hr bartender

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

We talk about feedback all the time. Managers give employees feedback. Employees give the company feedback. We talk about the importance of feedback but sometimes I feel that we don’t spend enough time talking about the feedback we can give ourselves. 

The Johari Window was developed in 1955 by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham to help people understand themselves and their relationships with others. Here’s how it works. 

The Johari Window has two axis and four quadrants. The two axis are self and other. The four quadrants are public, blind, private, and potential. 

Information known by me and others is called public or arena.

Information known to others and unknown to me is referred to as blind or blind spot.

Information I know but you don’t is private or facade

Information unknown to both of us is called potential or simply unknown.

The Johari Window is a dynamic model, meaning we can change the size of the quadrants as our relationships change. For example, an employee might decide to tell their manager about a challenge they’re having. That moves the information from private to public. A manager might share with an employee some positive feedback about the way they handled an assignment. That moves information from blind (to the employee) to public. 

Another example could be the organization has an emergency and employees (at every level) face new situations they’ve never encountered before. Employees might discover things about themselves they didn’t know before. Information might move from the potential quadrant to public. 

I’m reminded of this when I think about my work experience at the airline. During the time I worked there, we experienced a crash. There were some people in the organization who had been identified as emergency responders who were not prepared for the emotional toll this type of emergency can have. And there were others who were better prepared. My point here isn’t that airline crashes aren’t devasting events. It’s that we didn’t know how people would react to that type of emergency until we were actually in the emergency.  

What I appreciate about the Johari Window is that individuals can use it to do a self-assessment. What knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) would you include in your public window? What would you include in your private window? Employees might have a strength or something they would like to do and need to move that information from the private window to a public one (as in, tell their manager).  

Managers can also use the Johari Window when discussing performance with employees. Do employees know what their strengths and weaknesses are? What type of feedback can managers give to employees to help them understand what they see in terms of performance? An employee might not recognize a strength until someone points it out (i.e., moving that information from the blind quadrant to public). 

You’ve heard me say many times that “no news is good news” isn’t a communication strategy. Models like the Johari Window might help individuals identify topics that they would like to discuss. And that’s the whole purpose of feedback – to bring conversations into the open. 

Image captured by Sharlyn Lauby after speaking at the Flora Icelandic HR Management Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland
The post Understand Employee Feedback Better Using a Johari Window appeared first on hr bartender.
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27/02/2025 – 12:02 /Sharlyn Lauby
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