Feedback, Praise and Appreciation

I generally thought that feedback either positive or negative, and giving positive feedback is a good thing for the receiver. Today we learned that it is not the case. First of all there are many kinds of feedback but most important is that does feedback makes sense or not. Feedback should include observations also, what happen to me while you were delivering the task, what I needed. In other words; actions taken to increase well- being of the organization, feelings for fulfilling the needs, and needs that are fulfilled.  In order to a feedback to be more effective judgement should be eliminated-as in the earlier posts mentioned-
Also there are some issues to be considered;

• Praising work, not people
• Make praise as specific as possible
• Being genuine and unconditional
• Avoiding praise that sets up competition- meaning praising someone in private. I experienced public praise and it was uncomfortable for me, and I was an intern and the other person with us was a full-time worker there. 

No Judgement

I mentioned that it is important to not judge others in relationship before, I found an interesting example on Facebook.


An African tribe does the most beautiful thing.

When someone does something hurtful and wrong, they take the person to the center of town, and the entire tribe comes and surrounds him.

For two days they'll tell the man every good thing he has ever done.

The tribe believes that every human being comes into the world as Good, each of us desiring safety, love, peace, happiness.

But sometimes in the pursuit of those things people make mistakes. The community sees misdeeds as a cry for help.

They band together for the sake of their fellow man to hold him up, to reconnect him with his true Nature, to remind him who he really is, until he fully remembers the truth from which he'd temporarily been disconnected:

"I AM GOOD."

Here is the page.

Experiencing & Exercising Authority

Authority is an complex element of work places. People in authority are abusing their power in order to make their subordinates do what they want. But authority shouldn't be like this, employees should have freedom for the tasks that they should do, they may figure out a simpler way to do something when they are autonomous in order to do this, work environment needs to have trust between co-workers and between bosses and employees, other than trust, respect is needed. Respect requires non-judgement. I think our generation will not tolerate power abusive bosses, we would need our space to create and work, we would probably stick to our morals more, even our boss asks something against it.

Giusseppe showed us very interesting TED Talk of Itay Talgam

Trust

There is a saying "trust is a two way street" meaning that you need to trust others to be trusted. Building trust requires honesty and empathy.


Here is a video on personal relationships and trust

Another video on building trust in workplace

from http://vimeo.com/67184321

Collaborative Environments

When we have a negative respond to our request we have to listen for reasons why their answer was "no" and what is preventing them to say "yes", we have to empathize with them first, than persuade. Manipulation is not a part of conscious communication because a change in a person should be willingly. Manipulation is a reason for distrust.

Empathy

Empathy is "beauty of being understood", I never heard such a good way to describe empathy.

Another description is to compassionate understanding of one's own world. Empathy is crucial in order to understand one's feelings and needs, it is an important element of conscious communication, I mentioned empathy before. If we develop ourselves to be more emphatic, we can control our emotions more. For example; if a friend angers us before yelling, if we question his/hers feelings and needs, we can avoid the negative experiences. 

Power Listening

I sometimes listen others without much attention I cover up my lack of listening with "hmm..", "yes.." "you're right" "of course" but to be heard, to communicate and to be supported is a need for others, and a powerful listening can provide these needs for others. It is not easy, I admit that. Firs issue is to listen attentively without distractions, even eating. Another one is to paraphrase whole concepts or major points in the conversation this will show that you understand the speaker and will provide information how you hear them. Also checking perceptions and needs are crucial, it is similar to paraphrasing but rather than concepts or points it is about feelings and needs, listening for not being said, for example; "It sounds as if you are feeling... because you are needing..." Maybe the most important and neglected part is waiting, giving time to process and have some space before answer, waiting ten seconds before replying is crucial. Waiting gives suspense time to eliminate judgment in our replies. Being empathetic and non-judgmental is the most important elements of listening in order to fulfill other person's needs. "The ground rule for you as a listener is this: it is not your job to point out to someone what you think he or she may be missing" (Kegan and Lehay,2001)

Needs & Requests

Needs
As I mentioned before every feeling has a need underneath it. In order to have a conscious communication even in a negative content, we have to connect with our feelings and needs in order to be conscious of our feelings and understand from which need our feelings derive or connect to the other person's feelings and needs as they are currently expressed in order to understand other person's needs and feelings.

Accepting responsibility for our feelings rather than blaming others for our feelings. When we express our feelings with responsibility it is easier for others to respond compassionately.

Requests
Asking for action for our needs. But these are not demands, the other person may not do it. Demands has consequences but requests does not have. The easiest way to determine is to answer no to an asked action, if the counter answer is stating a consequence than the first question was a demand. Request must be clear with positive action language.

Observations & Feelings

Observations

Separating observations from evaluations is crucial, observations are facts, they must be clear and honest. They must have a specific time and context. Generalizations are not observations, must include facts, for example; count, frequency.

Feelings

The way we use the word "feel" usually does not express our feelings, when we use with "that", "like", "as if" also "I", "you." When I think how I use the word feel, I use all the no-expressing words.
A funny example for this; we clearly can't expect clear expression of feelings after anesthesia but this is an example for how we use the "feel" word.

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Disconnections in Communication

There are four elements that cause disconnection in communication.

Diagnosis: (judgement, analysis, criticism, comparison) if verb "to be" is used there is judgement

Denial of responsibility: avoiding taking responsibility in one self's thoughts, feelings and actions. For example: "I smoke because all of my friends do" one person choose to smoke, their friends are not making him/her smoke.

Demand: Request are to fulfill needs but they are not mandatory, someone may or may not do it. A demand is mandatory, if not done there will be consequences. 

"Deserve"- oriented language: the title has judgement in it, while compassion is blurred with merit punishment

Conscious Communication

Sometimes how we express ourselves is not received as we met to others conscious communication is a guidance to avoid this misunderstanding.

It is a process language which consist of four elements

Observation: observing actions that affect our well-being. Looking for facts.

Feelings: how we feel to our observations

Needs: what are the needs behind our feelings

Requests: the action that has to be taken in order to fulfill the needs.

In order to express ourselves and understand another, we have to observe, how we feel about it, or how other person is feeling ad think what might be the need under our or their feelings, and than take action. OFNR is not just for us, but for understanding other with no judgement

Human Needs

This week we talked about human needs, when we tried to come up with needs as a group, we had a long list, as we tried to categorize them we realized that some of the things we have listed was actually strategies to get another need. Giusseppe than told us that humans have so little needs but there are  many strategies to fulfill them.

We also talked about Maslow's hierarchy, according to him people has to satisfy their basic needs to accomplish their safety needs, it goes layer by layer.

there are critiques about this hierarchy, first one is that this is never prooven and second is that needs does not follow each others accomplishments to be satisfied. In my opinion base needs has to be accomplished in order for others, but the rest of the needs can be accomplished without the previous layer has accomplished.

Also Giuseppe told something interesting about needs "everything we do is to serve our needs"

Science of Happiness

Martin Seligman is a psychologist. In his view; happiness and well-being are desired outcomes of positive psychology. He defines three types of life;

Pleasant Life: successfully pursuing and achieving the positive emotions of past, present and future. For example: satisfaction, contentment, trust, faith and comfort.
This state of life is risky because it can change quickly. For me this state is settling for less.

Good Life: using one's strengths and virtues to obtain abundant gratification in the main realms of life. As work, love and parenting. For example; going to your job with joy and not minding to do overtime.

Meaningful Life: using one's strengths and virtues in the service of something much larger than we are (a cause, a belief) As an example; doctors without borders, they live in really bad conditions without money, but they are doing for a good cause.

Giuseppe mentioned that, people may go back and forth with these stages, these stages are not linear, they don't follow each other. People have changes on their beliefs, goals during their lives so their style of life changes.

Positive Psychology

Psychology is discourse of soul.

Seeing a psychologist has a negative connotation on society but psychology can be a useful science on determining an individual's strengths, which is defined as positive psychology.

         Peter Drucker author of Managing Oneself

"One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence.  It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence." 

More on: Harvard Business Review- Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker

Drucker's  view is a about a journey on improvements of individual's abilities.

Giuseppe mentioned that a good manager figures out his/her team members strengths and weakness and distributes tasks accordingly, rather than give them feedback to improve themselves. "Alignment of strengths that can eliminate system weaknesses." I liked this saying a lot.

Introduction

This blog is for a Sabancı University management course.  Main goal of this course is defined as; to build quality relationships for building quality environments that will allow individuals to be at their best and do their best. Our instructor Giuseppe Totino said something in our first lecture that really inspired me, he said that you have to set a goal before you start a project and imagine that you successfully complete this goal. There is a Turkish saying that can be related to this, "starting a task is completing the half of it", this saying is not a perfect match, but it can be taken as; when you start a task and as you  move on when you see your success you move on with more motivation.