Feedback and Lucy Kellaway

In her latest Financial Times column, Lucy Kellaway humourously writes about “feedback”, (Why Feedback Forms Leave Me Fed Up, FT 8 March) and how at dinners, a well known CEO would critique his dinner partners at the end of the evening—from conversation content, delivery to eye contact—as constructive criticism.

Kellaway went on to say:

When he told me this I was shocked. How vulgar, I thought. Yet every time I’ve been out to dinner and sat next to people who were not pulling their weight, I have thought about him and wished that I was brave enough to offer tips on how they could improve.

I’m never sure whether to take her seriously or not, as she seems to get great delight by tweaking everyone, and is flip enough to get away with it. The moral of her story is that we should all have the balls to do what the CEO did, as she relates her own coming-of-age and doing just that at another dinner party..

But if she is telling a true story, it is wrong wrong wrong. All of us have been in social settings with people who did not “pull their weight” (as if it is a one-way street) and one muddles on through the evening with grace. Manners is the stuff that keeps much of the world together, not saying what you think—if that was the case, we’d all be in jail for some infraction or the other. Can one imagine going to a conference of any sort,and raising ones hand after the speaker has finished to tell them how awful and deadening their speech was? And most are, but that is the agreement we enter into at a conference, and people can say what they want later, and outside the confines of the auditorium.

As I wrote earlier, one has to watch carefully what one says, ESPECIALLY from a position of power or authority. One strongly worded critique from a CEO—or parent—can inflict so much damage to some that they never fully recover.

I hope to be as far away from Kellaway’s dinner parties as possible; they truly sound like an imbibed lunatic fringe, and life is far too short to be stuck next to people who think they know much more than they do. Her conclusion almost makes it sounds that she was knocking a few back when she wrote it:

The problem with adopting [spontaneous feedback]at dinner parties is manners. Yet this is misguided. If you accept an invitation to dinner you are entering into a contract that says: I am being fed and in return I am going to try hard to be interesting and interested. To the extent to which people do not honour their contracts, they should be firmly told. To give such feedback is not rude or vulgar. It’s a public service.

Let’s hope Kellaway was only being puckish or tipsy in her humour, and made it all up to meet her deadline, including her conclusion, as she is over her head on this one..