Energize Your Team Feedback
Effective feedback becomes a stepping stone forward, not a stumbling block to avoid.
Although many managers and supervisors find it difficult, delivering feedback to their team members (including both the negative and the positive) is critical in helping your team members feel valued, noticed, and looked after.
It also gives them crucial information about their performance, which everyone wants to know.
Feedback is essential because when a supervisor or manager is silent, there are many ways to interpret that silence. In our workshops, we discuss the three most common interpretations:
- The boss thinks I’m doing okay because, typically, no news is good news.
- The boss doesn’t care about me.
- I’m not doing a good job, but the boss doesn’t know how to tell me that, so he has decided to say nothing instead.
Do these interpretations sound familiar? I bet they do.
Feedback matters because, by default, it creates an opportunity for you and your team members to engage with each other.
It’s our job
It is also an important part of managing performance.
There are different approaches to feedback. It does not always need not be a formalized annual review that is stressful for the manager and team members.
If done more frequently, regular feedback feels less formal and becomes more conversational (i.e., less stressful for everyone). Several of our clients have instituted a ‘check-in’ process, which is set up to be a lot less formal, a lot more regular than once a year, and entirely more user-friendly from everyone’s point of view.
There are important reasons for managers to provide their staff with feedback
Motivating employees to improve performance, determining whether workplace issues need to be addressed, and providing a general opportunity to assess employees’ happiness and well-being.
Unsurprisingly, well-run organizations prioritize providing feedback to employees in a supportive, instructive, and, most importantly, empathetic way.
Let’s look at the tools you can implement starting today.
Start with the positive
A simple strategy is to start a feedback discussion by outlining some of the employee’s accomplishments and showing sincere appreciation for their efforts (before talking about gaps and areas in which opportunities for improvement exist).
Positive feedback is a powerful tool for promoting employee engagement and may be essential to performance management. That said, positive feedback should be specific and focused on performance, not a person’s personality—not that personality is unimportant, but it shouldn’t guide a feedback discussion.
Take the time to give examples
Avoid general statements such as “Terrific work” or “You’re making a real difference” without factual examples to prove why that statement is true. Otherwise, you are conveying little to the employee.
It’s much more effective to highlight specific elements that have been appreciated—for example, a successful campaign they were responsible for overseeing, as well as the impact and the difference that the person’s efforts made.
Positive feedback is a real boost for any team member. It confirms that the person is doing well, contributes to positive behavior, and exemplifies what a manager tries to instill within the organization.
Identify growth opportunities
One of our workshop elements focuses on what is known as The Dunning Kruger Effect, where a person is unaware of where and what they lack because there has never been any direct feedback about their performance.
As with positive feedback, feedback focused on improvement and growth must be detailed and specific.
There is always room for improvement with any team member, even yourself—the person giving the feedback—Still, it’s important that when managers provide feedback that will be seen as criticism, they draw from specific examples rather than vague observations.
This will help keep the conversation focused on performance rather than leaving feedback open to interpretation by the employee, which may be taken personally. Don’t delay in giving your team members such information.
Don’t make people wait to succeed
Don’t wait a year to tell them something they needed to know earlier.
It’s important to remember that providing feedback motivates and finds ways to improve a team member’s performance—not to find fault, blame, or discourage them. It can prove beneficial not only to you but also to your team members’ understanding and job enjoyment.
So, when a manager points out what the team member has done wrong, it’s important to highlight specific details about their performance, attitude, or behavior.
It can’t simply be a blanket statement about their poor performance or attitude. During these conversations, you must remain objective and stick to facts; otherwise, it can come across as personal and subjective.
When managers detail aspects of an employee’s performance (not their personality) with concrete data and supporting evidence, they will likely find more openness on the receiving end, as it becomes a less personal conversation and more about facts.
Rational approach
Managers should never provide feedback when their employees are not at their best, such as when you are frustrated.
Effective feedback, and the truly impactful kind, is never a knee-jerk reaction to any employee’s performance, attitude, or lapse in judgment.
Work together to find solutions
If an employee makes a mistake or expresses disagreement with a particular company policy, the most effective way for a manager to provide purposeful feedback would be to discuss the circumstances that may have led to the mistake or disagreement and work together to develop a solution.
Employees are much more likely to feel respected and valued by managers who discuss situations rationally and provide plausible solutions.
Also, our amygdala, which keeps us safe when we feel threatened, will jump into fight-or-flight mode if a team member feels attacked by the conversation. They will likely shut down listening immediately because they are protecting themselves internally.
No good will come of that. So, creating a safe space to have a conversation is key. And speaking of “keys,”…
Empathy is always key
If you want your feedback efforts to be well received, demonstrating empathy is how to do it.
Carefully consider what needs to be said and how your words will be received. The take-it-or-leave-it approach may not serve your overall objective.
Effective, experienced managers have long known that empathy goes a long way in helping staff respond well to feedback. The feedback becomes a stepping stone forward, not a stumbling block.
One of my favorite books is Radical Candor by Kim Scott. The subtitle is How to be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity. In it, Kim recounts several powerful stories of how she got things very wrong for a while before she realized that to deliver feedback that makes a difference, you must have already demonstrated that you care about the person as a human first.
“Walk a mile…”
As a leader, you must always try to put yourself in your team member’s shoes. Truly understanding an individual’s perspective before providing any judgment or feedback will go a long way to ensuring both of you are having the same discussion and are on the same page.
The main objectives for managers providing any type of feedback to their team should be: improving work culture, providing positive reinforcement for employees who demonstrate exceptional behaviour and performance, as well as those who may need a little (or big) nudge to help get back on track.
And, like anything concerning humans, practice helps.
What to Read
- Radical Candor: How to be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity by Kim Scott
- Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen
- The Making of a Manager: What to do when everyone looks to you by Julie Zhou
- Harvard Business Review Guide to Delivering Effective Feedback
