5 Steps To Provide Feedback That’s Helpful, Not Hurtful
Here’s why feedback works
What one skill do you think has the greatest positive impact on workplace culture and performance?
From my years of helping leaders create a culture of accountability, I have found that the ability to provide feedback directly and respectfully makes the biggest and most immediate positive difference to individuals and organizations.
Contrary to popular belief, most people want to hear how they can improve, as long as that feedback is delivered well. Regrettably, only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive is helpful. This means most managers are failing at providing feedback. That’s a huge risk given the Great Resignation we are experiencing. When managers don’t provide feedback well, it prompts four out of five employees to start looking for a new job.
Managers can’t afford to wing it or rely on an outdated feedback model when delivering tough messages. They need to learn a better way.
Feedback Improves Performance When Delivered Well
Whatever you’re good at, it’s likely that receiving feedback on your performance helped you get to where you are now. The overwhelming preponderance of research shows that feedback substantially improves performance when delivered well. Feedback is so powerful, in fact, that it has a stronger impact on academic performance than cognitive ability. Indeed, 94 percent of people agree that corrective feedback improves their performance when presented well.
Here’s why feedback works.
Behavior That Gets Praised Gets Repeated. Don’t make your employees wonder what it takes to please you. If you want your people to perform at a high level, provide a steady stream of reaffirming feedback. We are all addicted to the chemical dopamine, which is released in our brains when we are praised. We repeat behaviors that we have been praised for because we instinctively want another dopamine hit.
You Get The Behavior You Tolerate. If you don’t address problematic behavior, expect it to get worse because employees take their manager’s silence as tacit approval. Managers who wait for the perfect time to deliver feedback usually discover that the facts get fuzzy and debatable quite quickly, which makes initiating feedback conversations even harder and less likely to end well.
When Feedback Fails
Notwithstanding the benefits of feedback, research has shown that feedback often hurts performance when delivered poorly or when it comes in the form of a year-end review. Year-end reviews should be about reviewing successes and lessons learned and discussing how to make next year even better. It should not be about rubbing employees’ noses in their mistakes and providing negative feedback to justify a less-than-desirable raise.
Besides giving feedback during the year-end review, feedback often fails for two common reasons.
Too Indirect. In an awkward attempt to spare an employee’s feelings, I have seen managers soften their improvement feedback so much that employees walk away thinking they’ve just been praised, completely oblivious to the problem their manager was trying to point out.
Too Harsh. When people feel disrespected by feedback, their brains interpret it as an attack, which triggers the fight-or-flight response. This shuts down the problem-solving part of the receiver’s brain, and they tend to either aggressively challenge the feedback or appear contrite and then quietly plot their revenge.
5 Steps of Providing Helpful Feedback
These five steps will substantially improve your ability to deliver tough messages directly and respectfully.
Ask for Feedback Before Giving It. Improvement feedback is sure to land badly if the people giving it never ask for feedback themselves. You must demonstrate that feedback is a gift, or everyone else will question your motives and associate it with punishment. You might have the formal authority to give your team members tough feedback, but nobody has the moral authority to give someone else feedback until they regularly request it themselves. Creating a culture of feedback begins with managers who regularly ask for it.
Begin With a Question, Not a Statement. Managers are rated four times more effective at providing feedback if they listen to the other person’s views before providing theirs. Say something like, “How do you feel our last team meeting went?” Asking about the situation in question allows the other person to share important facts that you may not know about.
Share Observations, Not Conclusions. Most feedback methods encourage managers to prepare a monologue. This is the number one reason why feedback fails. Feedback is a dialogue. You do not have a monopoly on the truth. All you have is a perspective, so make sure to state it as such. Say something like, “At the last team meeting, it appeared to me that you were dismissive of others’ suggestions, which seemed to shut down the discussion prematurely.” A clearly stated observation includes the context, the specific behavior, and the impact.
Ask For Clarification. Your perspective may not be 100% correct. After stating what you are observing, ask for their perspective to get all the facts on the table. Say something like, “Did you intend to shut down other people’s comments, or was something else going on?” If you give others the opportunity to share additional facts before you draw a conclusion, you might learn something that changes your perspective. You’ll also avoid jumping to conclusions and looking foolish.
Focus on Improving the Future. Perhaps, employees will provide some additional information about the situation that explains their actions, which may be the end of it. If, however, you still feel they could have done something else to produce better results, say something like, “Thanks for clarifying. I see there is more to the situation than it appeared. What else could be done to prevent this situation from happening in the future?” No matter how the conversation unfolds, the key is to come to an agreement about what one or both of you can do differently to produce better outcomes.
Following these five steps will make the feedback you provide work for you instead of against you.
Author Bio
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Michael Timms is a leadership development consultant, author, and speaker specializing in succession planning and creating accountable cultures. His latest book How Leaders Can Inspire Accountability has been praised as “the ultimate guide for embracing accountability as a leader!” He is Principal at Avail Leadership. Visit Avail Leadership Connect Michael Timms |
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