If you are a manager, your team needs your feedback in order to do their jobs to the best of their abilities and to increase productivity. Unfortunately, if you are like many other managers, you aren’t using feedback effectively. Maybe you are afraid of giving feedback that will leave your team discouraged. Maybe you are unsure of how to provide negative feedback in a way that motivates your team to improve. Maybe you aren’t providing feedback frequently enough. In any case, if you aren’t providing enough feedback, or if you are providing ineffective feedback, you are missing out on some great opportunities to motivate your team. You are also cheating each member of your staff out of the opportunity to make advances in their career paths by improving their performance. So, how do you provide feedback that is effective, accurate, motivating, and encouraging? There are 5 actions that you can take to increase team productivity using constructive feedback.
Dump Annual Performance Reviews in Favor of a Feedback System that is Actually Relevant
Performance reviews are utterly useless. If corporate police forces you to give them, no member of your team should be surprised by what you say to them. If they are surprised, you’ve done something wrong over the last twelve months. You cannot give feedback that is useful in an hour closed door session with each member of your staff once a year. If you want to provide feedback that has positive results, you need to provide that feedback when it is useful. This could be after the completion of a project, or you might find it most effective to give feedback on a regular basis. Depending on the nature of your business and the needs of your team, this could be weekly, monthly, or quarterly. If you wait too long to provide feedback, your criticisms will breed resentment, and your positive feedback will seem vague and meaningless. Take a good look at the structure of your team and what your goals are, and then create a schedule that you will adhere to when giving feedback.
Feedback Should be a Conversation and Not a Lecture
Too many managers approach the process of giving feedback as their time to lecture, discipline, and instruct. Your employees should not feel like they are entering the principal’s office when they are going to have a discussion with you about whether or not their latest efforts have been successful. In fact, if you walk into feedback sessions with the expectation that you will simply tell members of your team that they did X things wrong and X things right, you are going to miss out on a lot of opportunities to understand what is going on with your staff. Whether or not you are happy or unhappy with a member of your team, try asking these questions with a sincere goal to hear the answers (your team will know if you are forcing yourself to stay calm or if you are only feigning interest in what they have to say).
Then, if you can identify ways in which you have failed to meet the mark, acknowledge that and aim to do better.
Don’t be Afraid of Negative Feedback
You may have been advised to give two pieces of positive feedback for every one piece of negative feedback. You may have been encouraged to create ‘compliment sandwiches’. This is where you provide some positive feedback, meaningful or not. The purpose of this is supposedly to make your team member feel better about your feedback. Unfortunately this is not what happens. Your leaders, your potential star players actually want negative feedback and they don’t want it sugar-coated. They want to know what they have done wrong, and what they can do to improve things.
Set Clear Expectations for all Team Members
It simply is not fair to give your team members positive or negative feedback without letting them know the standards that they are expected to meet. Measurable expectations are indescribably valuable to people. They give members of your team something tangible to work towards. This will help them to set their own personal goals and to determine how and where they need to cooperate with one another.
Encourage your team to set expectations for themselves as individuals and then also as a team. This will give everybody a sense of responsibility and ownership when it comes to achieving goals.
Avoid Purple Feedback
Purple feedback is feedback that initially sounds motivating, but is realistically useless. If you are telling members of your team that they need to blend in with the team better, you are giving them purple feedback. If you are instructing your team to ‘work smarter’, but aren’t giving them suggestions on how to do so, you are providing purple feedback. In the best situations, purple feedback causes confusion among your team and brings into question your ability to lead. In the worst situations, purple feedback can give others the impression that you are trying to sabotage members of your team or treat them unfairly. Avoid purple feedback by presenting your feedback to your team in clear terms using plain language. Don’t use metaphors or figures of speech. If you need to convey a particularly tough message to your team, just do it. Say what needs to be said, and pull of the band aid. Once that is over, let everybody know what needs to be improved upon. Your staff will appreciate your honesty and candor. They will also want to work to meet your clearly laid out expectations.
Dump Annual Performance Reviews in Favor of a Feedback System that is Actually Relevant
Performance reviews are utterly useless. If corporate police forces you to give them, no member of your team should be surprised by what you say to them. If they are surprised, you’ve done something wrong over the last twelve months. You cannot give feedback that is useful in an hour closed door session with each member of your staff once a year. If you want to provide feedback that has positive results, you need to provide that feedback when it is useful. This could be after the completion of a project, or you might find it most effective to give feedback on a regular basis. Depending on the nature of your business and the needs of your team, this could be weekly, monthly, or quarterly. If you wait too long to provide feedback, your criticisms will breed resentment, and your positive feedback will seem vague and meaningless. Take a good look at the structure of your team and what your goals are, and then create a schedule that you will adhere to when giving feedback.
Feedback Should be a Conversation and Not a Lecture
Too many managers approach the process of giving feedback as their time to lecture, discipline, and instruct. Your employees should not feel like they are entering the principal’s office when they are going to have a discussion with you about whether or not their latest efforts have been successful. In fact, if you walk into feedback sessions with the expectation that you will simply tell members of your team that they did X things wrong and X things right, you are going to miss out on a lot of opportunities to understand what is going on with your staff. Whether or not you are happy or unhappy with a member of your team, try asking these questions with a sincere goal to hear the answers (your team will know if you are forcing yourself to stay calm or if you are only feigning interest in what they have to say).
Were there any instances where you felt that you weren’t getting the support that you needed?
Was there a point where you felt that your skills were being used in an effective way?
What were the barriers that you faced when trying to complete this task?
What would you have done differently?
What information would have been helpful to you that you did not receive?
What skills did you learn, and what new information have you gathered?
Then, if you can identify ways in which you have failed to meet the mark, acknowledge that and aim to do better.
Don’t be Afraid of Negative Feedback
You may have been advised to give two pieces of positive feedback for every one piece of negative feedback. You may have been encouraged to create ‘compliment sandwiches’. This is where you provide some positive feedback, meaningful or not. The purpose of this is supposedly to make your team member feel better about your feedback. Unfortunately this is not what happens. Your leaders, your potential star players actually want negative feedback and they don’t want it sugar-coated. They want to know what they have done wrong, and what they can do to improve things.
Set Clear Expectations for all Team Members
It simply is not fair to give your team members positive or negative feedback without letting them know the standards that they are expected to meet. Measurable expectations are indescribably valuable to people. They give members of your team something tangible to work towards. This will help them to set their own personal goals and to determine how and where they need to cooperate with one another.
Encourage your team to set expectations for themselves as individuals and then also as a team. This will give everybody a sense of responsibility and ownership when it comes to achieving goals.
Avoid Purple Feedback
Purple feedback is feedback that initially sounds motivating, but is realistically useless. If you are telling members of your team that they need to blend in with the team better, you are giving them purple feedback. If you are instructing your team to ‘work smarter’, but aren’t giving them suggestions on how to do so, you are providing purple feedback. In the best situations, purple feedback causes confusion among your team and brings into question your ability to lead. In the worst situations, purple feedback can give others the impression that you are trying to sabotage members of your team or treat them unfairly. Avoid purple feedback by presenting your feedback to your team in clear terms using plain language. Don’t use metaphors or figures of speech. If you need to convey a particularly tough message to your team, just do it. Say what needs to be said, and pull of the band aid. Once that is over, let everybody know what needs to be improved upon. Your staff will appreciate your honesty and candor. They will also want to work to meet your clearly laid out expectations.