Giving feedback is a delicate art. Telling employees they did something wrong can come across as judgmental. Worse, if the feedback is vague, then the employee will not have sufficient clarity to put it into action.
So what’s the answer?
More frequent informal feedback, plus performance motivation to work through the more formal self-evaluation process is the answer. It’s time for leaders to adapt and give feedback that is more humane, less awkward, more timely. Because if your team isn’t happy and feeling respected, they’re outta here. Today’s leaders need simple and fast practices that rapidly increase employee engagement while encouraging performance and course-correction.
Timely feedback is more likely to be helpful and feel constructive, while delayed feedback seems more like evaluation and criticism of past mistakes.
There are five critical components to frequent feedback that doesn’t frighten:
Build rapport
If your employee does not feel safe and supported, then giving feedback is meaningless. It won’t be received. Anyone who feels threatened won’t have the energy to focus and process what you say. Because they are full of oxytocin with only three options to choose from: fight, flight, or freeze.
Acknowledge what is working well first
If you focus on what is working well first, then employees will feel seen, included, and valued. This encourages them to reinforce their strengths and continually refine them.
Be specific
This is self-explanatory, yet often overlooked by leaders during implementation. Just telling someone they did a nice job on that project today might be great for morale, but it isn’t useful feedback. Be specific. For example: “What I noticed worked well, was you immediately called the client today to express your project concerns, and to offer a technical solution.”
Keep it short
Limit your feedback to a couple of items. People can optimally process about three chunks of information at one time. If you give them too much feedback, they won’t remember it all and the benefit will be lost.
Keep it equal
If you list one thing that’s working, list one thing you’d like to see more of. Also use the feedback up, down, across the org chart. Everyone gets and gives feedback. No exceptions.
Use these phrases to deliver frequent feedback:
“What worked/What’s working is ____” “What I’d like to see more of is ____”. Make sure you deliver feedback in that order.
Here is an example of proper use of the Frequent Feedback that doesn’t Frighten:
What’s working well is your delegation – you manage 6 projects at one time and see them to completion – awesome! In weekly team meetings you help everyone get clear on what they need to do, why and when they need to do it.
What I’d like to see more of is contacting the client after the project is done and getting feedback on their experience with us. You could even ask a certain set of questions so we can assess our client care with set metrics.
Wrong:
You often forget to follow up with clients after a project is completed. You should really do something about that. A project isn’t really completed until you had that conversation with a client.
If you don’t take the effort to find out what areas we can improve our service, we can lose clients to competitors. And as it stands, we can’t afford to do that, can we?
Everyone in your team is doing the best they can with the resources they have. With frequent and constructive feedback, everyone can get better and better. Try it out for a month and let me know how it goes! And be sure to ask your team to give you feedback in this format too!
First published on Forbes.com
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