The Role of Feedback in Company Culture and L&D featuring Patrick Cootes

Luis Malbas  
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the training learning and development community. Thanks for joining us today. We got a great guest featured Patrick Cootes from Mindstone Learning where we'll be talking with him about the role of feedback in company culture and l&d. Let me give a quick shout out to some of the live audience. Kimberly is here, Cody's here, Danny, nice to see you, Laura. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, and we're just gonna get right into it. Patrick, can it comes to us, it's a little interesting, sort of how, you know, finding guests for TL DC works. But Patrick Pena came in through an agency, and we're going to be talking about his organization. And so his ideas about feedback and company culture. And and so Patrick, what I'd like you to do is just sort of start with your background. And who exactly are you your journey in as a, I think I saw that you were listed as a clo at Mind Stone. We were talking earlier, saying your product manager, but tell us a little bit about yourself to start out. Yeah,

Patrick Cootes  
sure. So Louis, thanks for having me. And I do hope my English accent is comprehensible to everybody. listening and watching. So first of all, I the place to begin the background here is that I am a high school teacher. I taught philosophy and religion for 18 years and grew increasingly frustrated with that experience of preparing 1718 year olds for the adult world and being acutely aware of how bad a job or institutions do have that. And so I left teaching to cofound Mind Stone, which is an online learning platform. It's b2c, customer centered. And the central focus of our company is very much around the idea of putting the learner in the center of the learning process. So our users, our adult learners, both students, and what people in the workplace, who have a problem that they want to solve that problem is the abundance of content that's out there. And the difficulty of extracting value from the greatest learning tool the world has ever seen. I am of course, referring to the internet. And so we built tools to help people to learn faster and remember more from the abundant content that they see online. Now, Louise, you mentioned that I'm a clo. And that's, and that's a title that I struggled with a little bit. And I did call myself a head of product. Because of course, in most companies, a clo is the head of the DEA within the organization. But my small startup doesn't have an l&d Department, and I am in charge of the product. So I'm the chief learning officer, because our product is a learning product. And I also lead the team in our own learning journey. And today, of course, we're going to talk about how, as a former teacher, and co founder of a startup, I have tried to bring the lesson from my career as a teacher into the workplace and into my team and help my team to develop through a culture of radical honesty, you know, feedback. So that's a little bit of a background. Yeah,

Luis Malbas  
yeah. And I know, I'm like, I'm seeing Darcy's in the audience right now. I know, he's somebody that is really kind of, that I've spoken to in the past and it feels like is focused on on company culture altogether. But yeah, let's go ahead and start there with feedback in Copeland company culture. Like, can you tell me like that, that relationship? Okay, so

Patrick Cootes  
this is something which my chief exec chakra and I are absolutely passionate about. The opening premise is that feedback comes from a place of love, that when you are giving feedback, tough, honest feedback to a colleague, you are doing so because you want to help them perform better, and help the company to succeed. And as a consequence of that, which I think he's not very widely knowledge that withholding feedback is therefore depriving somebody of an opportunity to learn and an opportunity to grow and develop. And so we've tried to build feedback into our company, helped him through the processes have, obviously, there can't be a document that sits on a notion page somewhere, you have to actually live it. And it's probably best reflected in a couple of the things that we do as the rituals of company, the third of which is every single one to one meeting that we have, as a team is a compulsory feedback session in which both members of the team are asking each other. What feedback do you have for me this week? What behaviors have you seen and that I can improve upon. And we use a fairly standard model for that situation Behavior, Impact and suggestion. And that that model provides an impersonal framework where we're talking about specific behaviors and not personalizing it or making it too chromatic to have that experience. So so far, so predictable. But then the the next step, which I think is really quite innovative, that we've undertaken as a team, to accelerate that feedback process, is sharing the feedback that is there in a one to one setting, with the wider team, so that other members of the team can learn from that feedback. And we had a pretty tough journey with this because of course, that can be quite frightening to to feedback, which was given personally for one person, it's to the wider team. And initially, we had that the person delivering the feedback would then share the feedback to the wider team. And we switched it to make it or the person who received the feedback would be the person who showed up to the wider team. And that had a really major impact. Because of course, the wider team reading, then know that it comes from the place of security, on the part of the person sharing the feedback, I received this tough feedback. And I'm not rattled by it. Because I chose to share it to everyone, rather than I had it inflicted upon me, by the person who gave it gave it to me doing so publicly. So that has been a big step forward for us in terms of ensuring that everybody who can learn from a piece of feedback does nice that that gives you a little bit of a perspective.

Luis Malbas  
Sure. Darcy just posted a link to tier to the mind tools website, where the SBI feedback model model is mentioned. So yeah, very nice. Okay, it doesn't sound like well, so building this type of a culture. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that? How did you, you know, how does an organization do that?

Patrick Cootes  
Well, I guess the first thing to say is that you have to be aware of the scientific research into the efficacy of feedback as a mechanism for delivering high impact, low cost learning. And the scientific literature on that front is very abundant. And within teaching, where cost is obviously a major factor, feedback routinely comes out as the highest impact cost ratio interventions. So this is something that I come to already believing in my bones that this will be radically successful in helping people to learn. And having come to it with that attitude, you then need to walk the walk, you need to actually live by the by by those that believe. And I think the most powerful mechanism for doing so is ensuring that the feedback process operates at all levels of the company from the the BA to the Exec. And every one of us both receives and gives feedback. And crucially, the tough public feedback that we exchanged goes both directions of chief executives receiving feedback and being called out when members of the team think that he's handled something wrong. And that sense of me, obviously, as a co founder, and every member of the team knows that this is that this is the way that we operate because they see it on a weekly basis. Or on Slack. Just this morning, I got the message. It's feedback Wednesday, who's going to be the first to share a piece of feedback today. Another way of demonstrating that we mean what we say is that in our staff rewards program. Every month, there is an opportunity for staff to nominate a member of the team whose feedback helped them to improve and that member the team is is publicly rewarded with with points on our rewards which For the last month, I think the whole team ended up committing to donate their entire rewards to charities supporting Ukraine. So, in the end of this month, it didn't matter, we put the whole lot to Ukraine. But in any given month, a member of the team does not have that celebrated, and it's directly reflected in that reward scheme.

Luis Malbas  
I love it. Okay, so and I'm getting a few questions in here already about this. That's wonderful. So wait, just real quick, as far as rewards are concerned, what kind of rewards are are you? Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Cootes  
So so we've got, it's somewhat corny, but we use a company called Juno. And that way you, every member of the company gets an automatic allocation of I think 48 points per month, which equates to pretty four pounds. I don't know what what's that that $30 of, of credits, which you can use on a huge range of free Springfield yourself, and the, from, from, from yoga classes to computer games. The it's kind of nerdy, I'm embarrassed to admit this, because it's such a bunch of nerds, that actually, we have a company book club. And, and, right now, the main thing that people are using our reward scheme for is to buy the books to participate in the company book club. Now, we're a learning company. So I'm sure you won't be surprised that we have a company. Look, Rob, and the whole team is invited every month like this is what we're going to be reading. And then we're going to get together. And we're going to surprise, surprise, Stan, feedback. On our reflections upon this, this book we've read, and so we end up we end up plowing the roulette scheme, straight back into that, because of course, books on on learning, leadership management, startups, etc. They're often quite pricey, and we're asking people to buy one every month. So it's nice to be able to just say, well, that's, that's covered by the rewards program. Yeah, we're a bit off topic here. But I would just acknowledge, I think everyone knows that rewards programs can become very tokenistic and tacky. And a lot of a lot of employee ins will say, just just give me a pay rise. Like, like, I don't want this nonsense. And we are mindful of that danger that it's going to end up being this tokenistic thing, right. And so the reason we went with Juno was because there were such a lot of ways in which you could spend your reward points on things that that actually might matter to you like gym membership or, or yoga classes, hypnotherapy, whatever it might be, but just to actually help because I'm not sure what the workplace is nothing like in the US at the moment, but we were a mostly London base but but spread across Europe. And we are remote first. And so our teammates are isolated from one another, we don't see each other in person very often. And so well being is pilot is super important to her for that reason, and things like that, that can help people feel valued, and obviously look after themselves, and have automatically made sense,

Luis Malbas  
right, love it. And this is a great segue into Danny Oregon's question that he has in the q&a area. Danny's asking a couple of things have significantly impacted today's lnd workplace, the pandemic disruption and the rapid pace of changing of elearning tools, platforms, devices, etc. So how can l&d folks build in the capacity to consider and share feedback? It often doesn't seem like there's time or willingness to allow for this.

Patrick Cootes  
Okay, I'm just before we got on this call. I said i I'm willing to admit when I don't know. And this is this is one of those moments where I'm gonna preface my response with I don't know, all right, this is I'm not an expert in this space. Having said that, I will just just some observations from my own lived experience. We launched in the pandemic. We have been remote fast, and indeed remote only more or less continuously since our inception as a company. And I have colleagues that I've never met in person, which as you can imagine, I don't know if anyone on the call has had this experience. But when you do meet somebody in person and that tiny little things that you've been watching on the video, and then you meet them in person, you got your sigma six sigma. So there is that that interpersonal dimension is hard to build, right? So how do you? How do you make time for feedback? How do you elevator, I think that it's by your actions as a company, that the only way we fail to make feedback consistently happen is to require it to people as an expectation. And when a colleague says to me, I don't have any feedback for you this next week, I say to them, right? Well, I've got one extra bit of feedback for you. That's not acceptable. In a week's time, when I meet with you next, I'm going to need some feedback, because I refuse to believe that I can't get any better at my job. And I've used the word tough a couple of times already. But I also used a word that we very seldom use in the workplace, which is love. And positioning the feedback cycle, as coming from a place of love and helping people to do better, which everybody wants. And acknowledging also, that the giving of the feedback is more stressful very often than the receiving of it. Because where the recipient of the feedback knows, that they can just nod their head and say thank you. And, and, and and try to defend themselves emotionally from that the person giving that feedback, because they're adopting a position of dominance in the interpersonal hierarchy at the moment that they do. So is asserting a dominance and authority to give that to and in doing so, can feel very, very vulnerable and insecure? Like what right have i to to give this feedback to tell you how to do Jordaan, instead of the person giving the feedback more is more often the person who has a barrier is getting anxious, and the person receivable because to repeat myself that the person receiving the most, that the heart, all they have to do is say yes, thank you. And that, you know, they don't have to do anything more at that moment. And maybe they'll go away and cry. Or maybe they'll go away and swear. Or maybe they'll go away and make a change in their working life. But the person giving the feedback is putting themselves out there and making a judgement. And that's super hard. So and one practical thing that we have adopted is the expectation within the culture that when you receive feedback, you do say thank you, because that person hands. Right to help. That that's where it's coming from. So I don't know. I'm gonna come back to my first reaction, which is I don't know. But maybe that's that's some thoughts.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah. No, that's fair. And Danny has some great comments in in in the chatty saying, so walk the walk to demonstrate that feedback is part of your workplace expectations, he says seems fair, and that vulnerability and trust are important. No, I love the concepts that you're that you're talking about. And maybe this might help a little bit. Darcy has a follow up question where, where he's asking, Did the adoption of the feedback model that you use come from the grassroots level? Or did it come from the top?

Patrick Cootes  
It came from the top? Yeah, I'm the Chief Exec. And I was I was co founder number one. So I was I was the first person to join him in this mission. We, in one of these remnant lists, learners, somebody who is always always trying to improve and do better. And so the first thing he wants to know is what how can I do better, you know, for him, in his conversations with me, you're a teacher, you've you've given feedback for for 20 years. So give me feedback. And so setting that example, at the very top of the organization has helped us to build it. I honestly don't know how you would build that culture. If you didn't have buy in at the very, very top of the organization right. Now, of course, there are strategy for managing upwards. The Subtle Art of Letting other people have your way. But it is not a trivial matter if your Chief Exec is is not on board with feedback or doesn't appreciate the value that it brings. So yeah, it comes completely from the top and, and it's worth bearing in mind also that for more junior colleagues who come into this into this company, Going into this workplace, it's really stressful at first. And, and quite a frightening thing to be in a space where people are so frank with one another, and so direct. And so you have to, you have to understand that people are coming in with that, and that they need to be laid into a place of security that will promote them to tell their boss that they're wrong. And that takes time. So yeah, top down, as far as I

Luis Malbas  
know, that's great. I mean, I'm just reflecting on my past experiences. And it almost feels like for the most part, organizations that I've been a part of the, the feedback piece has always been surrounded by a lot of tension. And, you know, anytime that you get like a review, or you need to get talked to or anything like that, you go into, like a very closed office, and no one is really like communicating about like, what the situation is, you know, even if it's like an annual review or anything like that, it just turns into something that's, that's really, really tense cultures that I've been a part of, in the past feedback has always been not something that you really look forward to. So yeah, let's,

Patrick Cootes  
I've got to say a couple of things about that. Number one, well, of course, if it's annual, your chance of developing a comfort with that. And secondly, it shouldn't be tied to performance management, this is about helping people improve. So it has to be very, very high cadence, very, very high touch point, so that people are not scared because they do this every week. Yeah. And, in fact, they should be doing multiple times every week, because when, you know, they've got their different meetings with different members of the team. And they're reading the experience feedback, where where, you know, the chief technical officer is saying to the head of product, Hey, you did this business, the impact is much better for your group. So that so that it's normalized by making it extremely frequent. The moment it's, it becomes something when you go off into a into a room on your own with the person once a year, you're not going to be able to make that productive experience. The other thing for what you just said, is that it doesn't help not to acknowledge pastor Phil, it is the very first thing I said to you before we before we went live was I'm nervous. I think, and I said that because I am and by acknowledging what made it real, it made him more comfortable, you were then able to reassure me, so that my nerves settled a little bit. Right. And if I had not acknowledged the strain that I felt coming on this call and being in front of an audience, I, I definitely tried to deal with that on my own and you wouldn't have been able to grow your emotional intelligence in eating supportive and, and soothingly. Okay, so to acknowledge that discomfort, face it, and and you've got a chance of working through it together? Sure. Whereas if you don't, then then the person providing the feedback doesn't have that opportunity to own that they're a human being.

Luis Malbas  
Right, right. No, I love it. I love it. I am really curious, Patrick, you know, high school teacher, you're teaching religion and philosophy. I did see your background, you know, you just are described as like, and you mentioned earlier, you saw the education system being broken, and, and just didn't work. But this whole thing about feedback, like where did that come from? Was that something that you had personally implemented? When you were teaching your high school students? Or where did that happen?

Patrick Cootes  
Yeah, well, I, as a high school teacher, I absolutely had to provide feedback all the time. It's it's kind of the non optional part of the job. The some elements of it when established with the culture of the of the educational establishments I worked in, and there are some good lessons that I took from that. So for example, there's something which in British schools anyway, the teacher is sometimes called the tip sandwich, which is, which is a very nasty bit of critical feedback is sandwiched by two pieces of praise. And, and positive feedback. And the ratio of affirmation and positive feedback to critical and negative feedback is something which has been studied and in schools, it's widely acknowledged that you want a ratio between two to one, but preferably higher towards the sort of five to one ratio where for every piece negative feedback, you're giving at least five pieces of praise or encouragement. And when I talk about praise, it's not just saying, identifying what the person's done right, but also validating them. As a member of the tribe. We're, we're social animals, and we need to feel that we are part of the tribe, or in the case of my company, part of the company, when the case weren't back, when I was a teacher, that when a child received the mobile tip a piece of paper, they were not being cast out for the care of the learning community. So that affirmation is about the assertion of taking all that we still care about you, we still value you and we and this tough piece of feedback that someone is going to help you do better, rather than break you down and pick you out. So so now that come from my teaching career, and walking with my chief exec, who's done, and therefore, Dutch helper traditionals, extremely direct, extremely blunt, I have worked to nurture him into a more praising and encouraging mode, because otherwise he would just be wasting our time. That's so So yeah, that that phrase element comes from my tissue.

Luis Malbas  
I love it. Um, Darcy is saying in chat, he says, My experience with feedback in organizations has been mostly focused on the end results, fixing something. But to shift that narrative to one of feedback equals love is extremely interesting to me, the type of org I want to work for, and it does feel like if you do make feedback or priority, your team will feel more like collaborators, you know, you'll be all in it together, which is obviously what we all kind of want to do. And and I mean, do you have anything you can relate to that at all? Yeah, well,

Patrick Cootes  
it's interesting. Darcy mentioned outputs. As a founder of a startup, I'm in a very privileged position that I'm able to make experiments that can fail. And in fact, we expect nine out of 10 of our experiments in product development or growth, to be unsuccessful. And we just want to iterate very, very quickly. We want to find out we're wrong as fast as we can, so that we can stop being wrong. And this, by the way, I think is a very, very powerful mindset. Most people have do not wish to discover that they are wrong. And consequently, they will persist in wrongness in being wrong for longer than the two because they didn't want to find out that they were wrong. So as a company, we're trying to do the opposite. We're trying to find out we're wrong. Just now, if I was in the healthcare situation, industry, or if I was in, I don't know, if I was in aerospace. Finding out you're wrong, means lives are on the line, and people might die. And so you've got to be super risk averse. You've got to validate with absolute certainty. And like I said, we as a company, what company the worst thing that can happen if we screw up is one of our learners, loses that dissertation. And don't get me wrong, that will be terrible. And thankfully, it's not happened yet, but but no vibes are on the line. So we are able to experiment. And since has to loop back to those this point about outputs. We tried to make our outputs about learning what can we learn? And not? What can we what can we get right? Because if you only measured the times you get things right, you're going to miss out on all of the learning from the country, but I think wrong. Right? So that's, that's, that's the approach we tried to turn.

Luis Malbas  
Right. Right. So how about if you have someone on your team or you say new hires, things like that, that are just resistant to it? Any any kind of remedies there?

Patrick Cootes  
beyond what I've talked about before, there's just a couple of things. First of all, make it absolutely clear during the hiring process. This is how we are Yeah, and and if that's something that frightens you within a company, then you need to think long and hard about its as the company you want to work in. And in fact, are we we have used our own platform, which I mentioned before, is used and to curate and, and and draw value from content To build our own onboarding playlists, so we eat our own dog food at my mighty. So our onboarding trainers, which new hires go through, includes all of the regular legal disclaimers and the right to work and have you read our personnel policy, and so on, and so on, and so on fairly regular stuff, right? That includes a video of me talking about our feedback culture and how it worked. And everybody coming through the onboarding process goes through that and watches as we talk about it. And they then see in our Slack channel, which we use for our internal comms, your feedback happening in real time within the team. And you can't really be at our company for a week without seeing that happen. But I think that goes a long way to reduce the reticence. And, and I we've not had anybody say, people who

Luis Malbas  
write right now that's really, really interesting. So Patrick, I'm going to go ahead and start wrapping things up here. Um, I do want you to like just pitch like mine stone, I really appreciate you coming on today. Milestone learning, you know, why don't you just give us the rundown on exactly what it is and and why people should check it out?

Patrick Cootes  
Yeah, absolutely. So our mission is to surface and accelerate the world's informal learning. Okay. So if you're somebody who's interested in learning, you've got online content, you want to get more out of it, you want to learn faster, and you want to remember more, that's what mine stone is for. And it does that by drawing together content in from multiple formats you bring the content will help you learn from so that's the that's the strap line. We have various other aspects of the product, which I think I don't want to get into too lengthy a sales pitch. But the core of the platform is the idea for the manor center, not the institute, not the employer, not the university, but you as an individual. You can collaborate with others, but you're being challenged in all of your learning. So that's, that's fair to the center of

Luis Malbas  
love it. Thanks so much. So I think it was mine stone comm you can check out Patrick's product over there, I did see those those playlists, and I am interested, I wanted to go back and look at you know, because it actually looked really, really interesting. Now as most everybody in the audience knows to since we are community CLDC the training learning and development community. I was like to go into a little bit of stuff, some personal sort of exploration. And when I looked up Patrick online, when I was reviewing him coming in as a guest found he has a course on Udemy on lyric writing, so I just wanted to ask you, who's your favorite lyricist?

Patrick Cootes  
Oh, man, that's tough. Probably just written an American guy somewhere. I don't know. I would probably do intersection between Johnny Cash and Nick Tang and Leonard Cohen, water lyricist.

Luis Malbas  
Really? You're putting Josh Ritter and at the same like in that group. Wow. That's That's pretty.

Patrick Cootes  
That's pretty good here. I think. I think he is a world class lyricist. I mean, yeah, I know. It's me.

Luis Malbas  
So and Patrick, do you? I mean, do you? Are you a artist at all? Do you have anything out there?

Patrick Cootes  
Yeah, I, I've got some stuff on SoundCloud. But I am not here to plug my band.

Luis Malbas  
Well, I'm gonna go look, and I'm gonna try to find it. Regardless. So I'll probably I'll probably check out your Udemy course as well. Patrick, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time gave me a lot to think about. In fact, you know, I've got to do a one on one later today. So I'll be thinking about, about that, that feedback thing. Um, if anybody wants to get hold of you, can they just go to the white Mind Stone website and reach out?

Patrick Cootes  
Absolutely. And if the platform's free, and if you sign up, then the customer support is me so you can get get directly in touch with me. But yeah, the email is hello@neinstein.com. So easy.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, great, Patrick. Don't be a stranger if you ever need anything from CLDC. Just reach out and be happy to happy to help do all we can. Thanks, everybody for joining us. Don't forget tomorrow and Friday, Thursday and Friday, we have the women of l&d event. We've got four sessions tomorrow, four sessions on Friday. It looks absolutely great. We have Wow, a few 100 People already signed up for for that big virtual events starts tomorrow. So please join us for that. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and close out the cast. Thanks again, Patrick.

Patrick Cootes  
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thanks.

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