Darren Owen

Not responding immediately can allow you to ensure that you do not make the situation worse. Allowing yourself to depersonalise the response will help you to become a better manager and therefore be seen as a mature pair of hands who can grow within the organisation.

Looking at the feedback as a third person helps to keep an objective mindset when accepting feedback, to do this takes empathy and understanding of the other person's position. Why are they giving you the feedback in the first place, is this something that they believe, or something dictated for political reasons or personal benefit. If you can see the feedback from their point of view, is it actually fair? If it is, this method can take your value as a person or consultant outside of the conversation because it relates to your third person.

When receiving feedback regardless of negative or positive, viewing this as an opportunity to grow is the first step. When you listen to answer, you are already on the defensive, because you are no longer listening to the words. So, allow the feedback to first settle, asking clarifying questions can help you to understand the actual feedback and the reasoning. Creating dialog by asking open questions, what is it that I could have done differently to have limited this issue for example. If, however, the person giving the feedback is already combative, sometimes, just accepting the feedback and then responding when you have had time to consider the points raised is a good way to not take it personally.

The initial discissions should be assessed against the known factors at the time and the now known factors. If a decision was made against some information that has subsequently changed, this could be part of the cause of the failure. Identifying the decision allows you to pinpoint what information was also missing at the time of the decision. investigations can then happen to ascertain how that additional information could have been made available earlier in the project. If your decision would have been the same regardless of the information, was that a factor in the failure, some of the failed projects I have been involved in happened because constraints were added to the project that made it unachievable

Creating an open forum where people are able to contribute to the analysis of the failure is important, one factor to ensure that everyone regardless of the level are able to contribute is to manage a no bad ideas session first. Allow the team to come up with the most outrageous reason for the failures. start them off with some crazy ideas to show them that nothing is off the table, but then let the team think and exhaust their ideas before adding your own thoughts, this encourages all staff to contribute, without feeling the need to simply agree with your own ideas, therefore reducing the risk of unintentional bias, and creating an echo chamber.

When failure happens, it is very important to understand the causes of the failure. However, we have to be careful to not create a blame culture. In some organisations a no blame culture just means a find someone else to blame culture which does not solve the issue and can make the situation combative. Accepting that we all have a responsibility for the failure is the first step in removing the ego from the conversation. Then stepping through the project to identify the point of failure and the underlying reasons, allows you to also identify the actual root cause of the issue, and try and identify points at which this could have been identified earlier within the project.