Providing feedback is arguably one of the most significant gifts we can give to each other in the workplace. That is, of course, if it is done well. Giving feedback can help people along their continual development paths, and aid them in becoming aware of their blind spots. The ability to give feedback is not just about the person receiving it; learning how to give feedback properly is critical to your own personal growth and development. Next week, we’ll focus on RECEIVING feedback. This week, let’s explore how to get stronger at GIVING feedback.

Let’s start with the basics. Dispensing feedback does not mean negative feedback, though I don’t know a person who doesn’t have a slight panic attack when someone says to them, “I’d love to give you some feedback.” When you get into a routine of providing frequent and productive feedback on what’s going right -  in addition to that of the developmental variety - you are doing wonders to strengthen your relationship and trust with that person. In addition, you are showing you are committed to partnering with them on their continued development journey. When they realize you are sharing both the positives and the places for improvement, it removes the negative connotation with the term “feedback” and makes that person more receptive to it over time.

FEAR OF FEEDBACK

The way in which we provide feedback to our people can significantly impact our organizational culture and team environment. Whether this impact is for the better or worse depends largely on how it’s received. And yet, if we know this, why do so many managers and teammates fail to provide it?

Because it can be scary. Often, the person giving the feedback is nervous that they won’t land the message well, or that the person receiving it will freak out. The only way we can truly evolve and develop is to understand our blind spots.  If we knew what they were, the majority of us would actively work to continue producing them. We’d also build our confidence by understanding our strengths because someone took the time to acknowledge them. In short, to be a good people leader or teammate, this is part of your responsibility. Want to be good? Embrace the notion that helping others in this journey is part of the gig and put the fear on the back burner.  

CONSIDER YOUR APPROACH

Ever want to really throw someone off their game?  Get in their face immediately after watching them stumble, and confirm they had an epic fail. Trust me, they know.  

Instead, wait until a bit of the dust has settled and aim to share when the receiver is in a better headspace to listen. Then consider your approach and mindset. If you make the assumption that this is going to be a brutal conversation, it will become one. If the giver is thinking in terms of criticism or negativity, it adds undue stress to both parties. Rather, choose your timing and your words carefully. You may want to ask the receiver if they are ready to hear your feedback. A simple, “Do you have some time to debrief that meeting?” can make a world of difference.

If they say no, give them a bit of processing time. And if they never circle back to share their readiness, gently find a time you believe is better.  Unless it’s absolutely urgent, by showing the person you respect them enough to ask if they are ready to listen, it makes a big difference in their ability to actually hear it. When you give feedback with positive language and a collaborative mindset, it will ease the tension for you both. The key is making sure the feedback is constructive. Additionally, if you set up a dynamic of debriefing after every big meeting, presentation, etc., sharing feedback both ways becomes part of the normal routine; and becomes far less intimidating.

START WITH WHAT’S GOING WELL...

It’s a heck of a lot easier for someone to hear the developmental feedback if you start with something positive.  For example, if someone has had a rough meeting with a customer, I might start by saying, “Good job overall, Sophia.  I love the confidence and the way you listened to the customer concerns in that meeting.” While you don’t want to overly sugarcoat it, starting with positive feedback leaves the recipient more open to the rest of your input.

...THEN FOLLOW UP WITH LETTING THEM GIVE FEEDBACK TO THEMSELVES

Secret trick to giving tough feedback?  Let people give it to themselves. We do this by asking a simple question.  I might follow up the above example with a “How do you think the meeting went?  What went well, and what would you change?” Let them process, and collect their thoughts.  They might respond, with “What do you think?” Be prepared to share an example of the developmental feedback you wanted to give.  Give specific examples, and don’t avoid the message you want to land. You are in conversation mode now, and you’ve already shared something positive.  After providing your input, stop talking. Pausing will cause the person to begin to share, as no one wants to sit there in silence. And when you’ve given them the opportunity to surface the feedback themselves, they walk away from the conversation feeling more empowered, rather than having just received tough feedback.  It might not be the easiest conversation, but putting them in the position of feeling like they can own their strengths and weaknesses makes it far easier. Just make sure you help them tie it all together with a suggestion or strategy for how to be more successful next time.

Christina Luconi is Chief People Officer for Rapid7. Follow her on Twitter: @peopleinnovator

For this episode of The VentureFizz Podcast, I interviewed Julia Austin, who wears many different hats these days. She is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, Board Member, angel investor, and advisor to several emerging tech companies.

Julia saw her career skyrocket upon joining Akamai in the early days of the company, where she eventually became VP of Engineering. From there, she went on to hold leadership roles at VMware and was recently the CTO at DigitalOcean. 

Julia is the definition of someone who knows how to pay-it-forward in terms of her involvement in the Boston tech ecosystem.

In this episode, we cover lots of topics:

• Julia’s background and the evolution of her career.
• What it takes to become a great product manager.
• Best practices around hiring and how the first employees define your culture.
• The criteria she looks for when she is making investments.
• Plus, a lot more.

Lastly, if you like the show, please remember to subscribe to and review us on iTunes, or your podcast player of choice!

Before it was a school, Wentworth Institute of Technology was originally just an idea by Boston-area businessman Arioch Wentworth in the early 1900s. When he passed away, he left behind $7 million (which, adjusted for inflation, is a little over $190 million today) to be put towards establishing a school in Boston that had an exclusive focus on industrial development.

In 1904, a board of directors was established to incorporate the Wentworth Institute, and a few years later in 1911, the school officially opened. For more than 40 years, Wentworth was a trade school for developing various engineering skills, but in 1957, they began to offer degrees, and the first baccalaureate degrees were offered in 1970.

Today, the school fosters the majority of their engineering talent for their accelerator program, named Accelerate. Since its inception in 2012, Accelerate has had 5,800 individuals participate, and more than $300,000 has been awarded to 67 student teams.

How Accelerate was formed…

After years of working in the Boston-area higher education ecosystem, Dr. Monique Fuchs felt that Wentworth Institute of Technology’s strong trajectory of a maker culture presented the ideal opportunity to become a local catalyst for disruption and innovation in the product and social impact space.

“When Accelerate launched in 2012, our focus wasn’t so much on building startups, but to help our students develop critical competencies that are going to make them successful throughout their careers,” Fuchs said. “The goal has always been to encourage innovative thinking and entrepreneurial confidence to help students reinvent and position themselves for the future of work and experiment within a safe environment.”

As the Co-Founder of Accelerate, Wentworth Innovation + Entrepreneurship Center, Fuchs has overseen its growth over the past six years to the point where 5,800 individuals have participated in Accelerate’s programs from the Startup Challenge, immersive [Social] Innovation Labs to ThinkTanks. 

One of the key characteristics of Accelerate is its interdisciplinary nature. Students are not only encouraged, but are required to communicate and collaborate with one another across disciplines. This one simple, and effective attribute allows students to ideate together exploring different perspectives and approaches regardless of their current field of study. It’s not uncommon to see engineering, industrial design, computer science and business management majors working on the same startup team and even expand to disciplines and other universities beyond Wentworth’s campus.

Accelerating their mission further outside of the college campus

Accelerate’s commitment to providing students with opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration has also extended to the Boston business community through its newly announced partnership with Workbar. This partnership will allow Wentworth students to progress their startup ideas amongst Workbar’s member community, allowing for an immersive introduction to a myriad of Boston’s best and brightest innovators.

“When we first started thinking about the idea of partnering with a coworking space it was intended to be a bridge for our students to interact with innovators and entrepreneurs, giving them inspiration and real-world insight into startup life while expanding their mentor network” said Fuchs. “It also creates an opportunity to integrate our co-op model and allows Workbar member companies to hire our students and have a direct talent pipeline into Workbar.”

Accelerate will also host events at the Workbar Back Bay location, including their ThinkTank series where industry professionals, students, faculty, and community members convene to challenge assumptions, co-create ideas, envision future scenarios and explore the defining societal challenges of our time. Workbar Back Bay hosted Accelerate’s most recent ThinkTank in February, “Future of Our Cities - Converging Generations.”  Bringing Accelerate events to Workbar will help future programming reach diverse audiences and introduce Workbar community members to Accelerate’s many offerings.

“There are very few work environments that are interdisciplinary like a coworking space,” Program Director Max Rollinger said, who was appointed to the position in March. “You’re in a situation where law firms are next to startups. You have accountants who are next to marketing professionals. It’s a fantastic opportunity for our students to learn and network across multiple Workbar locations.”

With students beginning to register for their Workbar memberships, the Accelerate team and Wentworth community at large is eager to see how this new partnership will positively impact the learning and networking opportunities available to students as they take their ideas from campus to a coworking space.

Making an impact with Accelerate

Accelerators are, in a way, the unsung heroes of the startup world.

These organizations offer individuals to explore their ideas, form teams, and provide early-stage companies a chance to help grow their business. The Greater Boston area’s tech space is full of these organizations. Ask anyone who is involved with them in any capacity, and the names MassChallenge and Techstars will more than likely be brought up.

Even among other prominent accelerators in the space, it’s the versatile nature of Accelerate that has allowed the organization to grow and thrive on Wentworth’s campus. The combination of students taking in their ideas and pushing them forward through interdisciplinary collaboration has allowed Accelerate to foster innovative ideas and entrepreneurial concepts that could soon be the next big thing to come out of a school.

“We are building students’ mindsets and confidence to act on their ideas regardless if they launch a startup or work in industry,” said Fuchs. “Providing the environment and opportunity creates a microcosm for them to experiment, iterate, and fail realizing that this process can lead to solutions that can have an impact on society and the future. And that’s the sense we want them to graduate with.”

Colin Barry is an Editor & Staff Writer to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash

Images courtesy of Wentworth Accelerate

Kensho is a Data Analytics and Machine Intelligence Company. They deploy scalable machine learning and analytics systems across the most critical government and commercial institutions in the world to solve some of the hardest analytical problems.

Kensho was founded out of MIT and Harvard in 2013. Kensho was acquired in March of 2018 by S&P Global. 

Their office, located in the heart of Harvard Square in Cambridge, is filled with collaborative spaces to enhance the team-oriented culture at Kensho. The large windows in the office welcome in natural light, showcasing the many perks available. There are long tables for team lunches and chess matches, plus ping pong, two in-office gyms, and meditation rooms for Kenshins (their employees) to find their zen. Take a look at the slideshow below!

Also, Kensho is hiring! Check out their BIZZpage for all of the company's openings!

Let’s be honest when you think operations you probably do not think “Agile.”  In fact, about five years ago, I would have agreed with you. Back then, I believed that working in operations meant “keeping the lights on” and solving urgent issues and escalations. Whereas Agile meant burndown charts, sprints, and retrospectives. They were completely incompatible. Apples and oranges. Until I realized that the two are not just compatible, but that agility is, in fact, the best way to solve urgent issues and escalations and to “keep the lights on.” 

CollabNet VersionOne (Gartner’s recognized leader in Agile Management) said in their State of Agile report they document a 55% increase in productivity, 49% better business and IT alignment, and a 64% improvement on managing changing priorities (a constant bane of operations). The reality is Agile is no longer the exclusive turf of software development but in fact many different disciplines. Operations, marketing, even HR are recognizing that agility can help them achieve their goals faster and with higher quality. 

Agile is a mindset, not a methodology

One of the biggest misnomers out there is that Agile is a methodology. It’s not. Agile is a mindset, which often manifests itself in a methodology (most typically Scrum or Kanban). Resist dogma. Look to the very name of the mindset and be able to move quickly to what works.  You must BE Agile, not DO Agile. 

Ok, so yes. You will need some kind of methodology. Scrum? Kanban? Scrumban?

It’s been my experience that Kanban tends to fit Operations groups better than Scrum, but that may not be the case for your organization/situation. The reality is whatever you choose to label your new process, it will be its own animal. Do NOT be dogmatic. For example, check out the Agile Manifesto. There’s no dogma there. It’s about values and principles. So don’t spend too much time worrying about the footwork of what you roll out especially when you first launch.

How to approach a transformation

The only absolute requirement for attempting an Agile transformation of an operations team is buy-in from your executives. A change of this magnitude will likely bring bumps in the road and changes in the way you want to measure success. To make this work, you need to ensure that the C-suite understands, is invested, and is engaged in this transformation.

Understand that this is a long play. This isn’t some panacea you can roll out, and it will solve all your problems. The reality is you will need to make small adjustments to your overall process continually. To enable this, you will need to instill a culture of continuous improvement. 

Early on in my transformation days, I fell into the assumption trap that everyone else believed in continuous improvement. I realized not all do and I needed to set a paradigm that - while the team IS good- there is always room to improve. For that reason, we will relentlessly look for ways to improve how we operate. Also recognize you will have resistors, some relentless in their own right. Be a curious listener to their concerns, and bend - contort even - to make your transformation successful. This means all of your stakeholders need to feel like they own a little piece of this change.

When you first launch

Regardless of what your chosen methodology is, focus on visualizing your work and establishing cadence. Two weeks to a month is typical. To visualize your work, find a shared online system. It could be JIRA, Sharepoint, Smartsheet, or Rally, for example. Which tool you choose isn’t terribly important, but it needs to be shared. You can even start with just a whiteboard/Post-it notes that you photograph daily. Whatever you choose, use it as a way to get things started.

It’s been my experience that putting too much time into estimation early on is a mistake. It can lead to analysis-paralysis and it will be difficult to begin. Start by defining your smallest unit of work then comparing other work to the smallest unit. You can use hours of effort or T-shirt sizes.

How to manage interruptions

Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room. If you’re on an operational team, you likely deal with interruptions, maybe near constant ones. Two ways you can mitigate these are to include them in your capacity planning, assume there will be interruptions, take an educated guess as to how much time you spend on planned work vs. unplanned work (30% planned work? 50%?), and accept planned work accordingly. Also, as the unplanned work comes in, make sure to track that work on your chosen online system. This is still work, so you’ll want to track and take credit for it.

An out of the box game plan

At this point, you may be excited about putting this into motion but are wondering how. Here’s a game plan distilled from the points above into actionable steps. This plan has worked for me, but I want to emphasize that not all of this may work for you. With that said, here we go:

1. Think of how you want the team to operate and document it. 

Things like: we want to try a Kanban methodology; we will use JIRA as our chosen tool; etc. Document how you will use analytics to find issues and define your cadence (the team will have monthly iteration planning in which we will, as a team, size work, decide how will we pull work in, etc.) Put all of this into a slide deck. The start of the slide deck should be about why to change and include research (there is a lot on the internet) to document the productivity increase with Agile.

2. Work with your manager to refine the slide deck for executive approval (C-level if possible).

(This assumes your immediate manager is on board with an Agile transformation). Then present slides to executives with a proposal to transform. Ask for some Agile training, even as simple as online courses, for the whole team.

3. Plan your implementation with the team.

For your team, no matter how you do this, it will feel like a dramatic change. Right out of the gate implement just the bare minimums – your chosen methodology and cadence, planning and retrospectives, and stand-ups. Plan to make changes to the team requests, as you need their buy-in. 

4. After you launch, wait, measure, and refine. 

Give your team a few iterations to work under the initial rollout, then begin to look at the output and find where problems lie. Are there constraints to the process? Are there players who presented challenges? Once you have your target areas for improvements, plan an “experiment” to address what you see as the problems. 

Think about how you’ll measure the outcome of this experiment. What would define success or failure? Initially, I recommend no more than two experiments per year (I like to do them in spring and fall, as many take time off during the summer and over the holidays). As you progress, you can make smaller experiments more often and speed up your learning cycles.

5. Include the team in experimentation planning. 

I see this as the final step. By now, most of your team believes in the process. They now can be your best source of ideas to improve, which will empower the team and further cement buy-in. A hallmark of successful healthy Agile teams is self-direction. To enable them, you need to guide them. Don’t prescribe to them; collaborate with them.

Throughout the process, be positive and celebrate wins AND losses. Teams need to understand that failed experiments with learning and adaptation is still a winning outcome. This is crucial to growing and maintaining the culture which supports Agile teams.

Agile transformations are a journey. I’m still in Step Five and am learning that you’ll keep refining and improve. As you progress through the steps above, the team will be more open to changes, especially when you can demonstrate your successes. Have an open mind and enjoy the ride!

Christian Ollenborger is a Sr. Project Manager for the Information Technology organization at Carbon Black.

Employee training isn’t a one size fits all approach. There isn’t one straightforward answer to building the perfect employee training program, but there are a few things that are consistently present in all the best ones. Having participated in a variety of hypergrowth companies over the years, here are the shared characteristics I’ve found among the most successful programs.

A STRONG VISION, COUPLED WITH STELLAR PROGRAM MANAGEMENT

The best people development programs start with a champion with a vision. Regardless of what their title might be, this person is out in front, sharing their vision and building support for the impact they intend to develop. Most growing companies often assign an HR leader to do a little research and sign up a training vendor. This doesn’t cut it. Outsourcing is fine, but you’ve got to have someone who understands your culture, can anticipate your needs for the future of the company and develops a vision for how to empower people with the skills and knowledge to achieve those goals. This person is likely insatiably curious, driven, and passionate about developing lifelong learners. They balance this mindset with solid business acumen, leadership, collaboration, and project management skills.

INSIGHTFUL NEEDS ASSESSMENT

In building an impactful people development program, this leader must be able to identify the needs of your growing company. Being able to understand the past successes and marry them with what’s necessary for the future is critical. Correctly assessing and highlighting who needs development, and on what skills and mindsets are a core skill for this person. Conducting a comprehensive assessment that includes research, interviews, and surveys will help to identify the gaps and allow for input to a substantial plan forward.

COLLABORATION AND ALIGNMENT

It’s one thing to prepare a thoughtful needs assessment, and it’s another to ensure it aligns with the company’s business goals and the overall people development vision. By doing so, not only are your people more likely to understand the training provided - it is far more likely to be both supported and invested in by your leadership team. Putting people through a standard issue training program is a Band-Aid solution; ensuring it is impactful to both the organization and your employees is essential.

CLEAR GOALS AND METRICS

Developing people can be a tough thing to quantify. However, if your people development leader is doing a reliable job balancing and aligning the organizational goals and needs with the business, measurement of impact should become far more natural to define. When outlining your people development goals, think big picture. Include elements such as business impact, quality, cost, and effectiveness. Develop a benchmarking strategy for evaluating your progress, and capture pertinent data in an easily digestible format. Review this information on a regular cadence, and you’ll find your ability to become agile and tweak your strategy as needed.

BUY-IN FROM THE TOP

You’ve got the leader, the plan, and a robust way to measure your progress and impact. What else do you need to ensure success? Buy-in from your leadership team. Having their support helps ensure your employees view this important work. In addition, it will help with accountability and expectation setting. You’re far more likely to achieve affirmation if you’ve done a complete job ensuring your vision and program map to the business goals.  

No matter how strong your program, nothing replaces hiring people onto your team who are continuous learners. Attract and invest in people’s growth and learning, and watch them, and your company, thrive.

Christina Luconi is Chief People Officer for Rapid7. Follow her on Twitter: @peopleinnovator