Disney's CEO on Giving Feedback. Avoiding Garbage Research. A Football Legend's Secret to Being a Team Player.
Here are the 3 ideas for you and your teams to consider this week.
Empower: Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO approach to feedback
Discover: How to avoid getting “garbage” answers from research participants
Excel: Footballing legend Thierry Henry’s secret for enhancing the skills of those around you.
1. Empower
Ideas for unlocking your teams' potential
When giving feedback, stick to the big stuff and avoid offering your opinions on the details, unless you’ve specific expertise. And even then, think twice.
Instead, just ask questions. As a senior leader, your job is to drive innovation by helping others get better at making well-informed decisions. Not to replace their decisions with your opinions.
Here’s a 2 min clip from an interview with Bob Iger (Disney’s CEO) and Venture Capitalist Chris Dixon, talking about giving feedback (source: a16z podcast). Iger stresses the importance of concentrating on “only the stuff that would make a big difference”, often holding back pages of notes on “the small stuff.” Dixon similarly has a rule to “never give specific product feedback to entrepreneurs”.
It’s great advice for leaders that want to build high-performance, innovative cultures.
The risk/reward ratio when offering subjective feedback on small details just often isn’t worth it. Or very smart.
However much you see things differently, unless your opinion’s based on objective insight, or specific expertise, it’s unlikely to result in a better outcome. So keep them to yourself. Because the downsides are that you:
Unintentionally make their work worse performance wise, even though it makes more sense to you personally.
absolve individuals and teams of their responsibility for the outcomes of their work.
demotivate them, by eroding their agency and sense of purpose.
send a very poor cultural signal - “In this company, the right peoples’ subjective opinions can trump the considered work of experts we hire.”
I’m absolutely not saying let the details slide. I’m saying senior stakeholder feedback isn’t the best way to get the details right. And it’s sure as hell not scalable.
Instead, ask questions. Get teams to walk you through their thinking. Understand how their approach is responding to customer insight, in a way that will benefit the business.
If they can’t do that convincingly, because their understanding of the business’ strategy is confused or their understanding of customer needs and desires are too shallow… that’s the fundamental problem your influence should be spent on fixing. Not poking holes.
Fix that, and watch the details improve dramatically.
2. Discover
Uncover new opportunities, unmet user needs and solutions customers love.
"Anytime we ask anybody, “What would you do?” — whether it’s about pricing, behavior, or anything else — that response is garbage. Throw that answer away. It is completely unreliable.”
— Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits.
I love this quote. Last week, I showed one of the ways Monzo fuel their discovery process, by recruiting willing customers for research.
Once you’ve invited them for a chat (research interview) though, what on earth should be on your question sheet?
Some rules of thumb:
Avoid questions that require people to speculate on their own behaviour. This means avoiding hypotheticals like “What would you do in situation X” or “What would you pay for product Y, given these benefits?”.
Avoid context-less, direct questions like “What criteria did you use, when deciding to purchase product A?”
Don’t ask them for solutions like “What do you want?” or “How could we best solve this for you?”
The answers will be “garbage”. However much they may validate your ideas, or you’d love them to be true. Humans are dire at reliably predicting their own future behaviour or accurately recalling past behaviour.
Instead, get them to tell you relevant stories about times they tried to solve the problem your product solves. Using real events helps improve their recall and accuracy of self-reporting. Dig into the details. If they speculate by saying “Oh I usually do…” bring them back to “What did you do in this specific situation though?” Dig in some more.
Record the sessions. Note any distinct tasks in their process and any information about them. Expose as many colleagues to your notes and recordings as you can.
Then start spotting opportunities to improve their life by making those tasks easier.
3. Excel
Help teams fuel innovation and push each others’ ideas further.
"I started to think. How can I enhance the skills of the other player, instead of showing their weaknesses?"
— Thierry Henry. Striker God. Played for Arsenal (no one’s perfect :p)
Thierry Henry describes the moment the penny dropped for him, after his manager Arsene Wenger pointed out that no two team mates will pass to him in the same way.
The team-player mentality that evolved from there contributed to his legendary goal-scoring success and Arsenal becoming literally unbeatable in 2003/04.
So over the next week ask yourself… how might you be able to enhance your team’s performance too?
Thanks for reading and hopefully see you next week for 3 more ideas!