Feedback is widely regarded as a key component for any professional. After all, if you don’t know how you’re doing, how can you improve? How can you gain an appreciation of what you’re doing well and what you’re not?
I like to think that as you’re reading this on here that you appreciate the value of feedback to colleagues in your organisation and are keen to ensure that feedback is flowing frequently throughout your enterprise.
If however you’re in a position where your colleagues aren’t yet sold on the virtues of regular feedback, the following talk by Bill Gates may help. The talk, delivered at TED, sees Gates talk about the valuable role feedback plays in the performance of teachers, and of course by proxy the performance of students. I hope you enjoy it.
I'm intrigued to know what the US has been doing about all this 'feedback' they have been getting from the league tables of performance of countries in all these subjects. What is the reason they are not improving (or at least have fallen back to the position they are in now). This isn't something that just happened overnight.
And even as the richest men in the world go on talking about it, what is actually happening in their own backyards?
Feedback is great if you care about it, can do something about it and do do something about it. Feedback itself is at best interesting, at worse, depressing…
I suppose the challenge is actually acting on the feedback you get. I suspect with a lot of government departments, the feedback is not received fast enough, and employees don't have the power to act on the feedback they do receive.