Wes Kao: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you're not having success with this, if you're hearing this and be like, but it never worked, my manager doesn't listen to me, listen to the rest of this podcast we just did, which is basically advice on how to effectively convince someone of a thing. It's like, tell them why this is a problem, be really concise about it, sign post words, all these things. That's exactly what this whole conversation's been about. Okay. Let's see. We have a couple more really cool tactics that people have suggested we talk about. One is how to give feedback well, how to do better, how to be more effective at giving feedback. What's your advice there? I have a framework called strategy, not self-expression. And so the idea here is that most of the time, by the time we are giving feedback to someone, we have been frustrated for a while. I used to be very conflict diverse, so I would wait and try to convince myself that I wasn't bothered by something until I really couldn't hold it in anymore. Then I would schedule a one-on-one with a coworker to tell them the feedback and it would inevitably turn into a venting session where I was in the name of sharing the impact of what they did would share all my frustrations and all the ways that they have basically harmed me and made my life difficult. And this would be very counterproductive because the person would either feel like and feel really demoralized or they'd get really defensive and they'd want to argue with me about how what they did actually was not that bad or it was partially my fault too or whatever. And so I realized that a better way of giving feedback is thinking about motivating the person's behavior change. The goal is behavior change. So if that's the goal, trim everything else that you were about to say that does not actually contribute to that goal and only keep the part that will make the person want to change, help them understand the benefit to them as well as to the people around them. And so usually for me, that's trimming 90% of the initial stuff that I want to say and really keeping only that 10%. And that's made a really big difference. Whenever I am giving constructive feedback of any kind, I always keep that in mind. And when I don't do it, I almost always regret it. Someone close to me in my life is working on the skill, which is there's just, "I want people to know how they messed up. Justice. I need this to be fair." And what I always recommend is just think about what you want to get out of this conversation, what do you want from them? And then, okay, what's the best way to get that? Versus just making sure they hear you and making sure they understand how screwed up this was. And that's basically what you're saying is focus on the outcome you want to achieve, not something that's useful, something that will make you just feel better.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.