Vineet Mangal, Managing Partner, Beewise Consulting

Vineet Mangal
Vineet Mangal, Managing Partner, Beewise Consulting

Vineet is a seasoned HR Evangelist with more than 25 years of variegated HR experience in managing the entire gamut of HR in start-ups, rapidly expanding fast-paced companies at the Global level.

Currently, Vineet is the Managing Partner with Beewise Consulting where he is handling multiple assignments in the areas of Talent Development and Assessment (including Capacity & Capability building), Organization Design, Performance & Rewards Consulting & setting up of HR Processes.

He has recently finished a project in the Middle East where he was Chief Human Resources Officer for more than 5 years with the largest private university, having 1000 employees from 60 different nationalities. Prior to shifting to the Middle East, he was the ‘Founding Member’ of Tata Sky where he was instrumental in setting up HR from the scratch for them.

Vineet has ‘hands-on’ experience in setting up HR Practices from the scratch and ensuring alignment of HR KPIs to organizational Vision & Business Strategy.

To add to his list of achievements, Vineet is also Certified, Accredited & Licensed in HR tools like DISC; Trimetrix; Belbin; Executive Coaching; NLP (XLRI); HR Chally, etc.

In this TopTalk interview, Vineet shares his views on Feedbacks and how it impacts an organization.

Some key highlights of our discussion with Vineet (Video Below) :

  • ‘People come and people go but during an employee’s journey in the organization if things are not formalized then it starts losing its essence. If some things are recorded and some things aren’t then over a period of time it becomes a disjointed kind of information available.’
  • ’A practical problem that formalizing feedback has is that many managers feel this as an extra burden since they have to go step by step for the exchange of feedback and as a result, the feedback stops coming. So, it has become very important to come up with tools and techniques such that recording the feedback will be easy at the same time making it a formal process.’
  • ’If an organization wants to increase the efficacy of feedback then it must create a blend between formal and informal feedback.’
  • ’The organizations need to make a gradual shift from feedback –  where post mortem of events that have already happened takes place, to feedforward -where anticipations and recommendations take place about what should be done without having any past reference to it.‘
  • ’For making the feedback process more effective, it must have the following features-
    1. The intent of the feedback must be clear and pure.
    2. The feedback must be delivered on time.
    3. There should not be any ‘beating around the bush’. The feedback must be to the point and fact-based.
    4. There is no need for lacing it with stories because that gives rise to a lot of confusion.
      Feedback must be discreet.
    5. Feedback should also have a follow-up mechanism. It shouldn’t be treated as a one-time activity. However, follow-up doesn’t have to be too intense, there may be many a time when the feedback giver doesn’t even have to say anything. They can follow up just by observing the recipient.’
  • ‘Anonymity in the process, on one side, is required, especially where the feedback goes to the leaders and functional heads from employees but on the other hand, I feel anonymity decreases the acceptability of the feedback because some people think of it as an opportunity to take out their grudge. So to me, the feedback process cannot be binary, that is there should be some anonymity to it but that should be a very minimalistic level. Organizations must try to make it as much non-anonymous as possible unless it is extremely sensitive and cannot be done otherwise.’ 
  • ‘Feedback is feedback. To me, there is no negative or positive feedback because everything depends on the intent of it. The intent must be clear to everyone and there mustn’t be any hiddle motive behind it. So, as long as there is a culture of feedback in the organization, everyone will consider feedback as an opportunity for improvement and their own betterment or for the betterment of the organization.’
  • ‘The organizations must inculcate this among its workforce that the Purpose is far greater than Only People. The purpose is to make people aligned with the organization’s performance and they should add value to it.’
  • ‘I always try to ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’ and ‘separate news from the noise’ so that I do not bring the person or personality angle to the feedback and only stick to the subject, not making it about the subject holder. This helps the recipient to feel comfortable as well for accepting the negative or not-so-positive feedback.’
  • ‘It is very important to create an environment for feedback exchange. From my experience, sometimes positive feedback given in a casual manner is taken badly by the employees and sometimes negative feedback delivered in a good manner has yielded constructive results. So the mannerism which is followed while delivering the feedback is a determinant of how the feedback is going to get accepted.’ 
  • ‘Always try to separate the issue from the person and I believe the success lies in that.’ 
  • ‘Collecting feedback shouldn’t be an Impromptu approach. It must be done after thorough planning. It must be thoughtful, scientific, and systematic.’
  • Things that organizations must do:
    1. ‘Maintaining the confidentiality of the feedback.’
    2. ‘There shouldn’t be any judgment or prejudice thereafter.’
    3. “Organizations should be worried when their sincere people start becoming silent”
    4. ‘Make the intent and purpose of the feedback clear.’
    5. ‘Act upon the feedback. Do not lock it up after receiving it. Acting upon the feedback and bringing in the required change is the most important responsibility of the organization to maintain its people health.’
  • ‘Feedback giving is not rocket science. All that is needed to give effective feedback is the awareness of the environment and doing it the right way.’ 
  • ‘Giving feedback is like preparing a dish. When you are preparing a dish, of course, the recipe is important which is the content. ‘I have feedback for you’ is the content but will that make it a dish? Not necessarily. So, a dish requires a sequence of things that you need to follow in a recipe. How you are following the sequence, in which environment you are doing it,  how much you are observing while doing it will determine how you are coming out with the dish. But only saying ‘I have a recipe’ will not guarantee a taste worthy dish. Similarly, in the case of feedback, just because you have the information or the content to tell somebody doesn’t mean it will be constructive for an employee or an organization. So, make sure to become aware, wear the hat of a chef, and do it in a more articulative manner with all the sensitivities required to be done and I am sure feedback can become a pretty good dish for the organization and an employee.’

Click on the video below to watch the full discussion with Vineet: