Episode #455: Providing Constructive Feedback

Giving feedback at any time about performance issues is always fraught. Providing constructive feedback is one of those areas which we often dread, only surpassed by the prospect of having to give negative feedback. Ideally, we can avoid negative feedback altogether and turn it into a more positive version. Nevertheless, those on the receiving end of anything but adulation and lavish praise, are rarely in a positive mindset about receiving corrective feedback. They are keen to justify what they did, sometimes deny it was their fault or try to wriggle out of it and shift the blame to someone else. It is extremely rare for someone to put their hand up and take ownership for problems. What can we do about giving feedback?

Here are nine ideas on giving better, positive feedback.

1. Be certain the feedback is positive and constructive. Don’t boost your own ego or pull an authority powerplay of blatant status affirmation, by putting down others less knowledgeable or less skilled. Whenever someone is struggling with performance, recall what you were like at the same age and stage. As we get older, we conveniently forget that we had to make a lot mistakes in order to learn the best way of doing things and we didn’t know everything (although we probably thought we did). Also, remember, everyone is watching you, so if you push the blame for a project failure on to the delegate of your delegation, they will not be motivated to receive delegated tasks in the future. If you beat people up, metaphorically speaking, then others will feel fear that they might be next and this lowers the morale, loyalty and engagement rates.

2. Be open to input and feedback from the team member. There are many paths to the mountain top and we should accept we don’t have a monopoly on the approaches available to us. The obvious way of doing things is the sum of our own singular experience and knowledge. It is always a good reminder for me to be tolerant of other ideas when one of my team approach the task from an angle I hadn’t thought about. “Oh, so I am not God after all” is what I remind myself, when this happens.

3. We should be vigilant for major deviations and act on them immediately. If we ignore them, then explode with rage because of what happened, we are going to create bad relations with our staff and within the entire team. This is usually our fault anyway. How did it get to this point of deviation in the first place? Why weren’t we making the time to be cognizant about the path being taken?

4. Speak calmly and don’t do all of the talking. Our first instinct is to tell them where they went wrong and to share our viewpoint on the problem. We do this because we believe it is the most efficient way of doing things. But is it effective? If we view the issue as something they can correct by coming up with the solution, they will be more encouraged to get to work on fixing it. No one likes being told what to do, but we all enjoy being asked our opinion on how to fix it.

5. Do not have any discussion about performance in public. Remember, everyone is watching how you handle problems. While it may feed our white hot rage at that time, to let them know they are an idiot etc., but in the long run we are diminishing our ability to lead the team effectively.

6. Start the conversation with a sincere compliment to set a psychologically safe environment. If it isn’t sincere and real, it will trigger a negative response in the staff member because they see through it as ploy, which by the way, they interpret as an insult to their intelligence. We get things off to a bad start in this way. After the positive feedback on some aspect of their work, we transition to feedback using the specific word “and”. Never use “but”. As soon as we hear a compliment followed by “but”, we start mentally bracing ourselves for what comes next. It makes a world of difference to use “and” as the bridge.

7. We must separate the person from the issue. Their activity or behaviour may be a problem, but they as a human being, are not a problem. We only talk about the behaviour and the problem, but not about them personally.

8. Only if appropriate, do we supply the next action step. If possible, it is better to have it come from their side, because the ownership factor is much higher that way.

9. We started with some praise and at the end it is a good idea to repeat it and finish on a friendly note. Some people hearing the feedback will suffer a confidence crisis and believe they are useless. We have to encourage the that they can do a professional job going forward and we are here to support them.

Before we give the feed back we should be clear about what we are looking at here. The issue can be clouded and confusing regarding the real problem. We need to have some sense of what the issue is, before we start engaging with the staff member. We need to do our homework first. We can use the Four Problem Solving Questions to provide us with more clarity, before we go any further.

1. What is the actual problem?
2. Why is this a problem?
3. What are some alternative solutions for getting around this problem?
4. Which of the alternatives is the best solution?

This helps us when we get into the conversation with the staff member. We can compare our understanding of the facts with theirs and also our contemplation of the solution, with what they come up with. It makes for a much more positive and rich conversation.