CHAPTER
10
Feedback: What and How
WHILE APPROACHES TO EXECUTIVE COACHING DIFFER, THEY ALMOST ALWAYS INCLUDE INFORMATION GATHERING ABOUT THE CLIENT AND THE RELATED RESPONSIBILITIES OF INTERPRETING RESULTS AND PROVIDING feedback. As you prepare to do this, it is important to bear in mind that:
Interpreting the results of self-report questionnaires, 360-degree surveys, informational interviews, and other assessment methods is a core challenge of coaching.
Offering useful feedback from those sources relies on your ability to extract meaning from the results; it becomes even more valuable if you can also consider the client’s priorities and context.
Feedback is meant to facilitate the client’s self-insight and motivation toward growth by sharing views from different angles and perspectives.
Confidentiality of feedback is important so that clients will feel more open to respond and willing to consider even critical, challenging results.
Feedback that is tailored to the client’s needs and interests is much more likely to be accepted and then incorporated into development action plans. In other words, regardless of the rigor and research base of the feedback source, it is useful only insofar as it facilitates self-insight and motivates professional growth. Even the most sophisticated and valid tool is a means of fostering insights that resonate with your client. The tools and measures themselves should be in the foreground of the conversation only long enough to be understood.
The goals of feedback differ depending on the type of coaching you are doing. Some coaching engagements are quite short, only a session or two, and just involve interpretation of a 360-degree survey and a self-report instrument. These types of engagements are referred to as feedback coaching or development plan coaching. (See Figure 3-2, The Coaching Continuum, in Chapter 3.) They are aimed at achieving modest gains in self-insight and suggesting areas to consider for development. More typical three- to six-month coaching engagements often use comprehensive assessment methods, and so the feedback comes from both quantitative and qualitative sources, such as informational interviews. Those feedback sessions draw on both your interpretive and client-relationship skills in highlighting results that are particularly relevant for development.
In the usual coaching engagement, you will also be expected to compare the negotiated goals that emerged in your earlier coaching sessions with assessment-based feedback so as to arrive at designed objectives and development action plans. Often, the connections among the feedback, objectives, and plans fall into place as you discuss the feedback; other times, you will need to point out connections, linkages, and possible interpretations. When multiple measures are being used, integrating all of them can be complex. Your guidance is the essential factor in transforming assessment results into client insights and agendas for change.
Feedback of Quantitative Assessments
Clients, even those eager for feedback, are usually apprehensive about receiving the results of standardized assessments; numbers and graphs can be intimidating. That is why feedback is best explored in the context of a trusted relationship. Even if the coaching engagement is short and does not allow much time for relationship building, it is important for you to be sensitive to your client’s potential anxiety and create a safe environment in which to look at results.
Facilitating feedback based on quantitative measures that yield dimensional scores is a unique challenge since numerical results sometimes carry more impact than is warranted. Indeed, to balance that impact, narrative reports often accompany the dimensional scores that are provided from quantitative instrument feedback. Some test publishers use lengthy computer-generated reports to turn scores into descriptions or even developmental recommendations. However, as the coach, you are in a position to help your client make sense of scores, graphs, and narrative reports and decide what in that material has developmental relevance.
It is important that you are familiar enough with the measures you are using to explain scales and scores, sharing examples as needed. You also need to help the client understand any inconsistent results and unusual score combinations. These interpretive skills draw on your experience with the instruments and knowledge of the possible patterns. Giving feedback from standardized questions sometimes requires you to explain specialized terms unique to those instruments; at other times it is more simply offering your descriptions of how the client’s behavior might be represented by the dimensional scores in the results.
Coaches usually develop their own flow in discussing quantitative feedback. For example, loosely scripted explanations of the rationale and premise of a questionnaire and how the results are displayed can be a useful preamble to giving the client the results. Some coaches also like to arrange the discussion so that those tests which are likely to be most interesting to the client are discussed first. You might experiment with different introductions and flows to arrive at what feels right to you. If you have the opportunity to do a number of development plan or feedback coaching engagements, having a consistent flow makes it easier for you to prepare and facilitate these interactions.
Feedback of Qualitative Information
The use of informational, or 360-degree, interviews by coaches is pervasive, but there is a wide variation in how coaches conduct feedback from them. For example, some coaches use verbatim comments, some rely on written summaries, some prefer oral feedback discussions, and some structure the feedback by competency or perspective (e.g., from direct reports, from peers, and from other stakeholders). Regardless of what you choose to do, when you combine the results of interviews with assessment scores, extracting interesting themes and suggestions may be all that is necessary, since there are often many points to interpret. Remembering that feedback is a precursor to a development plan, you can highlight those themes, in effect confirming negotiated goals as well as pointing out results that require further consideration.
Just as results associated with quantitative tools, analyzing feedback from informational interviews draws on your interpretive skills. In addition, summarizing interview feedback also draws on your ability to express yourself and capture themes in writing. A two-step process is customary in preparing interview-based feedback: (1) analyzing the content of the interviews, and (2) writing a summary of that analysis that can be given to the client directly and/or used as a guide to the feedback discussion.
While there is no rigid formula for the first step, distilling strengths and development needs from your interview notes well before your feedback discussion is the usual approach. This effort will make the feedback meeting much more efficient and also will reduce the risk of revealing a source because you will not be using your interview notes directly during the meeting. If colleagues are promised confidentiality of their comments, as they usually are, it is the coach’s responsibility to uphold that commitment rigorously. The use of direct quotes or situational examples, when they add important information, needs to be handled carefully. Using these comments needs to be contracted with interviewees or should be avoided. Paraphrasing an interviewee’s intent or putting sentiments in your own words is fine and consistent with your task of summarizing themes. Comments from the client’s manager can be used more directly in situations where that adds essential information. On balance, however, most coaches prefer to interpret all feedback instead of sharing it verbatim, confirming to the client that a rigorous process has been used to extract themes from the interview notes. The decision about how directly to use interview data also is guided by your Personal Model in how best to motivate change.
In terms of the second step, coaches usually design a written summary format that is clear and comprehensive. This document is often the most impactful of all the feedback provided, so crafting the summary is important. There are no hard-and-fast rules about writing a summary of informational interviews, but there are options and choices you can make. The objective of the written feedback summary is to help clients reflect on and absorb the key points as a precursor to development planning. Since you want to capture a complete picture of the client, consider sharing strength themes first, followed by possible development areas that came out of your interviews. These themes can then be discussed with respect to the development areas already under consideration, whether felt needs or negotiated goals. This approach sets up a discussion about what themes may end up in the development plan and which ones may be less clear or important for the client’s development.
When interview results vary based on perspective (i.e., respondent groupings, such as peers or direct reports), you can show those differences as clustered themes, as long as you have sufficient numbers in each category so that no feedback can be tied back to any particular person. Usually the requirement is three or more respondents per perspective. The client’s manager is a special case since this person usually does not require strict confidentiality. Still, you may choose to weight the manager’s feedback more heavily in the summary and weave it in to broader themes rather than call it out as a separate perspective. In general, bullet points are used rather than narrative paragraphs. Note: Exhibits 5 and 6 are examples of two different styles of interview feedback reports.
Integrating Feedback Sources
When there are both quantitative and qualitative feedback sources, your goal is to help the client look across all the results and identify themes; there is no need to utilize every score or feedback element. You, as coach, are the filter by which clients will avoid being overwhelmed by feedback. You can help your client understand that all feedback is not created equal. Feedback can be true and yet irrelevant to the client’s life. Current priorities, organizational context, and career plans are key moderators of the value of even accurate feedback.
In that respect, feedback is better thought of as a view through a different lens or a new perspective worth discussing, rather than as information that is right or accurate. That is why it is best shared in the context of a confidential discussion. The goal of a feedback meeting is to foster discovery and insight. To reinforce that feedback is neither right nor wrong; it is best to use terms such as descriptive, clear, useful, interesting, thought-provoking, or confusing, inconsistent, vague, and the like. This way you help the client keep a balanced perspective about the feedback rather than feel compelled to use all of it. As mentioned previously, a written feedback summary of interviews is an important addition to a feedback discussion. When a written summary complements results from standardized assessments, it often generates themes that can serve as a framework for development planning.
The complete feedback picture may take the form of a packet of findings reflecting results from both quantitative and qualitative assessments. This material reduces the need for the client to take notes during the feedback discussion, although clients can be encouraged to make margin notes and capture other emerging insights, just as you will also be doing. Since the interview data is often very compelling, that written summary is essential in providing the client with a means to review and reflect upon the themes after a feedback meeting. It also provides the coach with a written record of what was covered in the feedback discussion.
A feedback discussion is one of the most pivotal moments in coaching. The client’s eyes are opened to input and perspectives that may never have been considered before. The feedback discussion may produce significant shifts in the client’s insights and contain opportunities for breakthroughs. As the coach, you can capitalize on these opportunities by helping clients make productive use of all the sources of feedback that are available.
Delivery of feedback is best thought of as part of an ongoing conversation about development, not an event to be checked off a list. It requires patience and process skills, not to mention in-depth experience with the tools and the results they provide. Clients may ask for time to consider the feedback, to integrate it into their own thinking, to make sense of it, and to link it to possible action. You want to be sensitive to these natural processes while still encouraging movement on the coaching engagement and development action planning. At its core, the feedback discussion should help the client answer just two questions: How useful is this description of you? What, if anything, do you want to do about it?
Providing feedback can be very helpful in both shorter and longer coaching engagements. However, with piles of interview notes and other information it is easy for a coach to slip into overkill and share everything without much interpretation. On the other hand, when coaching time is limited, there is a tendency to describe results too broadly, hoping they resonate with the client. In framing feedback, it is important for you to consider several variables, including how much time is available in the engagement, the goals and interests of the client, and the client’s openness and curiosity.
It is best to connect feedback to what is likely to be important to the client. In this case, Eric was concerned about how his management style was perceived and how to better balance his work and personal life. Any larger themes of Eric’s personal ambitions and his sensitivity to criticism would need more time than this engagement provided. Still, very useful coaching could be accomplished within the constraints of the engagement, and Max effectively focused on Eric determining what was important from the data.
`Max, like most coaches, needed to choose between the clarity of the conclusions and client buy-in, based on the client’s own interpretation. He chose the latter approach, which demonstrated his commitment to the coaching process, even under time constraints. There are no guarantees as to how things will turn out, but generally it is better to build on the momentum that is there and see if the client is interested in exploring other points. The two themes that Max identified would certainly have been important for Eric to work on, but Max was willing to let them go if Eric’s interpretation and priorities went in a different direction. The specific conclusions may be less important than the quality of the coach-client working relationship, which is needed to produce a compelling and actionable development plan. Whichever way the conclusions went, Max and Eric would have a working relationship to support the preparation of a practical, actionable development plan.
Takeaways
Because clients are usually apprehensive about discussing feedback, it is best explored in the context of a confidential, trusting relationship.
The goals of feedback differ depending on the type of coaching you are doing.
Shorter coaching engagements may be limited to facilitating interpretation of quantitative instruments or 360-degree feedback surveys.
More comprehensive coaching may use feedback from both quantitative and qualitative sources.
Quantitative instrument feedback is provided in dimensional scores, often accompanied by a standardized report.
The coach’s job is to help the client make sense of scores, charts, and standardized narrative reports and decide what specific information in that material has developmental relevance.
It is essential to spend time analyzing and summarizing feedback from informational interviews prior to offering it to your client, since this kind of data can carry great weight and significantly impact the client.
When there are both quantitative and qualitative feedback sources, you can help the client identify the most useful themes across both.
Feedback is often a pivotal moment in coaching when the client’s eyes are opened to new perspectives; it is best approached as a discussion of what is useful in the data rather than what is right or wrong.