Psychological Contracts

I encourage people to provide feedback to one another. It's a gift. It's also often part of your job. But too often, we don't go far enough. So I suggest that we create psychological contracts. You don't do it with everybody, but it's an opportunity to agree to exchange extremely honest feedback by mutual consent in a safe and trusting way. I say to somebody who I trust, whose opinion matters to me "I'm getting up on stage. Let me know afterwards Was I clear? Did I give too much information, too little information? Did I move too much? Did I engage with the audience? Tell me the truth." That's an immediate request for honest feedback and we are creating a psychological contract. You're not going out of bounds if you tell me exactly what you think. I also tell people if they're going into a meeting, pick the person who's going to pull on their ear to let you know you're going off topic, whether your data is really not holding up in that room and getting an immediate sense from somebody, the unvarnished truth about what's going on.