To prune means to clip, crop, cut back, and weed out. Pruning usually happens to overgrown trees and bushes, but can also be helpful for guest lists that are too long, unwanted social media contacts, screen time, clutter, hair, eyebrows or just plain too many social engagements.
The word is generally used in verb form to describe giving something a much needed trim. Gardeners prune plants, cutting back dead branches and weak parts so they can thrive and grow better. Companies prune budgets to cut back on unnecessary spending. And you might need to prune your shoe collection if you’re running out of places to put them. When getting my rose bush ready for a new season, I trim it back as far it goes in late winter. This radical trimming process gives the rose bush exactly the impulses it needs to encourage a flush of growth in the spring and bloom profusely. Like with everything else the right timing is essential.
Giving feedback has much in common with the pruning of such a bush.
Timing, method and context are crucial to creating a valuable learning experience for the giver and the receiver. The feedback you give says also much about the feedback you yourself require. Every message sent to someone else is a message you need to hear yourself. Pruning is in fact a two way street.
In a Mythbusters experiment involving seven plants — two received positive speech, two received negative speech, one listened to classical music, another to death metal and the last was left in silence — the plant left in silence fared the worst. So talking to each other appreciatively albeit “pruning the bush” is the far better choice if you want to foster growth and development.
In the recent article “Surprising Research Says Negative Feedback Is Effective (and We Might Even Prefer It),” author Joe Hirsch cites research by the leadership firm Zenger Folkman that showed:
“By roughly a three-to-one margin, [employees] indicated that getting suggestions for improvement and being alerted to mistakes did more to raise their performance than positive feedback and praise. When asked to name something that could help advance their careers, fully 72% thought their performance would improve with more frequent and authentic appraisals from managers—even if that meant swallowing difficult news along the way.”
As the albeit not so terribly scientific IKEA experiment has shown us. Plants that were provided with the same environmental conditions (light, food and nutrition) but where either given positive or negative messages faired differently over time. After 30 days, the plant that received compliments was healthy and thriving, while its bullied neighboring plant was wilted and noticeably droopy.
Pruning sets the impulse for future growth.
Nurturing and care feed the relationship that fosters the growth and helps the plant to thrive and prosper. Feedback given properly, timely and contextual functions in much the same way. To get the most out of it, feedback should be embedded into daily work and communications as a form of ongoing two-way open candid dialogue between the giver and receiver (akin associate and manager) that is specific on what, where, when, how and why, is timely and feeding forward – delivered on the basis of a positive, respectful, caring relationship. Anything else would be like trying to prune a bush with a battle ax. In the end, no one likes the process of pruning and the pain of loss, yet that being the case remember: luscious fruit only grows on new wood. And so it is.
