I’m working with the vice president of a Fortune 500 company. She’s preparing to deliver the keynote for a product launch.
After she’s finished speaking, I begin offering feedback on the keynote. The first thing I comment on is something she did well in the first minute of the keynote.
“I don’t need compliments,” she says. “Just tell me what I need to fix.”
I tell her:
I’m not complimenting you. I’m offering you positive feedback, which is an exceptional way of improving performance for two reasons:
- We often aren’t aware of what we do well, so by alerting you to this, I can ensure that you don’t arbitrarily extinguish the behavior because you don’t understand its value.
- By alerting you to what you’re doing well, I can improve the frequency and consistency of that behavior, thus improving overall performance.
She seems taken aback by this explanation, but after a moment, she nods and says, “Okay. Keep going.”
After I finish giving her feedback — both positive and corrective — she says to me:
“I never really understood the value of positive feedback. I think I need to change the way I work with my team.”
Now it’s my turn to be taken aback.
A vice president of a Fortune 500 company—an executive with a long and successful career in the technology sector—has just realized that positive feedback is an effective management tool.
I know this person well. She’s a good person with an impressive track record, yet she has yet to see the value in positive feedback until now.
How does something like this happen?
I think it’s this:
People get promoted into management, leadership, and administrative positions without any training in managing organizations and leading people. I see this in education all the time:
A teacher is promoted to vice principal or principal without any real training in how to run a large organization with a multitude of stakeholders and clients. As a result, they flounder and ultimately fail, or worse, they plod along, lacking any skill and bereft of any discernible vision for their school.
Sometimes they get promoted to a higher, less challenging position in some silly little office away from students, teachers, and parents.
Now that I work in the business world, I see it happening here, too. In fact, I often find myself offering clients advice on managing and leading people as much as I do on storytelling and communication.
What qualifies me to offer such advice?
Two things, I think:
First, I managed McDonald’s restaurants for more than a decade, which is perhaps the most challenging job I have ever had. Effective management strategies are essential in running a business like McDonald’s effectively and profitably, so McDonald’s offers an enormous amount of academic and hands-on management training. This includes in-house training systems, intense mentorship programs, and university classes.
In fact, many of my corporate clients know about the quality of management training that McDonald’s offers and ask me about it all the time, hoping to leverage some of my wisdom and experience for their own work.
Unlike me, they received no formal training—just a promotion alongside elevated expectations to lead a team or organization. They were not taught things like Kaizen Continuous Improvement, the Blue Ocean Strategy, Parkinson’s Law, the Peter Principle, the SWOT analysis strategy, PESTLE planning, and so many more.
Learning on the job can be a great way to acquire skills and experience, but not when your job is leading other people, and their success depends on your skill level and decision-making.
I’ve also managed a classroom of students for 26 years. Though this may seem to have little correlation with the needs of the business world, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Understanding how to manage, motivate, teach, and accommodate a multitude of personalities is critical for a teacher’s success, and it’s also critical in the business world.
My students may be ten and eleven years old, but their needs are the same as those of adults. The stakes are often lower, and the problems are often smaller, but the thoughts and feelings are the same. Failure to listen carefully, interpret communication, and find ways to help people improve is disastrous for both children and grown-ups.
You can learn a lot about the management of people by spending time in a classroom.
Another strategy taught in McDonald’s management training and college while training to be a teacher:
The value of positive feedback.
I use it relentlessly every day to help my students and clients improve and grow.
I’m hoping my client is also using it today. That conversation with my vice president client happened almost two years ago, and she has since moved on to another company. Hopefully, she’s brought that strategy to her new position because positive feedback is an essential tool in managing people, but it’s also the right thing to do.
