Your team are not mind readers. If you want your team to perform well, you have to give feedback to them regularly. If they don't know your standards or expectations, it's very unlikely they'll meet them consistently. Show
Unfortunately, the most common way managers give feedback is something crudely called the sh*t sandwich. Put simply: Before you give the critical feedback, you open with something positive about them. Then, after giving the critical feedback, you again say something positive. Hence the sandwich metaphor: While the intentions may be good (don't hurt your team member's feelings), more often than not it comes off as pandering. It can also water down the important feedback in the middle of the sandwich, making it less effective. So what should you do instead? Today, we have 6 ways to give feedback that beats the sh*t sandwich. 6 Ways to Give Feedback to Your Team to Improve ThemIn the right situation, each of these methods of giving feedback can help you improve the performance of your team. Use your best judgment to decide when and how to apply each of these to your team. The 6 approaches to give feedback to your team to improve their performance include: Read through each of them and file them away. They all have unique value and can be used in different situations. And best of all, by having multiple ways to give feedback, your team will never grow bored of how you deliver it. 1) Give them a 5 Word ReviewWhile the traditional performance review is often a moment of dread, the 5 Word Review, as coined by Kayak.com CEO Paul English, is an efficient, simple way to give feedback. Here's how it works: There's a few keys that make this method to give feedback really work well: Genuine:
Meaningful:
Thematic:
Given the simplicity of the 5 Word Review, it's easy to do at any time of year. Consider it a great way to give feedback to your team members as you notice trends in their work and behavior. Don't be afraid to ask them for a 5 word review, too. 2) Try a Feed ForwardA key part of feedback is that it's looking backward. What happened in the past, good or bad? The power of Feed Forward is that it looks ahead. They're "positive suggestions for the future" as described in this awesome, quick video: The rules of Feed Forwards are very straight forward:
Those rules are followed by a simple process: Those simple steps are totally different than your usual ways to give feedback: Ego-less:
Collaborative:
Actionable:
Feed Forwards break the mold of the traditional feedback process. They're a great way to engage your team in helping each other improve. For more ideas on adapting Feed Forwards to your team, you can learn how the startup Tint used them here. 3) Use your One on Ones for feedbackWhile the world moves many things to real-time, feedback should sometimes wait. While egregious issues (harassment, blatant values violations, etc) should be handled immediately, many other situations are better left addressed after some reflection. In How To Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie shares a story about Abraham Lincoln that captures this lesson well. Lincoln would write letters to those that he had strong feedback for (like failed Civil War generals) while he was outraged. Rather than letting the heat of the moment get the best of him, he would not send these letters. Instead, he would stash them away, and with time come up with a response that showed more empathy, and was more effective. Face to Face > Written FeedbackAs important, writing feedback is not nearly as effective as giving it face to face. There's too much room for misunderstanding. There is too limited a context to fully understand feedback that is simply emailed, or otherwise entered electronically. As Kayak.com CEO Paul English remarked above, you need to talk to them live to make sure that when you give feedback, it's received well. This is where one on ones become so powerful for feedback. Rather than scheduling a special meeting to give feedback (or possibly forgetting about it), working feedback into your one on ones provides a variety of benefits: Prepared:
Want to be prepared for every 1:1? Download our free meeting template here. Contextual:
Frequent:
One on ones can have a major impact on the morale and motivation of your team. Good feedback is a significant part of making the most of these meetings. If you're looking for more help and best practices to have great one on ones, sign up for a free trial of Lighthouse here. 4) Use the Prepare-Listen-Act ModelPlanning to give feedback and giving feedback that actually makes a difference are two very different things. Unfortunately, what you think is crystal clear may not be to your team. That's why the Prepare-Listen-Act model is so powerful: it ensures your team will understand what you're trying to tell them. The steps in this model are as follows:
This 3 step process to give feedback works so well for a few reasons: Detailed:
Focused:
Measurable:
When you really need to see change and improvement in your team, the Prepare-Listen-Act model is your best bet. Learn more detail about this approach in our detailed blog post on constructive feedback here. 5) Trade Praise for FeedbackOne of the biggest challenges around feedback is the defensiveness that can come with criticism. The human mind weighs feedback much heavier than praise as we learned in a past post on giving effective praise:
Given praise doesn't last nearly as long as criticism, it should not be surprising what was found in research by Heaphy and Losada, reported in HBR:
How you give praise mattersKnowing the importance of a positive praise to criticism ratio, your work is not done. How you given your praise is just as important to it having the desired effect. When given correctly, praise can be a huge motivator. It can make people work harder and longer on their work, while applying themselves to grow. Done wrong, it can cause people to actually avoid new challenges and perform more poorly. As psychologist and researcher Carol Dweck shows in this video below, praise directly impacts your mindset and work ethic: Knowing all of this, the keys to using praise as an effective feedback tool involves a high frequency, a focus on effort and mindset (not "talent"), and being specific about what you want to see more of. By adding praise to your approach to improving your team's performance you also experience these benefits: Positive:
Anticipated:
Motivating:
Even the most ambitious team members hungry for feedback appreciate praise and recognition for their work. As you look to improve certain areas of a team member's work, look for opportunities to praise that improvement and their effort to get there. 6) Ask questions to create feedback and self assessmentNo one has all the answers. And since you can't see everything each person on your team does every moment of every day, questions are the best way to get the full picture. Asking good questions and listening intently are a critical part of leadership as SoulCycle's CEO Melanie Whelan emphasized in a NY Times interview: With the right context, you can not only create a great solution, you can also teach your team to have a critical eye to their own work. As you coach and develop your people to grow their Task Relevant Maturity, their eye for the difference between poor, good, and great work should improve. As they show signs of mastery in their work, use more questions of them to create feedback. It will help develop their critical eye and make it easier for you to start managing them more hands-off in that area. Kinds of questions to start a discussion:
Using questions to involve your team members in your feedback process with them has many key benefits: Independence:
Humility:
Scalable:
Yes, you can take the questions too far, so don't make it an interrogation. Try to frame the discussion as an exploration of how things can be done better in the future, and you'll tap into some of the optimism found in Feed Forwards. --- Conclusion:There are many ways you can give feedback, but they're not all equally effective. While some, like the sh*t sandwich never really work that well, others are best used in certain situations. Take these 6 tactics for giving feedback we shared today, and use them with your team to improve them in different situations. By mixing up your approaches, you'll find you always have a good way to deliver feedback to your team. And if you want to learn more about how to give feedback, you can check out these posts here: |