Feedback

"Our three toads were back from their traveling to the Sahara desert, and one of them said to another, 'Why were the camels wearing sandals?'

Other replied, 'To stop themselves sinking into the sand.'

The first toad said again, 'Why did the ostrich stick its head in the sand?'

The last toad replied, 'To look at the camels who forgot to put their sandals on,' Wulandari was talking about an event.

Wulandari then went on, "When a woman threw a shoe at Hillary Clinton, the US former secretary of state wasn't struck. The shoe whizzed over Clinton's head and landed with a loud clunk. At first she didn't realize what had happened. 'Is that a bat?' she asked. She then joked about it. 'Is that somebody throwing something at me? Is that part of Cirque de Soleil?' Clinton quipped.

It was said, the woman was protesting the U.S. government’s involvement in the mining and utilization of heavy metals, which she claimed are toxic and have harmed U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As we all know, sandals and shoes are footwear. Feet and footwear carry not only the weight of the body, but a great deal of symbolic, social, and cultural weight as well. How we view and treat the foot, the kinds of footwear that we wear, and how we view our footwear tell us a great deal about society and culture. Feet, both bare and shod, are linked to our ideas about gender, sexuality, class, and culture. Thus we can read, through the history of footwear in a given society, the evolution of that society’s ideas about men and women, about the working classes and the elites, and about work and leisure. Shoes and sandals, ultimately signify individual identity, group affiliation, and social position.

But I'm not going to talk about shoes or sandals or any other footwear here, but I'm wondering, whether the act of throwing the shoe is a feedback? And why feedback matters?

It’s easy to associate the word 'feedback' with formal experiences, like an annual performance review or a customer feedback survey. But actually, feedback is all around us, all the time. We get feedback from others, from our environment, even from our own observations and inner monologue. Giving and receiving feedback are dynamic experiences that shape and are shaped by our relationships and the context of the conversation.

We swim in an ocean of feedback. Lots and lots of feedback are queuing. We are confronted with the problems of our children who are in school, people who have lost their jobs or cannot get jobs because of foreign workers, lists of names filing for divorce, and many more.

Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen say that when people are asked to list their most difficult conversations, feedback always comes up. It doesn't matter who they are, where they are, or what they do, they describe just how tough it is to give honest feedback, even when they know it's sorely needed. Stone and Heen then tell us that when they give feedback, they notice that the receiver isn’t good at receiving it. When they receive feedback, they notice that the giver isn’t good at giving it.

What counts as feedback then? Feedback includes any information you get about yourself. In the broadest sense, it’s how we learn about ourselves from our experiences and from other people—how we learn from life. It’s your annual performance review, the firm’s climate survey, the local critic’s review of your restaurant. But feedback also includes the way your son’s eyes light up when he spots you in the audience and the way your friend surreptitiously slips off the sweater you knitted her the minute she thinks you’re out of view. It’s the steady renewal of services by a longtime client and the lecture you get from the cop on the side of the road. It’s what your bum knee is trying to tell you about your diminishing spryness, and the confusing mix of affection and disdain you get from your fifteen-year-old.

So feedback is not just what gets ranked; it’s what gets thanked, commented on, and invited back or dropped. Feedback can be formal or informal, direct or implicit; it can be blunt or baroque, totally obvious or so subtle that you’re not sure what it is.

Now, let's see a brief history about feedback. The term 'feed-back' was coined in the 1860s during the Industrial Revolution to describe the way that outputs of energy, momentum, or signals are returned to their point of origin in a mechanical system. By 1909 Nobel laureate Karl Braun was using the phrase to describe the coupling and loops between components of an electronic circuit. A decade later the new compound word 'feedback' was being used to describe the recirculating sound loop in an amplification system—that piercing squeal we all know from high school auditoriums and Jimi Hendrix recordings.

Sometime after World War II the term began to be used in industrial relations when talking about people and performance management. Feed corrective information back to the point of origin—that would be you, the employee—and voilà! Tighten up here, dial back there, and like some Dr. Seuss contraption, you’re all tuned up for optimum, star-bellied performance.

In today’s workplace, feedback plays a crucial role in developing talent, improving morale, aligning teams, solving problems, and boosting the bottom line. And yet. Fifty-five percent of respondents in one recent study said their performance review was unfair or inaccurate, and one in four employees dreads their performance review more than anything else in their working lives.

The news is no more encouraging on the manager’s side: Only 28 percent of HR professionals believe their managers focus on more than simply completing forms. Sixty-three percent of executives surveyed say that their biggest challenge to effective performance management is that their managers lack the courage and ability to have difficult feedback discussions.

Something isn’t working. So organizations are spending billions of dollars each year to train supervisors, managers, and leaders on how to give feedback more effectively. When feedback meets resistance or is rejected outright, feedback givers are encouraged to be persistent. They are taught how to push harder. It can be helpful. But if the receiver isn’t willing or able to absorb the feedback, then there’s only so far persistence or even skillful delivery can go.

Actually, feedback can be very powerful. Those who look for and accept it position themselves to be more competent and capable. Those who resist, reject, or avoid it, doom themselves to the limitations of their own personal insights—which may be right or wrong, but they will never know.

They fail to see the power in feedback. Without feedback we are flying blind. Others see things we can’t see. In performance assessments designed to measure individual effectiveness, it has been found that those who are the least effective at accurately predicting their strengths and weaknesses are the individuals themselves.

Most people do not feel they lack feedback from others on how they could improve their performance at work, how they could be a better parent, how they could be a more considerate and caring spouse or friend, or simply how they could become a better person. For many people, the typical reaction to new feedback is to say, 'So what, I’m too busy to do anything about it anyway.'

Meaningful feedback is central to what we do on the job and in other aspects of our lives. Feedback guides, motivates, and reinforces effective behaviors and reduces or stops ineffective behaviors. Feedback tells us how close we are to our goals. Similarly, giving feedback is an important way to guide others’ actions and decisions. Yet many people feel uncomfortable giving and receiving feedback. Indeed, the lack of feedback isn’t unusual.

Managers and supervisors may give feedback as a way to reinforce their self-importance or manipulate how others see them. Givers of feedback may be destructive or hurtful intentionally or unintentionally. In addition, they may be biased by factors such as race, gender, or age. Receivers of feedback may be apprehensive about being evaluated, defensive in the face of negative feedback, and/or apt to ignore information that could help them.

People often use negative terms when they observe and describe others, while they use positive terms to describe themselves. As a result, feedback may be disappointing and possibly detrimental. No feedback at all may be better in some cases. Feedback is not effective regardless of the content and manner in which it is given and regardless of the receiver’s sensitivity to the information.

Most people receive much more feedback than they are willing or able to implement. They receive feedback from many sources, including books, articles, friends, coworkers, bosses, spouses, and children. To cope with all this information, some stop listening; others become defensive. Some blame others, and others simply ignore or don’t understand the feedback.

A growing trend is to provide people with more and more performance feedback on their strengths and weaknesses. Companies institute performance appraisal processes with more feedback, including upward evaluations, 360-degree or four-way feedback, and peer evaluation systems. These companies hope to involve more people than just the boss in assessing a person’s performance. The idea behind the trend is the more information and feedback people receive, the more effective they will be.

Getting feedback from multiple sources is an effective way to discover the strengths and weaknesses in our performance. Feedback frequently helps us understand the attributes we would not otherwise notice, but which may be obvious to others. Although people are receiving more feedback, changes in their behavior do not seem to be taking place. As with antibiotics that are used too frequently, people quickly begin to build immunities to feedback and resist making changes.

Also, people who receive an abundance of helpful feedback early in their careers often find, later in their careers when they become managers, the feedback seems less open, honest, and straightforward, and more politically loaded. To help managers obtain more open and candid feedback, many organizations now ask employees to complete anonymous surveys for each manager at several key points: those who manage the manager, the manager’s peers, and those who report to the manager. But, although the feedback process has become an increasingly popular way to 'send the message,' frequently the people receiving the feedback still do not 'get the message,' nor do they change as a result of the process.

And finally, as a closing, in the land of Konohagakure, presidential candidates were invited to give feedback with students in a university. One of the candidates gave a spontan answer; the other, giving answers according to his strategy, diplomatically; and another one, quibbled. And Allah knows best."

From the distance, the Dawn approached with her shining golden chariot, brought a new habit, which, thus, changed the game. Wulandari had to leave, and she left while singing an excerpt from Chicago's song,

Want you to know, I'm a man

Say the words and I'll say it again

Want you to know, I'm a man you can depend upon

That's all I am 

Wanted to show, I'm a man

Say the words and I'll tell you again

Wanted to show, I'm a man you can rely upon

That's all I am

I am a man that you can count on

Call out my name and I'll be there *)

Citations & References:
- Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, 2014, Viking
- Joseph R. Folkman, The Power of Feedback, 2006, John Wiley & Son
- Manuel London, The Power of Feedback: Giving, Seeking, and Using Feedback for Performance Improvement, 2015, Routledge
- Margo DeMello, Feet & Footwear: A Cultural Encyclopedia, 2009, Greenwood Press
*) "Song for You" written by Justin Parker, Michael Milosh & Itai Shapira

Bahasa