8 Quick Tips to Improve Your Effectiveness with Feedback
Filed under: Developing Key Skills, Leadership Tip of the Day
Leaders at all levels struggle with this most important of performance tools: feedback. We delay delivering it, we water it down, we sandwich it in praise and obscure the message or, we avoid it altogether.
Like anything else, practice makes perfect, and a few simple suggestions can help ease your concerns and usher in more “practice time” in your workplace.
Suggestions for Improving Your Comfort and Use of Feedback:
1. Frequency and timeliness count! Your job is to deliver feedback everyday….not just at the performance review. In fact, that’s a horrible time for it.
2. Always base feedback on observable behaviors.
3. Link the behavior in question to business issues. Don’t make it personal.
4. Describe the appropriate behavior or in the case of positive feedback, specify the good behavior. Tell a person, “nice presentation,” and while they feel good, they have no idea what they did right.
5. Keep the discussion simple…focus on one behavior, not everything that you can think of for the past three months.
7. Actions and outcomes count! Create an action plan to change the behavior. Ideally, the target of the feedback creates the action plan.
8. Observe, coach and provide on-going feedback.
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Bonus Tip 1: Take a few minutes before your feedback discussion to jot down your opening statement and plan your conversation. Use the above as a check-list to make certain that you’ve incorporated all of the key elements.
7 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working
Filed under: Developing Key Skills, Leadership & Career, Leadership Tip of the Day
It’s often difficult to gauge whether your leadership practices are helping improve your team’s situation. I encourage leaders to look for these signs as evidence that things are heading in the proper direction:
The Seven Indicators of the Effective Work Environment
- Individuals and teams display a great deal of pride, collaboration and cooperation to meet and exceed objectives.
- Failure to meet or exceed objectives is met with healthy frustration that quickly is channeled into lessons-learned and “what we’ll do better” discussions.
- Regardless of individual roles, teams spontaneously assemble to meet specific challenges and then dissolve once the challenges have been met.
- The group becomes self-policing on quality, timeliness and conduct.
- The drive to innovate and create value comes from within the team not from management.
- The teams learn how to fight and to play together.
- Output tangibly supports strategic objectives and improves the ability of the organization to meet customer needs.
While there is a great deal of subjectivity in judging the Seven Indicators, I’m OK with a little, “you’ll know it when you see and feel it or when you don’t” type of measurement. The weatherman can give you all of the meteorological reasons behind the sunny day you see through the window, but until you step outside of your Chicago office in July and feel the humidity swallow you up like a wet blanket, you don’t truly know what it’s like out there.
The best leaders are critically aware of their role and power in shaping the environment on their teams and inside their organizations. They are also aware that almost no one will ever provide the boss honest, actionable feedback on performance. I encourage leaders to develop an extreme awareness of what is going on around them as the best indicator of their effectiveness. Pay attention, look, listen and then ask questions and take actions that help people solve problems.
10 Things You Must Know About Feedback
Filed under: Developing Key Skills, Developing Others, Developing Yourself, Leadership Tip of the Day
1. Motivated, conscientious team members and employees thrive on well-delivered constructive and positive feedback.
2. Too many managers or supervisors fear delivering constructive feedback. The fear is irrational. It tends to be focused on concerns over reactions or fear of not being liked. Good employees will like you a lot less if you never provide performance feedback.
3. The fear of delivering constructive feedback will disappear the more you practice delivering feedback. You should be “practicing” every day.
4. The fear of delivering constructive feedback will disappear if you follow a few simple rules: focus on observed behaviors (never attitudes), tie the issue to your business, be specific about the required change in behavior, develop solutions and improvement ideas with the person you are providing feedback to, and ensure that there is a follow-up plan.
5. Deliver feedback as close to the occurrence as possible.
6. Try mapping out your opening statement on a sheet of paper before delivering it. The success of the feedback discussion hinges on how you open this.
7. In my opinion, the sandwich technique (positive praise, constructive criticism, positive praise) confuses the feedback discussion. It’s a crutch for those that are uncomfortable delivering effective, professional constructive feedback.
8. Be careful about not having the discussion turned around on you. It’s easy to lose control of the feedback conversation.
9. Positive feedback must identify the positive behaviors that you want reinforced. “Nice presentation,” is a compliment, but not positive feedback. What was nice about it?
10. Feedback is the manager’s ultimate performance tool. Use it wisely and use it often.
Mastering the art and science of feedback is the closest thing you will find to a silver bullet when it comes to leading others.
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