Just doing my coaching apprenticeship. I had to comment on feedback models. Just wrote this it's probably too much?
Before commenting on Pendleton, I want to say something about my experience with feedback and in particular recent trends I've seen where people have tried to take out the niceties. I have been a manager for 20 years, so feedback is core to what I need to do to help people achieve goals and develop. That said, I believe in constructive positive feedback that believes in the potential of the individual to learn and improve.
Lately there is a lot more "hard" behaviours that are coming into our culture. Only yesterday our CEO said
"We need more performance culture. We need more honest feedback to people. We can't be polite, non confrontational team anymore. We need to talk to each other, honestly.
You have this caring culture, and this support culture. But on the other side of that, is non confrontation, non-performance oriented. And that's why we're changing our HR systems to be more focussed on that."
I find this troubling, not because we shouldn't be honest, that we shouldn't seek improvement, high standards, great quality and work, but because I believe you get there by caring, by taking people with you.
The feedback sandwich has been criticised on a culture course I was on run by a consultancy. People need more direct feedback they said. Feedback sandwich being just give positive - constructive - positive message. I use it all the time if I actually want the person to listen to me and not be defensive. They said just give the constructive or even negative, don't sugar coat. But to me they are ignoring the humanity and natural reactions people have to criticism. And when you're telling someone you'd like to see something different from them, a lot of people, especially ones with gentler personalities will take it as criticism. What I would say, is there's a lot of alpha culture that is coming out of America in particular. Some of it is to my mind very close to toxic masculinity. For example the new performance system has 4 ratings for performance to objectives and 4 ratings for behaviours, so 16 in a grid and the 50% of the org was given the 1:1, bottom of 16. That's against everything I know about performance management theory, it's just being cruel and brutal and I don't believe it will get the results they want it to get unless that's just to single out people to fire that don't fit their cultural values.
I like the sound of the Pendleton model, I'd not heard of it before. It comes from medical settings and uses clients self reflection as well as input from the coach/trainer/supervisor/consultant.
1. Learner says what went well
2. Observer confirms what they think went well
3. Learner says what could be improved
4. Observer offers their thoughts on improvement.
This is great and I think is very close to what we do with appraisals where people provide their own input first and it gets augmented by the leader. It is something I try to do naturally in 1x1's with my team and I think is a good route to learning.
I've done some searching and there are a lot of models out there, variations on a theme. CEDAR, SBI, CORE, IDEA, Future focused, COIN. Some are direct but most have similar basic structures. The key is to try and make it explicit, not general so that the learner can actually learn from it.
In Samaritans, we have the BEAR model. They want us to provide feedback to colleagues and
Behaviour “I noticed that…”
Effect “This meant…”
Alternative “You could try…”
Result This might/could mean…”
I think Pendleton is better, and in mentoring that is what we do, always how did that go for you first. But the basics are trying to make it explicit. It's also about having courage to have a conversation with someone to help them learn and improve even if as a peer. For that reason I would definitely look for a sandwich response. To wade in with judgement without saying you value the person or something that they did well is just too harsh for me..