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Want to get more from your team? Here’s how: Master the art of giving well-grounded negative assessment.
This type of feedback is based on concrete criteria and evidence… and it provides your team members with the ability to see where and why they need to make changes and HOW.
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Below is an Autogenerated Transcript
Is there a piece of marketing or life advice that someone shared with you once that has always stayed with you? Well, I’ll tell you the one that comes to mind. It was from my mentor, a gentleman named Dr. Fernando Flores, who was an extraordinary person. Anyone interested could just Google his name and you’ll find him. He was the finance minister of Chile before he was 30. Wow. And had five kids at the time. Wow. Right. Dramatic life. Incredible philosopher, biologist, historian, businessperson, entrepreneur. And he said something once and he said many, many things. Spent 2 hours with him this morning on the phone. But I remember at the moment he said this, he said a well-grounded negative assessment is worth its weight in gold. A well-grounded negative assessment is worth…. Is worth its weight in gold. In other words, there’s a big difference between people’s opinions and a well-grounded assessment. Okay. Which raises the question, “How do you ground an assessment?” because an assessment is not a fact. It’s still going to be a point of view. It’s a, somebody has this assessment, somebody is that assessment. One person says, “This is valuable.” The other person says, “No, that’s not valuable to me. This is valuable to me.” Like the example you gave at the beginning of the podcast between convenience and, let’s say, low price. Right. So, if somebody gives me or gives you, if you’re a listener here, a negative assessment, “Hey, I don’t think you did that very well.” “Oh, you messed up on this.” “Boy, you need to learn X, Y, Z”. Negative assessment. But if they ground it for you by saying, “Let me tell you why I say That. The performance in this particular area, the standard that I live to or I’m looking for or I think the community expects is like this. And here are examples of specific performance or behavior that either does or does not comply with those community standards.” So, if somebody can say, “May I offer you a negative, offer you an assessment?” and you don’t just blurt it out at someone, “Hey, you need to hear my point of view.” No, you ask with respect. And if they say, “Yes Please”, like it often happens for me when people ask me to mentor them. Right. And they’re asking me to give them some kind of constructive critique, certainly some advice. But it can only be constructive if I can ground why I say what it is that I’m saying. So, I need to be very curious about them. What do they want to achieve? What world are they participating in? What community do they want to attract? Either to hire or to have as customers or collaborators or partners. Then I need to understand enough about that particular field to know what are the standards of performance there. Right. What are the strategies? What are the behaviors? What are the regulations? And then if I can point out what somebody is missing, what somebody should be doing, but they’re not doing. What somebody needs to learn about or is pretending to be competent in that they’re clearly not, that can become a well-grounded negative assessment. And with that, you can then design next actions to learn. Okay, so it’s almost like rooting yourself or rooting the assessment in evidence so that there’s a proper context to it without just giving someone a bunch of negative feedback. It’s absolutely that. Absolutely that. And when you say evidence, the evidence is based on certain criteria, and for it to be a well-grounded assessment, those criteria need to be accepted by the general community of those who are competent in that domain. Right.