No More Feedback: Cultivate Consciousness at Work

by Carol Sanford

Peer Review is the Foundation for Measuring Employee Performance.But does it help employees realize their potential?Does feedback improve the bottom line of a company?Business Educator Carol Sanford has spent 40 years developing people, leadership, and systems to ensure all stakeholders benefit. Fortune 500 companies like Google, P&G, and DuPont, plus entrepreneurial enterprises like Seventh Generation and Numi Tea, have engaged her to develop a capability to reimagine and redesign the entire business from strategy to work design. By popular demand, her new book series takes on common toxic workplace practices hurting organizations today and presents the contrarian remedies to achieve extraordinary outcomes.Management depends on feedback to measure and improve employee performance and the company’s bottom line. An annual peer review is often foundational to this process. But is this decades-old managing tradition getting the results it promises? No More Cultivate Consciousness at Work, Book 1 in Carol Sanford’s new Toxic Practice book series, is your resource for breaking down the erroneous premises about feedback and its effects in achieving the main employees delivering on their potential.This business guide disrupts commonly-held organizational beliefs about workplace culture to feedback can (and often does!) undermine employee development.The negative impact of feedback on core human initiative, selflessness and accountability, fairness & equity.The 6 premises and phases to develop effective work systems.How to see business change as a living ecosystem set up as an alternative path to growth and success.The developmental alternative to feedback to transform your team into innovative, self-regulating employees.Packed with true case stories from Carol’s extensive career in business, No More Cultivate Consciousness at Work identifies the errors in the feedback trap, why employees should be developed to use the power to self-regulate, and the instruments essential to enduring developmental success.

Genres: Leadership, Business, Communication, Nonfiction

192 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Carol is recognized as a Global Thought Leader by Conscious Company Media & Athena Awards for Mentoring and Community Service to small businesses. A Senior Fellow of Social Innovation, Babson College; CEO, The Regenerative Paradigm Institute, Educator and Social Change designer for people in change agents roles, organizational leaders who aspire to make a difference, business and organizational teams pursuing non-displaceability. Author of seven award-winning, best-selling books, including The Regenerative Life: Transform Any Organization, Our Society, Your Destiny, No More Feedback, The Regenerative Business (Google VP, Michiel Bakker, foreword.) All seven books are built around case stories of specific transformations in people, businesses, communities, and regions. Exec Producer, The Regenerative Business Summit and Producer & Narrator of, Business Second Opinion Podcast..

Reviews

[Brandon Laws · Rating 5 out of 5]

"No More Feedback" gave me quite a jolt. For years I have believed that getting and providing feedback is one of the best ways of development and this book questions that truth and proves it wrong. Carol Sanford, in her years of academia and in the business world has proved that development must come from within. I look forward to discussing the ideas in the book with others and trying to implement this in my personal life and at work.

[Ash · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book disappointing, dogmatic, poorly edited, and in places, outright wrong. The extended reference to the Schroedinger's Cat experiment is entirely wrong but that wrong idea supports the authors 'Premise 5' well, suggesting she did not research it but instead misremembered it as what she wished to make her point.
I disagree with the premise that all feedback is unhelpful and pushes people into a fixed mindset, preventing them from growth and development.
I agree that rather than offering advice we should question and teach people to fish for themselves, but this is a hard thing to teach and requires a lot of time and effort. Self-reflection is likewise hard to learn to do and can take years, even with professional training.
I finished this book so I could throw it across the room. I do not recommend it, I do not agree with it.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book posits that humans have core capacities to manage themselves, and that while many societal practices may atrophy those capacities, they do not go away. The author also believes that everyone has an Essence that is trying to express itself--though how it expresses varies with maturity and in different contexts/cultures. Some Essences are more sensitive to toxic practices in dysfunctional contexts than are others. Being allowed to manage one's self and work toward the goal of expressing one's Essence (reason for being here) is more efficient, healthier, and better for the bottom line, customers and the larger needs of the world. Relying on feedback systems based on other people's input creates work for those people and weakens recipients' core capacities to self-reflect and self-direct. Performance appraisals narrow employees' focus down to how co-workers perceive them and take focus away from what they and the company are trying to contribute to the world.

Many students of psychology or of A Course In Miracles will already relate to Sanford's claim that feedback is inevitably and unavoidably projection, which means it tells a lot more about the person giving the feedback than about the person they are supposedly assessing. Feedback is also distorted. Some of Sanford's examples seem to be drawn from consulting work; one stuck me as tragic in the classical sense, where a manager whose team outperformed most other teams was driven out by feedback that criticized the very thing that made him different from other managers and had created his success, as evidenced by poor performance of his team after he left (tragic in that his best quality was characterized as a flaw by those all around him).

Overall the book makes a good argument against feedback and other toxic practices that are alluded to, while not being sufficient information in itself to turn a culture around into a developmental culture. The systemic frameworks and hard reflective questions are not actually detailed, so the book seems in many ways like an ad for the author's consulting services and other books. I do think Design Thinking and Agile methods like Scrum would both have a lot to offer in terms of psychologically safe self-management that chooses to do valuable work of benefit to customers.

[Isidro López · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked reading it because you always can get a couple of interesting thougths, perspectives and insights (I did here)... though I deeply disagree with most of what it's written there XD

I don't think that any feedback is "wrong" per se. It actually depends on the level of self-consciousness, self-knowledge, and empathy of the person giving it... the same as the grade of success that it will have the alternative offered (which is not less complex and it can lead to the same wrong outcomes if "incorrectly" actioned).

The alternative proposed is more suitable to psychotherapy, but that is not (and SHOULD NOT) be the case in a company (there are already too many managers playing to be psychologists).

[Claire Blackshaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a challenging read as it forced some confrontation with systemic worldview. I initially dismissed it and then picked it up again.
The Schroedinger's cat thing mentioned by others is a blip on a long book, blown out of context. This book can be dismissed but if you're instinct is to balk at ours premise I encourage you to read it a bit more deeply.
It's not perfect but it was a good read to grow and develop your mental models.

[Genevieve · Rating 2 out of 5]

I agree with the author's premise that feedback can hinder self-knowledge and force employees to focus on the wrong thing. The book was far too long, though, and was written more for researchers than a general audience. She also made some presumptive leaps and failed to convince me that feedback is always a bad thing.

[Joshua Crompton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've always felt a bit uneasy about the focus on feedback in the software development world, and this book helped me to understand why. But the lack of an *actionable* alternative was disappointing.

[Kevin Ferguson · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the premise was good, I got a bit bogged down in the philosophical themes. The sections that focused on the science and practical aspects of replacing feedback with self analysis were what I was looking for, I was just hoping for more along those lines (which I think would have been antithetical to the authors philosophy). My advice would be to read chapters 1-8 and the conclusion and skim the rest.

[Adam W · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting read and definitely affirming for me in the way I've felt about feedback and coaching for a long time both as giver and receiver. The history of how it came to be was particularly insightful, I'll definitely be reading more of her work.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Counterintuitive, but so much better than common assumptions and practice

[Review Trackers · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few interesting thoughtd

But not a revolutionary book. Good to read and reflect on the counterpoints of a given topic regardless of topic

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m going to retool my feedback process in my companies as a response to this book. What a compelling read.