so it should be easy to find me

Dr. Jim: Thanks for hanging out and spending some time with us. When I think about the conversation that we had, there's a few things that stood out to me that I think it's worth repeating.

I think 1 of the things that I found really valuable about the conversation. Was how you talked about setting the tone early in terms of building that feedback culture. So when you think about your employee life cycle, you have to embed that feedback culture across all stages of it and be collecting the information that's valuable and actionable.

And you want to make sure that your turn keying as many of the things as possible when it comes to getting the messaging out. And doing some of the grunt work and in keeping in line with that grunt work comment, the last thing that I think is important that you called out was that you can't forget some of the basics that need to be done.

You can have all of the technology and all the feedback mechanisms in place, but if you're not being disciplined around consistency of engagement, consistency of conversation. You're never going to move the needle in terms of getting actionable results or getting meaningful results. So really great stuff.

I appreciate you sharing that with our audience, Eric. Thanks for listening. If you liked this conversation, leave us a review. Tune in next time, where we'll bring in another leader to. Give us their game changing realizations that help them build a high performing team.