Joe Hirsch (1928–2009)

Feedback comprises a crucial part of leading people under you. Your feedback to them and their feedback to you provide a means to improve. Yet with how it’s conducted in many places, feedback in the form of reviews and grades can induce more anxiety than improvement. Giving effective feedback and receiving effective feedback are separate but vital skills. In this book, Joe Hirsch seeks to make feedback from managers and teachers more effective by unlocking its creative potential.

At times, this book strikes me as spot on with practical examples of how to provide good feedback. Many managers came to their position through hard, skilled individual work, not their abilities to teach, but good feedback requires more of the teacher hat. Hirsch tries to unlock the secrets that good educators know about how to inspire students (and parents). He strategizes to focus on the future and unlock creative energy instead of just reviewing a fixed past.

That said, many times, Hirsch comes off as oversimplifying a complex problem of changing another person’s mind. He provides a couple of educational outfits as “gold standard” examples to follow, but at times, I became lost in the abundance of words. It seemed as though he was inventing psychological jujitsu rather than describing a real, concrete, mastered process. The educational examples strike me as flowing from inspiration in his salaried work instead of practical, task-analyzed data that can be imported into management circles. I would have liked to have seen these steps broken down with more definition.

Overall, this book pushed me to think about how I provide feedback to those around me, whether under me, over me, or beside me. Its main audience is the business community, especially managers who might not have time to get an entire MBA to polish their soft skills. Professional educators, whose abilities for feedback usually surpasses other professionals, might find this book lacking in enough specifics for them. Again, the section on schools seemed to need more deconstruction. This book did make me think more about feedback and will help me survey the literature more on this important topic.… (plus d'informations)