The first time I delivered a workshop for a political movement was on “organisational development.” To be upfront, it was about the importance of feedback in the culture of newly formed political organisations. I was requested by the board of the party to deliver this workshop to the members of the staff.
As I was delivering the workshop I noticed that there was a lot of scepticism in the room about this “feedback culture” concept. There was still some curiosity about the concept, but you could tell that the staff was not happy to stay on a Thursday after 18:00 to listen about feedback. Moreover, few members of the team who are usually the loudest ones in the room were suspiciously silent and shy. A week after, I asked for some feedback about the workshop. Two members of the board of the party praised the workshop and mentioned that they need to push for feedback to be a regular concept in the processes of the organisation.
They mentioned they needed to give and receive feedback from their peers more often to improve processes and optimize performance. However, the Director of the party (the equivalent of a corporate CEO or a non-profit General Director) was reluctant to say anything positive or negative about the workshop. I was then asked to do a follow-up workshop by the board and the director finally opened up to tell me separately:
“Luis, please do not take it as a personal offence, but do you think we need this? This feedback culture thing is too much of a corporate term, kind of bullshit! This is a passive-aggressive strategy from the board to tell me indirectly that I am not doing a good job and that I should be open to getting feedback!”
I listened and asked the director of the party to have a coffee later that week for us to discuss what could we change about the content of the workshops. Over coffee, he broke the silence to express his frustration and mentioned that he was insecure about his performance. He then said: “It would be easier if I would get more feedback. Silence is a killer in politics.” He laughed and said: “I just heard myself saying that out loud, I guess this feedback concept is not such a crazy idea if it comes from a constructive place.”
I asked him: “Why else would your team provide feedback if not to be constructive?” He replied: “Oh man, you are naive, people give feedback in this organisation to show off that they know more than the person receiving it or to humiliate the other. This is a game of power. Who would open up to be told that he or she is doing a bad job in a passive-aggressive way?” My last comment was:
“Easier to change the team's understanding of what feedback is about than to deal with the killer silence I guess...”
The issue of lacking “feedback culture” is something that organisations across sectors struggle with. Yet in politics and social causes, organisations deal with two particular challenges that create bigger obstacles to changing the culture of the institution: The ego of many not willing to acknowledge their vulnerabilities when receiving feedback, and the many non-paid extra working hours that are required by the political or social professions.
Those of us working for political and social causes tend to put ourselves at the front of the line. The public scrutiny we are subject to makes the feedback culture harder to implement in our organisations. In my career, I have been working with colleagues that acknowledged the poor performance of other peers, but they felt inappropriate to give feedback not to hurt the ego of the other or to avoid a “House of Cards” type of drama. Many in political organisations and social enterprises will build up a career with a record of poor performance because not many dare to harm their ego by providing feedback. Moreover, because of alliances and little games of power, many avoid giving feedback and opt instead for diplomacy. I have a big issue with the word “diplomacy” used in this context, but I will write about that on a later occasion.
The second issue hindering the embracement of feedback as a cultural element in social and political organisations is the unlimited working hours that come along with the profession. Comparing my experiences in the corporate, public, and political sectors, I can say that the political and social professions are the most demanding. In politics and social causes, many of us start as volunteers and our passion does not limit our efforts to a specific amount of hours. Hired staff in political and social organisations depend a lot on teams of volunteers and have to expand their working hours to fit in the volunteer’s availability. A manager in a political party might start working at 8 am and finish his/her daily tasks at 18:00. However, the manager has to stay in the office until 21:00 as the volunteers come to help the organisation after their day jobs. After such a hectic schedule, the manager, the community organizer, the political figure is many times close to being burned out. A colleague or a supervisor would hesitate to provide feedback in fear to destroy the spirit of the individual working the extra mile for the public good. That feedback note can be the drop that fills the glass. Because of those aspects, feedback, either positive or negative, is not given to staff, leaders, and politicians alike.
In organisations where silence is preferable, the consequences are palpable in the motivation, performance, and turnover of staff and leaders.
The organisation itself also suffers from the lack of feedback, the main problems I have witnessed include:
Mismanagement of scarce resources,
Slow adaptation to the external realities of the constantly changing political landscape, and
Poor capacity to respond to political external attacks.
Moreover, it would be false to believe that social or political organisations with or without feedback cultures are lacking any type of feedback alike commentary. Beware of the harsh commentary of supporters behind a keyboard!
To be effective, feedback has four elements: it has to be timely, it has to be specific, it has to be constructive, and it has to be private. None of those elements is embraced by supporters when they provide public online commentary over the performance of politicians, social leaders and staff openly in social media. Since social media arrived, many supporters feel entitled to comment on their organisation structures without filter, generalizing behaviour, and destroying the spirit of the individual. Supervisors and leaders often forget that this commentary gets in the brain of the people working for social and political organisations if not balanced with objective feedback. If staff are met with silence from their supervisors, it is not unfair to assume that they will get demotivated by assuming the commentary from social media is shared by the ones working in the structure of the organisation.
(Many times volunteers feel entitled to give destructive feedback behind a keyboard since no consequences come with the comments)
SO... WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT?
To tackle the aforementioned obstacles, organisations need to take the step from awareness to commitment. This often happens on a team-building retreat or a staff alignment workshop. The first workshop I did was just a step to introduce the concept. Culture change takes more than one workshop. Changing culture requires commitment from core staff and leadership. If commitment is there, you might want to consider the following tips to ensure feedback becomes part of your organisational culture:
Tip #1: Push for change to happen within working hours. Social and political staff are overworked. Do not make organisational culture a burden to them. In the corporate sector, retreats and workshops are done during working hours and are understood as a must to boost productivity. Often social and political enterprises fail on this first step, as they often organize these events on a weekend or in the evenings. Such a failure in logistics always meets with the reluctance of those working for the public good. As I mentioned before, the staff is often giving 150% and should not be asked to put an extra 10% on top of it. I encourage those in central administrative positions, political leadership and in human resources to be the agents of change and call for the commitment to change the organisation’s culture to be part of the working hours of the staff. The staff members that have the time to reflect and rest would have an open mindset to receive and process feedback.
Tip #2: Invest in building trust among your staff and leadership. Unnecessary conspiracies and closed-door pacts are assumptions that need to disappear in politics. No, this is not a naive claim, it is a demand from all those who want to change the political culture in general. With an army of supporters ready to blame for failures and comfortable being silent during victories, staff and political leadership need to be a team! A mistake to avoid here is to look for external moderators to build trust. Often outsourcing this exercise can be counterproductive, as many would justify the failure of the process to the insufficient contextual knowledge of the external person and this would ultimately result in further rejection of cultural change. The best resource for organisations to do these exercises is to rely on the moderation of a respectable staff member with the skills and authority to run the show with no hidden agenda. Openness and trust would diminish the reluctance of someone to receive feedback and the assumption that the giver of feedback has hidden intentions.
Tip #3: Create a unit to handle organisational development. If one wants to take the question of organisational development seriously, the organisation needs to have a program coordinator to monitor progress and identify obstacles. If the organisation wants to assign this task to the HR department it has to be clear to all staff that the responsibility lies within that unit. Often, HR in political and social enterprises is a unit in charge of recruitment and background checking. If this is the case in your organisation, you might want to push for the creation of a new responsible unit that can take care of performance management, process alignment, culture management, and diversity. Most importantly, this unit would be able to support the regularity of the feedback flow in the organisation.
Tip #4: Embrace some tools used in the corporate sector. Many social and political organisations fear the concept of corporate because the dynamics are different. As mentioned, with many volunteers and low salaries, it is easy to assume that corporate tools are just a burden. What organisations forget is that many of the volunteers come from the corporate world and are familiar with process and performance management tools already. They would expect to see clear KPIs, they would expect performance evaluations, and they would require good project management skills to work in campaigns and engagement initiatives. Moreover, those who join the party without any experience before politics will most likely end up working in the public administration if the party succeeds. In the administration, the corporate tools and concepts are labelled differently but are the same. Thus, introducing them to corporate tools would make them better public servants. Public servants who appreciate feedback would ultimately enable social participation.
Tip #5: Enable education opportunities for your staff and create mandatory training programmes for campaign managers and representation figures. It is a reality that education programmes are not the most favourite tool for staff in social and political organisations. The demanding work schedules put the staff on a defensive mode to attend workshops and training events. Moreover, many times one would meet managers that would be reluctant to participate in the training programmes because they would protect the knowledge that their unit has. However, a unit in the organisation can hold the knowledge and regularly document it to make it available when needed. Many times volunteers, campaign teams, the staff or the leadership would require it and it would be ready to be delivered. The case is different for campaign managers and representation figures. Just like the staff, they would also be reluctant to be trained. The difference is that their performance in the field depends on the knowledge. One indeed learns to ride the bike by starting to pedal and not by the book. Yet, training programmes for those on the field are exercises of accountability and alignment. Central staff would also be able to map who needs help and where good practices are, thus enabling feedback.
There are more tips, but these are the main lessons that I learnt from my experience in the field. Ultimately, most of us join movements and invest our time in social change so we can help others. We will need feedback from the people to be better representatives and we will need to give feedback to our supporters when passions get too heated up. We, as representatives and champions of change, need to improve every day. We will do so thanks to our openness to feedback.
Is feedback culture too much of a corporate term? Possibly...
Is feedback culture needed in political and social organisations? It is, urgently! Why? Because organisations embracing a feedback culture would be creating new leaders aware of their duty to improve, listen, and engage!
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