Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak to a special working group at Boston Consulting Group. To say I was excited would be an understatement. At the conclusion of my talk, I got a lot of very good questions. I want to address one of them in greater depth here.
Before I get to the question itself, let me preface it with a story from my days as head coach of Gentofte Swimming Club. As I was responsible for the whole team, I made an effort to visit practices at all levels of the team and talk to all the coaches.
One thing came through in nearly every conversation I had. Coaches would complain to me about the technical development of the athletes they were coaching. Yet, instead of taking responsibility for teaching it, they would lay blame at the level below them.
My second team coach would tell me that the athletes weren’t learning what they needed to on the third team. The third team coach would say that the fourth team, our lowest competitive team, wasn’t teaching the appropriate skill.
The fourth team would point the finger at our swim school. I realized, simultaneously, how many times I had made a similar accusation. Instead of taking responsibility for something, I would complain bitterly that my second team coach hadn’t taught it.
Now back to the question. I was giving a presentation on Positive Psychology and high performance. Essentially, making the argument for how a kinder, more benevolent form of coaching was the right thing to do morally but also if you want to win. The question posed to me was this, more or less:
“Do you observe any generational divide in how people approach feedback?”
The answer I gave started with an emphatic yes. What I notice is that there is a growing divide with athletes, and that divide is one of the foremost motivators for me in the work that I do. The divide looks something like this:
Athletes are craving honest feedback, whether they can even express that directly or not. A lot of people may disagree with that to start off, with so bear with me while I finish and I will come back to those objections.
Coaches are more scared than ever to give honest feedback. They are, like any other human beings, risk and conflict averse, especially with the risk is potentially existential for their career.
Now in a former, less “gentle” age, athletes got more honest feedback, some of it delivered cruelly and personally. Nevertheless, they got to hear someone’s actual opinion of how they were doing.
What I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about, is how can we be honest in our feedback and still remain kind. I don’t think most people want to be cruel, but when they run out of ways to deliver a message kindly they will default to baser instincts. How can we broaden the range and skill of delivering honest feedback?
Now for those of you who might argue that “kids these days” do not want honesty, I want you to think about that for longer than a few seconds. More than likely, that contention is based on an experience with young people having an incredibly poor reaction to getting honest feedback. Do you think that they have a poor reaction because something evolutionary has changed in one generation that suddenly people are allergic to honesty? Or is that a learned reaction.
Perhaps more accurately is that how to receive honest feedback is a developmental step that is being skipped more and more. People associate honest feedback with cruelty, which is fair enough. The solution is not to get rid of the honesty, it’s to get rid of the cruelty!
Wherever you are in the position to influence young people, I believe it’s incumbent upon you to not pass the buck. It is possible to teach the skill of receiving honesty- I’ve done it with every athlete I’ve coached here at Chris DeSantis Coaching. To do it you have to take responsibility for it and not point the finger somewhere else.