„‚ CONDITIONS THAT HINDER EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

4. Hope. Not all of the feelings that people have on entering the meeting are
negative. Frequently, individuals come to feedback meetings with a great deal of
excitement and positive energy. They see in the data and in the meetings the possibility
of major and constructive change and an opportunity for critical information to be put on
the table, for problems to be surfaced, and for problem solving to begin.
To some degree, group members and leaders come to the feedback meeting with a
combination of all of these feelings. The fact, however, that people come into the
meeting with strong feelings of anxiety, defensiveness, fear, and hope makes the
meeting a particularly complex situation and implies that issues of process in the group
are important if the group is to do constructive work. There are many opportunities for
the group to get sidetracked, to spend its energy in defensive or punitive behavior, or to
let anxiety serve as a blockage to effective action. The process of working with the data
is therefore important.
Agendas in the Feedback Meeting
In any meeting there is both a formal agenda and an informal process of group
development. For the formal agenda, several specific approaches have been outlined
elsewhere (for detailed guides, see, for example, Hausser, Pecorella, & Wissler, 1977;
IBM, 1974). Most formal outlines see the meeting as having several discrete phases.
Frequently, there is premeeting preparation with the meeting leader (sometimes the
supervisor of a work group) or with the leader and the consultant. In the meeting itself,
the first step is a brief introduction in which the group leader or consultant describes the
goals of the meeting and attempts to establish how the group members will work
together. Second, the leader or consultant gives a presentation or overview of the data.
Third, the group gets involved in specific parts of the data, working to identify and
define problems and develop solutions. This stage may extend over many meetings.
Finally, the solutions that are generated are developed into an action plan as a basis
either for recommendations or actual concrete action.
Questioning Data Validity
Other events occur in the feedback meeting that are not accounted for by the formal
structure of the meeting. Neff (1965) has provided some insight into what happens by
describing a series of stages that groups receiving feedback appear to go through. The
first stage concerns data validity. People enter the meeting anxious, defensive, and
possibly skeptical of the ability of the consultant’s data-collection methods to come up
with anything real or new. Thus, because they frequently deny the validity of the data, it
is crucial early in the meeting to present data that people can verify, to provide them
with some information on how the data were obtained, and to create the kind of climate
in which people will not be motivated to deny the validity of the data. Obviously, if
organizational members have been highly involved in the data collection and analysis,
many of the validity problems are taken care of.
The Pfeiffer Library Volume 6, 2nd Edition. Copyright ©1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer ❚❘ 199