About learning from feeback

From my notes on September 19, 2008:

Sometimes we get so much caught up with doing things, working hard and demanding hard work from others, but end up getting less than the desired results. There is no substitute for hard work. But that is only part of the jigsaw puzzle of high performance. We need to put all the pieces together to obtain high performance.

There are several pieces to the puzzle. Here I am focusing on the role of obtaining and giving timely feedback. Without a system of ongoing measurement and feedback, we end up doing more postmortems than life saving surgeries.

It is easy to talk about the role of feedback and correction, but difficult to practice it. But I believe getting a handle on this difficult thing is the key to success as managers and leaders.
One thing that I learned through feedback today is about the importance of fixing the duration of meetings and sticking to that.

In today's meeting I was emphasizing the importance of defining clearly measurable learning objectives. I was discussing the matter with a group of IT learning facilitators. I was very enthusiastic about making this work, that I ended up talking more than I should have. Immediately after the meeting was over, came the personal feedback that the meeting should have been closed earlier. Though I would have appreciated this feedback during the meeting itself, it was worth having even after the meeting was over.

So I am keeping a rule for myself to use the mobile phone to alert me about the end time for meetings that I call. I may snooze it once, just to summarize the point being discussed, but not carry it beyond that.