Cracking the Feedback Code: Neuroscience, Leadership & Culture

Ron Stodd, Rise Smart, is the only coaching provider that lets you offer coaching to all your employees. Their disruptive, innovative approach does away with cumbersome and expensive licenses, allowing you to be more equitable and inclusive, and extend the reach of coaching for all like never before. Welcome to AT&E's Talent Development Leader podcast, featuring monthly conversations with the greatest influencers in the talent development field. We cover the latest trends, hot topics, and future focused ideas that current and aspiring TD leaders need to know. Learn more by visiting www.td.org and searching for Talent Development Leader podcast. Sandra Machihi is an organizational psychologist and leadership coach who is more than 20 years of experience coaching and training leaders to improve their behaviors in a way that leads to their team's high performance and effectiveness. Sandra works on a one-on-one basis as well as facilitating group coaching programs along various topics such as emotional intelligence, performance feedback coaching, and emerging leadership programs. Sandra runs a boutique consulting firm called Spectra Coaching. She also serves as an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University's Gratziato School of Business and Management and the California School of Professional Psychology among other professional institutions, where she teaches leadership and organizational behavior for MBA and doctoral students. Ken Noak is a licensed psychologist and the co-founder and senior research officer of Amvisia Learning, a global leader in assessment and technology solutions. With more than 30 years of experience, Ken has made significant contributions to the fields of habit and behavior change, 360 degree feedback, leadership development, and health psychology in peer-reviewed academic journals, book chapters, and HR, OD, and LND magazines. He holds a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Recognized for his valuable insights in learning and development, Ken is a fellow of the American Psychological Associations Division 13, Society of Consulting Psychology, and served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Consulting Psychology Journal. Ken and Sandra just published their latest book, Performance Feedback Strategies by ATD Press in April of 2025. Hi Sandra and Ken, thank you for joining me. Today we're talking about feedback as it relates to employee performance and engagement, an organizational performance and culture. So let's start with a basic definition of performance feedback. How do you describe it and why is it such a critical skill for leaders today? A great question and really the impetus for our book, but we define the term performance feedback, really is information sharing with an employee with a real key intention, and it's really helping them to do their job more effectively based on whatever mutually agreed upon goals and standards exist. In feedback the word itself as we all know there's a lot of moving parts, whether it's giving or receiving the content, the valence, whether it's positive, negative, a critical, constructive, the purpose of the message, why are we meeting? Obviously a lot about the feedback recipient, their intersectionality and the culture, a cage, job, a self personality, and obviously a lot about the feedback provider. But we see performance feedback really is a set of strategic techniques delivered to employees in a fair, consistent, timely, really constructive manner. So what we call the three really important components, so what performance feedback really is all about is achieving these three things or sort of metrics or standards in any conversation, even what you and I are having today, and the first is whether or not the delivery of feedback enables employees to understand what the heck you're trying to share with them. So they comprehend, they just get it. We talk on one of our chapters a lot about how cultural differences really change. I may say something in one particular frame, but if you're from a different country, means something really different. So that first component of performance feedback really is around do you understand the second, which is really critical is do you buy it, do you accept it, however I share feedback with you, you might understand it, but you may get defensive. You may deflate it, you may feel it's unfair or I'm just incorrect. And finally, we give feedback for performance with one really important terminal hope and prayer, and that is not just the people get it and are motivated to do something with it, but they make a commitment to change. So performance feedback is very pointed to say, how can we turn the volume up, turn the volume down, help employees do their job, but more effectively. I love the intentionality of this, and when you think about you mentioned mutually agreed upon, right, many people engage in performance feedback with not so much intention, shall we say, right, so to really think about how you might elevate performance conversations when you approach it with the kind of the constructs you presented here curious how performance coaching and performance feedback differs from traditional performance management. Yeah, that's a great question. You know, you just said it, it's about elevating performance feedback conversations, those feedback conversations that we have our purpose is to help leaders elevate those conversations in a traditional performance feedback approach. It involves a cycle of setting goals, having ongoing feedback conversations toward monitoring progress and performance, you know, this includes standard approaches, documentations, annual performance reviews, checklist, progressive discipline, and the leader does that to manage and monitor performance. Now, our model and our approach is to monitor performance, but we would like to help leaders become coaches in that process and help them facilitate conversations and feedback in such a way where employees feel aligned, heard, understood, and bought into the process. Because as we know, there is really a gap between what leaders are doing and what employees are actually experiencing. So traditional performance management is is a great way of monitoring performance. If you want to just track progress, but we're elevating that to the next level, and we would like to help leaders become coaches in that process. So much more than a performance review, clearly, that's fantastic. Let's talk about kind of the state of performance feedback in the workplace today. I know as far as performance management goes, performance feedback and coaching, you know, the pendulum can swing from one end of the spectrum to the other, but this is always kind of a hot button topic for our field. Certainly employee expectations have evolved over the years, but I think especially recently employees want and expect a lot more from their managers and their employers and leaders. What do those expectations say about performance feedback and kind of the role it has in the employee employer relationship? Yeah, that's another great question, and I see this all the time with leaders thinking that they're giving feedback, but they're not really understanding what's been taking place lately, you know, with the shifts around work life integration, the expectations of people having that balance between taking time off for parental leave, sick leave, whatever it may be, and the remote life. So that's a big paradigm shift as well that a lot of leaders are still struggling with tuning into another big paradigm shift is AI and technology taking over this big boom. So life has shifted for employees and leaders don't only need to tune into them, but they also need to understand the boundaries around well, I need to respect my employee because I'm emailing them off hours because I know they have their mobile phone on them and they're working remote. So maybe I could just email them all day so leaders need to understand that yeah, they do work remote, but there's a time that you can contact them leaders need to strike that balance between tuning in and understanding and meeting their needs, but also really respecting their boundaries around what they can and can do. And employees really expect that now employees want to feel like their leaders are taking care of them and understanding, you know, what they're going through and where they're at, that's what we're seeing in paradigms have shifted so much and it's shifting at an accelerated pace, that's why this is so important. I know we've had a lot of stats in our books and surveys change from year to year, but to really stuck with son and I and I think they're in our book as well, but a recent Forbes article reported that I think it was 65% of employees really are craving more meaningful feedback today, old ages, old tenures, yet less than 60% of managers are convinced they're already doing that. And if that is enough for one of the more recent Gallup surveys, I think indicated that roughly 80% of employees who share that they do get meaningful and important feedback from their leaders were much more engaged in those that. not. And I think again, that's the impetus for thinking about our model and helping leaders do what we really expect them to do, but think a sonar will share more detail with her active coaching. We're shocked and surprised at how few of the leaders we interact with have had this structured training and exposure to the model we have in our work. I like to hear that it's an employee thing. It crosses generations, right? It's not a Gen Z, you really want some feedback, you know, everybody does. And so to understand how to address people and employees in your organization kind of cuts across those divides. Sandra mentioned the gap. And then I want to kind of get back to that. I found it quite interesting actually when reading your book that this major gap exists between a leader's and employees experience around feedback. Can you talk more about the biggest disconnects between what leaders believe they are delivering? And what employees are actually experiencing in that feedback conversation? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is the reason that Ken and I got together to even write this book. Organizations are spending so much money on leadership training programs. And there's still this huge disconnects. I coach leaders and yes, they go through leadership training and they're learning feedback techniques and they're giving feedback. And they're trying these approaches, but they're still this disconnect. And what we hear leaders saying is that every time I give feedback, it's presented with some kind of resistance or my employee will say, okay, and nothing changes. Or I'm scared to give feedback with the way they'll respond. Or I don't have time to keep giving feedback and nothing changes. Or a lot of leaders say, I wasn't given any feedback and I'm doing just fine. You know, why should I do it any differently for them? You know, they should think on their own feet and come up with their own solutions to things. And that's a big complaint amongst leaders. And then interestingly, if you interview those employees that work with them, what they're saying is my leader doesn't hear me. My leader doesn't understand my needs. My leader is not interested in my career development. My leader is not interested in my team dynamic and the conflict of our team and is not addressing that. So there's lots of complaints that employees have. And ultimately, they feel like their leader isn't giving them the feedback that they need and their leader isn't tuning into them. And so when you look at this gap, it's a frustration on both parts and that ultimately will really diminish and decrease performance. Our book provides a whole series of practical tips and suggestions for exactly how to package and frame and deliver the feedback to essentially any type of employee because there is a variety of employees with different needs, different personalities, different skill levels, different engagement levels. And then on a personal level, you know, they come from different generations. They have different cultures. They have different race, different neurodiversity. We look at every component of what each employee comes with because that all matters. And in a traditional performance management system, they don't necessarily look at all that. It's just, did you do your work? Yes or no, you met, you exceeded or you didn't, right? But this is more, okay, what does this person come with? What's the whole package of this individual? And so we provide those techniques for leaders to be able to package and deliver feedback in such a way so that the employees feel heard and they got it. At the end of the day, it's about the employees feel like they got the feedback and they could actually, like Ken said earlier, commit to some kind of action. It's great. I hear our audience of talent development leaders say all the time one size fits one and I appreciate the perspective of approaching performance feedback the same way and it makes total sense. You know, the person is the whole person and looking at all that makes them uniquely who they are, including how they want to be spoken to. Again, kind of agreeing mutually on that. I think a lot of this is about essentially raising self-awareness to for leaders and employees and to close that gap and just write with opportunity for improvement across the board. Ken mentioned the impact of poor performance feedback. He mentioned engagement retention, overall business performance. Certainly this has far exceeding reach beyond just a performance review or even kind of overall satisfaction from an employee. Could you talk more about that about kind of the effects of poor performance feedback? Well, just on the effect on the employee level, it impacts morale, it impacts the morale of a team. For example, you know, you have teams where you have a so-called, I'm going to use a term, competent jerk on the team. This is an employee that's highly skilled but has some interpersonal deficits and I didn't make up that word. Some Harvard Business Review authors actually made up that word in their article, but these kinds of competent jerks that are on the team are impacting the morale of the team. So you have other employees that have this expectation that their leader is going to step up for them. So it impacts the morale of the team. It impacts definitely decreased productivity, lower quality outputs, missed deadlines, you have dissatisfied customers. Things are not happening and things are falling through the cracks. Ultimately, it impacts the company's bottom line and reputation. So there's really big, significant impacts. If leaders aren't willing to constructively confront, you know, poor performers on the team or those competent jerks, you have a situation where there is this contagion effect amongst the team and other employees feel dissatisfied and that has so many repercussions. It's a great business case for it, for sure. Your book contains a lot of interesting information about the neuroscience behind feedback as well and particularly fascinated by this to think about how people react to feedback often defensively, right? Even when it's constructive. So curious for some more information around this. The neuroscience label is really attractive. If anybody lover obviously is throwing that label into articles and TED Talks and books, when I served in the last few years as editor for one of the American Psychological Association journals, we had an entire special issue on the neuroscience of consulting psychology, coaching training, and I wrote an introductory article four, that's a special issue around what we call neuro misconceptions. A lot of neuro BS, a lot of neurosur秀 to running around. In L&D, literally they'll bless you for attending a 12 week program and all of a sudden you're a neuro coach. But they give our brain, really in the evolution of our brain over the estimated time, humans are then running around on earth, which is around 300,000 years, that are brain basically as a cost-benefit calculator. What we seek to do are two things. Our brain really is a survival organ that seeks pleasure, seeks plain joy, seeks to facilitate flourishing. But more importantly, the brain's a protective calculator that's weighing every interaction, every situation we perceive from the lens of business, potentially harmful, is their danger here. And unfortunately, we refer to this as the negativity bias that we react quite frequently. And because we're social creatures, that's how we evolve to tribes and clans, and we may look at the world through a Wednesday and wonder why we haven't evolved further, but that's another podcast, that's the topic altogether. We immediately within seconds our brain is this cost-benefit calculator, determines whether we can meet somebody and interact with them and treat them as a friend, or there's a threat inherent in those individuals as a foe. So this is from an evolutionary survival perspective, how we're organized, and brain research really suggests we feel a lot more pain interacting and sensing people that seem different from us, and different can be any aspect of how we look, how we speak, how we behave. And this is an automatic protecting calculator that says, "Gosh, the more you seem like me, the more we're like, you seem safer." So because of that, we also find that interpersonal interactions, feedback is a great example. It lists a heightened fight or flight response. So if I could draw blood, grab saliva, have it wear a smart watch, and grab some physiological parameters, if you and I are interacting and we have an argument, if you feel as if there's tension, if I've shared information of feedback that seems unfair, incorrect, just biased, you will elicit that fight or flight response, cortisol, the hormone of the stress response, remains elevated, about 50% longer than non-interpersonal stressors. And finally, kind of from a neuroscience perspective, there's been great plastic research that I think most listeners will be familiar with. And it's really come out of the lab of Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA in California, putting people that were playing a social game together under brain scans using functional MRIs. Her lab was really one of the first to determine that social rejection, social evaluation, receiving feedback that seems very unjust, living into a situation environment where we experience discrimination, we experience being ostracized, being left out, and not only causes a perception of hurt at an emotional level, but it actually activates the pain matrix in our brain, that network that's really interconnected. So we treat feedback and so did I have an entire chapter of the book that really tries to unpack, how can we deliver and receive feedback without that pouch? So the neuroscience is pretty interesting as a backdrop to why feedback is one that we all know visibly can hurt, even if our intents to be constructive and supportive, how its experience are perceived as the other side that we need to be cognizant of. It's helpful to know, Ken, that nothing's wrong with me then when I'm like, why can't I take constructive feedback better? I need tougher skin, why doesn't this just roll off me right? So very much how we're just wired. That's a survival wiring that it's allowed us to wander around earth and hopefully continue to evolve in a way that we do treat people with civility, empathy, and an inclusive manner, and that feedback is seen as a positive. In fact, there's a lot of words out there, a martial goldsmiths may not be one that's pointed to this idea of future oriented feedback. Feed forward is a lot less painful. And the more you and I get to know each other, we care about each other, I'm interested in you telling me when we're on a podcast and you can see me that I've got food stock between my teeth. I'm interested in receiving what can be kind of painful feedback and criticism, but you love me. I love you and the intent is growth and development. You talk also about psychological safety and culture. These are important ingredients too when you think about overall a performance feedback, performance coaching system or environment in an organization. Can you talk more about what role, particularly psychological safety plays in making feedback more effective? It's pretty intuitive and let me unpack the label because I think today we read about it, we hear a lot about it. Psychological safety is again a calculation and prediction. If I behave in a particular way with you, either interpersonal is part of a team, that your response to the behavior to what I've set or done will be one that I feel safe around. In other words, I won't be bullied, I won't be made of fun of, I won't be ignored, so I can take a risk to be authentic. I can share, I can actually make a mistake. I can be brave and disagree with you. A lot of the research around psychological safety. In fact, a colleague of mine, Paul Zach and I wrote one of his professional ATD publications that have unpsychological safety. Anybody that's going to the ATD site can actually purchase that. So psychological safety again is your prediction of how others are going to treat you, which either frees you or inhibits you to be yourself, to speak out, to be challenging. In feedback is always in an environment where I feel comfortable, freely shared. In fact, there's a lot of cool research that does suggest that a key predictor of high performance teams is we can in fact constructively disagree and that it's not an evaluation of my intelligence or my personality or worse. And every one of us can relate to being in a meeting and we've got a brilliant idea, right? And we throw it out and nobody responds to it. And it seems like 20 minutes later, somebody's gotten virtually the same idea and everyone's now jumping up and down and cheering. And you kind of want to what the heck? That was my idea. And you feel psychologically unsafe to reveal too much or share much more. So we know that what leaders and team members can do to cultivate psychologically safe environments enhances feedback given and feedback received. It's that simple, but it's an interesting concept that we need to unpack exactly what it is. Different from interpersonal trust, which is again, a calculation that I'm empowering you to do things on my behalf. So if you're my plumber, come on in and fix some I broke in garbage disposal. If you're my car repair person, I'll just bring my car to you and come back and pick it up later and trust you know what you're doing. If you're my surgeon or my banker, we think you've got the right skill set and you have our backs to do things on our behalf. And interestingly, I won't go in any more detail. Both psychological safety and interpersonal trust are mediated by a pro-social peptide called oxytocin. So when you and I interact and there's a level of trust that's there, we find an oxytocin lowers the threshold for me believing you're a threat. And in a feedback interaction where I might feel defensive, there's less trust for me to respond in a way that's truthfully going to say to somebody outside the meeting, oh my gosh, can you believe what Kay said to me? Let me say in my perspective, because I didn't feel comfortable to let her know. So it's an interesting concept that plays a big role on the quality, the quantity, and certainly the authenticity of feedback that shared in a partnership or a team. So the point of all of this, I think, when we talk about performance feedback is to drive behavior change, right? We want to share with folks, deliver feedback and the intent is that they receive it in such a way that behavior is changed, that a change ultimately is made. So what are the key ingredients of feedback that do drive such change? Yeah, this is a big topic that Sunder and I have written about and we speak at ATD and other conferences as well. I mean, terminally, we're praying and hoping that what you hear and receive will translate into doing something more or less or differently. Otherwise, why share? Why share now? And is it me that should be shared? So we have an entire chapter in our book devoted to a framework that we have curated from a lot of research that's out there on habit and behavior change over many years and we basically see three very important dimensions or factors that are critical for individuals to begin something, it's a stated Friday length of time and then make that part of their DNA. So the silly exercise for listeners to do right now, but we often in our workshops or presentations have people actually write their name, sign an autograph for us with their non-dominant hand. And it's a great visceral exercise because we can actually watch people struggle, we see their non-verbals of why do I do this. But at the end of the day, if you unpack again the experience, it's really fascinating because most people take a lot longer to write their name with their non-dominant hand, obviously. They have to focus and really think about it, which if I just ask you to sign your name now in a credit card or what not, you can do it pretty unconsciously. And finally, the quality of what we do is probably, unless you have a dexterous pretty different. So we really believe that the elements of habit and behavior change are seeped in a lot of research models around getting people to start, getting people to stay in things, keep it up over time. And we have what we refer to as this three E model that we again talk about in one of the chapters of our book. But nobody spontaneously wakes up and just decides to be different. Whether it's our body, when blood pressure goes up or heart rate goes up, we have corrective mechanisms in our body to correct that, to change that. And that's the purpose of feedback interpersonally used to share information that has an intention. We hope of modifying behavior. So this stage of the first stage is really are you in tune? Do you see yourself in a way that others will align? And we actually have had an article in training development this last March, 2025 issue in which Sunder and I unpack and talk about the next evolution of the Jahari window and the alignment between how I see myself, my identity, and how others uniquely may be writing things that Mathram wall about us or speaking outside of a meeting, which is our reputation. So without insight and awareness, we just don't find people doing anything any differently. It feels pretty comfortable to stick with habits that we've developed. So that's our first stage we call it the enlightened stage. It's again thinking about feedback as a frame to help people see the world were clearly and the impact they have in what they do. And of course, the second stage really is do you care? Do you want to do something with it? Are you motivated? In the book we talk about the second necessary conditioner stage we call it encourage of what feedback delivers and systems around them can do to support acceptance, buy-in, moving it to a readiness and think of it as a stairway of I think I want to do that to know I really need to work on this and enhancing that motivational level. So it becomes more intrinsic. And finally, the last stage is now I got started think of New Year's resolutions and most people that have created wonderful ideas of starting the New Year have now abandoned them. They're no longer practicing what they set out to do. So we think the last stage we call enable is putting into place systems and processes and recognition rewards in our peer and support network including our bosses of how to reinforce how to catch us doing things right and have a game plan for the possibility of relapse. So that's a three model that's really spoken about a much more detail in a book but get it's nothing brand new but it does curate everything that's out there in a literature on best practices for habit behavior change, learning, transfer that thick readers will find pretty provocative. I love how practical your book is when you talk about that model. I know you have another one we'll get into in a minute here, but you really helped to distill all of this research and these insights into some approaches that are super actionable for readers and for our listeners, talent development leaders. And speaking of our listeners, curious for you to talk a bit more about the role of TD in all of this, how can they support training and development efforts around performance coaching? Great question Ann, and I alluded to this earlier. In order to ensure this process isn't just leaders are going through the motions, through the checklist, I've done my annual performance review, I've given feedback, I've done everything I needed through it in a systematic way. TD leaders are really important change agents in the process to help them think bigger than that, to hold them accountable to be mentors in the process, to hold discussions with them to ensure that their understanding their employees needs as well. This is a process, it's not one size fits all, so to have that accountability partner in the process will really help them translate those new skills into action. And that's what we want for these leaders to become expert performance feedback coaches with the help of the support network around them. And what we know is that when you have a network of individuals that can periodically nudge you, remind you, help you think of what's important because sometimes it is a shift in mindset. It's coming out of thinking of yourself or thinking of feedback as a one way approach to thinking of it as a two way approach. Sometimes we need those reminders, we need that guidance and we need that support. So TD leaders play such an important role in this process to get them to the point where they could become expert feedback coaches. These skills are so relevant for the rest of our lives, right? But even think about training and developing managers, employees to be expert feedback coaches. It's not just about their role currently, it's just kind of infiltrates every part of your life and feedback arenas, which is really exciting. Want to spend some time talking about your performance feedback coaching model in the book. You spend quite a bit of time on this particular model in the book. So I think it's important to mention it a bit. And of course, I encourage listeners to check out Ken and Sandra's book performance feedback strategies so they can really dig into this model themselves. But can you give us a little teaser? So we look at two broad dimensions that are rooted in social psychology and organizational psychology. And we suggest that employees should be evaluated based on two main dimensions. One is competence or the perception or appraisal of one's competence, which is their knowledge, skills and abilities, how they get things done, and basically performance against a certain standard or expectation. And then the other dimension is their interpersonal skills, how they play well with others, how they get along with others, how they tune into others, are they likable? And so amongst those two dimensions, we now have four different quadrants. And those four different quadrants are categorized from anywhere from high performers with high interpersonal skills to low performers with low interpersonal skills. And ultimately, our goal is to get people to be in the high performer high interpersonal skills quadrant and keep them thriving. So you have the first quadrant I'll talk about, which is the employees with high interpersonal skills and high performance. And this is a quadrant that is so important. And leaders often ignore so much because they assume if they have employees that are high potentials and they're doing great on the job, then they don't need feedback. They're doing great, they can take care of the other employees that aren't doing as well. And that's actually a misconception and it's a flawed approach because those high performers need to be challenged. They need to be heard. They need to be tuned into and sought out because they're going to leave. And they need to be groomed so much and they're not. They're actually just kind of if you're doing well, then I'm just going to, you know, attend to the other employees. So we have a whole series of techniques, feedback approaches, approaches to understanding career drivers, how to conduct interviews to understand the needs of those high potentials and how to really leverage their strengths so that they could excel to the next level in their careers. And then you have the next quadrant, which is, you know, the so-called competent jerks. These are individuals with high performance but low interpersonal skills. We call this the performance management quadrant. And these are the individuals that are great at what they do, but they don't get along well with others. I've coached many surgeons, leaders. In fact, I would say a vast, a vast majority amount of my clients have been competent jerks. They have interpersonal deficits. They don't know how to get along with people. And some of them aren't aware of their interpersonal deficits and some of them don't even want to be aware of their deficits. So there are some liabilities involved with the ones that don't even want to be aware of their deficits. But there's some really big repercussions there. And organizations make the assumptions that these individuals, if they're performing well, then we got to invest in them and keep them. But the impact of their interpersonal deficits and the way they're treating other people really has tremendous impacts, which I've spoken about earlier. And so we have, you know, a whole series of approaches. What do we do with those competent jerks? How do we talk to them? How do we make them aware of their behavioral issues? The goal there is to really help those individuals change their behaviors. And then we talk about can they change? What can we do to get them to see the impact of their behaviors and strategies within that quadrant? And then we have the other quadrant, which is the individuals that have low performance, but they have great interpersonal skills. They're very likable. Team players engaged want to get along with people can connect well with others, but they have some performance deficits. We take those individuals, we teach leaders how to troubleshoot. What are the performance deficits? Is it their knowledge skills and abilities? Is it something personal, you know, that's going on with them? Within this quadrant, we help leaders really assess and understand the performance deficit to really get them to the next level. Sometimes we feel like if they're not performing, then, you know, maybe they're not the right fit. Maybe they're not performing, but they have great interpersonal skills and they have the potential. So we talk about all the strategies and feedback approaches and different techniques you can use with guiding these people to excel in their career. Then finally, you have the last quadrant, which is the low performers and the individuals low interpersonal skills and every company has their own progressive discipline process. So we respect that and we intertwine that within our approaches in this quadrant. So that's something that we embed every company's approach, but basically we talk about strategies for dealing with them, you know, and what are ways that we can give feedback so that they understand what they need to improve and what their consequences are if they don't improve. We talk about that as well. So categorizing these individuals like this really kind of captures all types of employees on your team and the strategies that we give help these employees excel at the level. They're supposed to excel. So we're addressing performance and then we're addressing interpersonal skills because at the end of the day, it's not just about how you perform, but it's also about your team and how you get along with others and how you communicate and how you're working across departments and with team members. So that's a really, really important aspect of working in an organization at the job. It's not just what you did, but how you did it. They both matter very much. I love the quadrant. It's a super helpful way to just a construct to categorize. And then again, just how actionable and practical your book is to provide strategies and tools for each of those quadrants and how to approach them. It's fantastic. There's a sidebar on this that we don't see it as fixed as dynamic. So obviously, you may have somebody that's really talented. They're performing at a high level interpersonally. They get along with everyone. They've got high emotional intelligence, but something changes in their life or their situation where they go from an outstanding performer and now they're struggling. Could be a new role. Could be things outside of work. So again, I think our book is helpful to say we're evaluating and categorizing employees along a continual load of high performance and lower high emotional intelligence or social competence, but that can change. I think you Again, the strategies, tips and techniques, worksheets we have are adaptable in a dynamic sense. People are fixed that they fit into one of those quadrants and that's all we deal with this all later. So I just wanted to highlight that to dynamic nature of the model we're writing about as well. Thanks, Ken. That's helpful. So as we wrap up today, one more question for you. And I like to ask this question of all of my podcast guests. What in your recent research writing or work has surprised you lately? Perhaps something that has caused you to pause and think, huh? Or a ha? We'd love to hear any insights or epiphanies you have. Maybe I'll kick in first and suddenly you can jump in second. Actually, a two. And one comes from my clinical background as a licensed psychologist that we have an entire book around giving and a little less about receiving feedback. And it's all about speaking to keep reflecting on the idea that we need to also acknowledge being better listeners. This cubby used to say listening for understanding. So that's one aha that as much as our book is around that, the micro skills of leaders as performance coaches shouldn't be neglected. We want to teach people to be better listeners, ask and open any questions, listening for empathy, etc. And the other one I have that comes from my own company that's global. And we have offices, we use to break more offices, but we have a large crew in the UK. Even though the language is the same understanding cultural differences, it's a real big aha for me in traveling and teaching and working around the world. And even in the UK hearing a phrase like, that's interesting here in the US, we might reflect and think that's really positive. And as my managing director in the UK pointed out a long time ago, sometimes when the Brits say that, they don't necessarily mean they're enamored with what you have to say. It's a very indirect and plight way of disagreeing. Show intelligence for leaders today, managing international teams and remote teams. It's so easy to say something and be misunderstood or to misinterpret our direct manner with someone in France or in Asia, having different norms around eye contact and what it's like to be indirect and be more subtle. So that's been a really big aha for me of why I need my knowledge and awareness and just how small the world is and how sometimes my style of preference just isn't heard and understood in the same way. Sandra, any thoughts? I think it's so interesting how it's great. The world's organizations are embracing the whole concept of leadership training, but still there is just such a disconnect amongst a lot of leaders and a lot of leaders still don't have the necessary training and skills to lead. And there's still so many employees and if you look at survey after survey, you still see this big need for employees, you know, for leaders to lead them the right way and tune into them. I'm currently working within a nonprofit organization. Leaders have been there, tenure, been working there 30 years, never have leadership training. It's just a lot of organizations are investing and they're still disconnect and then there's some that still haven't even introduced leadership training yet. So I think they're just still so much room for growth and I'm really excited about the opportunity to contribute to that cause. So much opportunity here and I know your book again called Performance Feedback Strategies really presents a case for how so many talent development leaders, managers can provide effective performance feedback and coaching and super practical tools as we've mentioned to do so. So I encourage listeners to get your hands on a copy of Ken and Sandra's book. And Ken and Sandra, please tell listeners how they might connect with you if they have any additional questions they want to ask or conversation they'd like to take up. Sure. Contact me at Sandra S-A-N-D-R-A SpectraCoaching.com, that's S-P-E-C-T-R-A Coaching.com. And yeah, email me with any questions and I'm really happy to connect. And for me, my first name Ken and then the name of our company, a little bit long-winded @invigialearningalloneword.com, E-N-V-I-S-I-A, at the word learning.com. Both of us you can fight also on LinkedIn. We'd love to connect with you as well. Thank you both so much for spending time with us today. And thank you. Thank you, Ann. Thank you for listening to this podcast by the Association for Talent Development. If you found this show insightful or useful, please be sure to like, subscribe, and share it with a colleague.