#45 - The art of giving feedback!
21 Jan 25
Delivering valuable feedback to your team is a skillset which a leader will need to deploy multiple times. You need to balance to need for them to understand the areas for improvement, but without crushing their morale or making the task appear unattainable. Similarly, when delivering positive feedback, the need to avoid encouraging complacency is paramount.
After all, feedback is knowledge! Knowledge is valuable information leading to increased performance. So it needs to be delivered well!
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#45 - The art of giving feedback!
What?
At some stage of your career, there will have undoubtedly been occasions where you would have received feedback. Sometimes this would have been positive feedback, mostly though, it may have been provided in order to assist you or your team in striving to become better.
As a leader, you will regularly be delivering feedback, be that to an individual as part of an annual appraisal process, or collectively to large teams.
Whether the feedback you wish to deliver is good, bad or indifferent, the success or otherwise of how the message is received hinges on what is said, and the manner in which it is delivered.
Why?
The carefully managed delivery of feedback is vitally important for a number of reasons. Let's start with the easy one first; the delivery of good news.
You may well be forgiven in thinking that this is nothing to worry about, that delivering good feedback is a non-event. It certainly makes you feel good when you're delivering it, and the general mood with an individual or a team is high on receipt. People tend to be receptive to people saying nice things about them!
But when delivering good feedback it is important to recognise that you want that great performance to continue. You want to avoid the steady creep of complacency at all costs. Because if people bask too much in the glow of success, they may rest on their laurels, and that is where complacency starts.
Consequently all the gains made previously are nullified! So great feedback must be delivered with a cautionary wrapper around it, or it could actually be a huge demotivator since it could encourage a loss of aspiration to continue to strive!
When it comes to negative feedback, that must also be carefully delivered. The risk here is that it is too harsh, or perhaps perceived to be so fundamentally dificult to address, that people become demotivated, stop caring, and simply give up.
Therefore the approach needs to be measured, considered, and delivered cognisant of how well you know your team.
How?
In my experience, the following formula works quite well and has always helped me to navigate through this particular minefield quite well.
Adopt the following process:
- Start by asking the target audience how well they think [whatever you're providing feedback on] went,
- Listen to what they say, as this provides you with an insight from their perspective. This in turn, will allow you to gauge how your feedback may be received. It may be that they believe that they have done an outstanding job; you may disagree! Sometimes the difference in opinion between those receiving the feedback and those providing it can be huge.
- Then highlight and outline some of the good points that you observed. This simple act will serve to provide some recognition of the good efforts that have been made. Nothing is truly terrible! There is always going to be some good stuff to talk about.
- Then, it's time to start addressing the 'not so good points'. The aim here is not to crush people, rather to pinpoint areas which need to be improved, and the potential causes/reasons why they weren't so good. This step gets people into self-critique mode, and hopefully shifts their perspective to one of reflection, analysis and then towards finding solutions.
- Always round off on a positive note. Re-emphasise the good stuff and provide an overall assessment from a holistic perspective. It's never a good thing to end on a negative note, and provides a neat 'ramp up' or pathway for future action to be taken to ensure more success next time.
Use the same process to deliver good feedback to prevent complacency. If you think of the above process as a sandwich, with a filling which is not appetising (good, not nice, good), this will help you remember the process!
In Summary
I hope that you enjoyed reading this newsletter and that it has given you food for thought.
Delivering feedback in a structured way such that team morale is not crushed is a skill to be developed and honed. As a leader you will draw on this skillset time and time again.
The skill is to keep your team engaged!
Have a great week!
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