A wonderful way to help your co-workers and team members develop is giving them useful feedback.
The culture of feedback is getting more and more traction in workplace and outside and this is great, but often we do it in a way that hinders performance rather than enhances it.
3 tips to make your feedback effective:
- Ask for permission to give feed-back. Even if it is to somebody who is hierarchically reporting into you, it is important that you are for permission. Non-solicited advice and feed-back can come across as an intrusion in a person’s space. If you want to make sure the feedback is not only listened to but also heard, be kind, ask for permission.
- Make it on behaviours, not on the person. So, it shouldn’t be like “you don’t listen”, but rather “in this or that specific instance, I have noticed that you didn’t seem to be listening to what was being said”. If you make it personal, it will come across as a personal attack and again the receiver might shut down or worst feel that there is something wring about them as a person, which is never the case as nobody is really to fix.
- Provide examples, rather than fluffy generalisations. Be specific, mentions circumstances, places, people involved, call out behaviours, things that were observed. This is important because when you give feedback you are giving an assessment, and every assessment is subjective, so you want to make sure you provide the supporting evidence of what is pushing you toward a certain conclusion. This is important because your feed-back needs to be grounded and credible, and will also prevent you from distorting facts and creating a narrative that only exists in your mind.
So, if you want to make your feedback effective, be kind, be objective and be evidence based.
Hope you found this helpful.
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