„‚ CONDITIONS THAT HINDER EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

groups at different hierarchical levels within social systems, and (4) the place and value
of the survey-feedback process.
Effectively done, survey feedback is a complex process requiring special
knowledge and skills. Its success depends largely on the ability of the people involved to
understand and subsequently use the data as the basis for altering conditions and
behaviors. In most cases the recipients of survey feedback require the help of a resource
person who provides expertise and skill in several areas and who serves as a link
between these people and those other resources (for example, knowledgeable people)
that serve as a potential energy source for the group’s development.
The Resource Person’s Role
The resource person’s expertise must include an understanding of organizational
processes and techniques of data aggregation and statistical analyses. In addition, this
person must be skilled in helping the recipients to understand and use the feedback data
constructively. Abilities related to these functions include those of formulating
meaningful pictures of social interactions on the basis of quantitative information and
interacting with individuals and groups to facilitate the constructive use of the data.
It should by now be apparent that the resource person’s role is not an easy one. To
be useful to the process, he or she must know the group’s data thoroughly prior to any
feedback-related contact with its members or its leader. Only a thorough grounding in
data analysis and interpretation can provide this skill, and only extensive practice can
perfect it. In the group’s discussion, he or she must be able to distinguish the elaboration
and refinement of otherwise-tabulated reality from the frequently exciting, but
obfuscating, attempts by the group members to provide the consultant with what they
think he or she wants to hear and work with. The consultant must be able to intervene in
the process to keep it on track with the model and with what he or she knows represents
a profitable course for the group members. Yet the consultant must do so in ways that
avoid his or her being perceived as engaging in exaggerated flattery or reproof, telling
them what to do, or solving their problems for them.
Group-Member Relationships
Through all of this, the consultant must remember that the feedback meeting or training
session is an artificial setting for the group’s members. The fact that, in survey feedback,
they are and ordinarily have been for some time enmeshed in a network of relationships,
roles, and functions means that, for them, the greater part of their organizational reality
exists outside that setting and is more closely aligned to the data than to the process that
the consultant has stimulated. This fact requires that, prior to the group session, the
consultant present and discuss the data privately with the group leader or supervisor and
counsel him or her as to the meaning of the data. Only then can that leader, who must
chair the group session, be expected to cope constructively with the various stresses and
strains of meeting his or her subordinates.
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The Pfeiffer Library Volume 6, 2nd Edition. Copyright ©1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer