Right Feedback Creating Right Staff

Feedback helps keep people and things on track. For instance, it gets a passenger plane from Sydney to London. The plane is rarely pointing at London during the flight but adjusts its direction continually from feedback on where it is at any time. We all need feedback at times to ensure we achieve our goals, and it can generally be split into two types:

1. Management feedback where we catch people doing the wrong thing and focus on the bad. It is usually in the form of criticism and hard to miss doing as problems readily catch our attention.

2. Leadership feedback where we catch people doing the right thing and focus on the good. It is often in the form of praise but is easy to miss giving.

Research suggests praise is not common in the workplace with recent research in the UK finding that only 16% of people had been praised one or more times in the last 6 months. It is hard to believe that only 16% of UK workers do anything good…

Hundreds of studies show that praise (when something is done right-success feedback) is much more effective at getting improved performance than criticism (when something is done wrong-failure feedback).

Just take a moment to reflect on how many times have you genuinely praised each of your team members in the last 2 weeks?  Click here to find out how leadership helps

The key is to praise a team member if it is good work in terms of their ability, not their managers’. And then to praise them next time they do something better than the good work before. In this way it is genuine praise which keeps “pulling” the team member, and their performance up.

Mark began his career as a combat and chemical engineer, but quickly started to get a greater interest in human performance and leadership in particular. His first role was in the UK’s 5 Airborne Brigade, where he was a Jungle Warfare instructor, Helicopter Abseil dispatcher and Demolitions Officer for 11 years before moving into the business world for 30 years.

He specialises in enabling organisations and leaders to gain significantly greater engagement from their staff in a way that directly increases the 4P’s of purpose, productivity, performance and profit. He does this through leadership and high-performance team training in Motivational Leadership and boosting leaders’ four fundamental intelligences (which means first extinguishing the “IQ Myth”). These courses focus on leadership, self-leadership and self-awareness in both professional and personal life.

He has run leadership development and assessment courses since 1986 in twenty countries and on 6 of the 7 continents, in both military and commercial environments. Countries include: Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK, Switzerland, Germany, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, South Africa, Dubai, Jordan, Brunei, Belize, South Korea, the Falkland Islands and Fujairah UAE, involving participants from about 60 different countries from around the world.

Mark set up the international consultancy, MarkTwo Consulting, in 2002  to provide advanced leadership development and assessment programs, applying the best international organisational psychometric instruments. Mark is certified in twenty of the world’s best ones, and realised an additional instrument was needed that helped companies motivate and engage their managers and workforce. Mark researched the area and found new ways of explaining pragmatically the underlying causes of the lack of engagement and productivity. Using those findings, he developed MarkTwo Consulting’s highly innovative and holistic Universal Hierarchy of Motivation (UHM) leadership development tool.

The UHM gives leaders new insights on human intelligence and helps people to enhance their self-awareness and self-leadership in all areas. Recent advances in neuroscience have vindicated the UHM theory have added weight to its conclusions.

His drive for guiding people to be the best leaders they can be at home and work, combined with his deep knowledge and unique take on “authentic” leadership as a driver of business performance, has made MarkTwo’s courses highly sought after in Asia-Pacific.

Mark speaks at high profile events, and has been interviewed on Australian national TV, and prime time media on matters to do with capability, selection, recruitment and assessment.

Mark is a graduate of the University of Cambridge, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and the Royal School of Military Engineering. He is trained in a form of Jungian psychology as well as internationally credentialled in 20 of the World’s best organizational psychology instruments for assessment and development. He is also a Chartered Fellow of the Institute of Personnel and Development, Life Fellow of the Australian Institute of Professional Facilitators, Fellow of the Australian Human Resources Institute, Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and member of the International Coaching Federation.

He is also qualified in other unusual areas, such as a Range Firing Officer, Taekwondo blackbelt, Watermanship Officer, and an Arrest and Restraints Instructor.

Mark has published three books: MOTIVATIONAL LEADERSHIP – which debunks 10 common myths on leadership (and several illusions about intelligence); THE SEVEN MOTIVATIONS OF LIFE – a psychological reference book on the psychology of leadership and life; and A HIMALAYAN TRINITY – about insights gained from experiencing serious illness and trekking across remote areas of the Himalayas.

He has Dual Citizenship (UK/AUS) and lives in Melbourne Australia with his wife, Ruth.

Connect with him through social media:

Twitter/X: @MarkTwoConsult

For more great business content see here.