Action Learning Specialists, based in Sussex, South East England

How can themed feedback help?

One of the advantage of having many Action Learning sets ongoing within your organisation is that you get a live snap-shot of the issues being tackled by your managers.  And by gathering these non-attributable themes from the facilitators (remembering that Action Learning is a highly confidential process), you quickly build up a picture of where you may need to provide additional organisational support or, diversely where you no longer need to focus.

One organisation we worked with were adamant that their new HR process for Performance Management was working very well.  However, the biggest theme emerging from the Action Learning sets was that managers were feeling un-supported by the new system and indeed it was hampering their efforts to actively manage performance, an area the business was targeting.  The Board initially dismissed the findings as implausible (given the expenditure on the new system) but could not deny the sheer scale of feedback provided through the sets.  A inquiry project was set up and key changes were made to the process of the system as a direct result of the themed feedback.

Without this feedback process in place the business was in effect trying to drive forward, yet hadn’t realise it left the handbrake on.

Think how useful this could be in your organisation.