Giving Feedback – 6 key steps
I think we all remember a time when we were given feedback and it just made us go ‘ouch’. Poorly given feedback can stay in your mind for years (be it from school, from a coach at the gym or a manager at work.) Whatever it was – feedback shouldn’t make you feel bad.
The truth is, giving feedback can be tough and it is a bit of a skill to be able to do it well. It takes time to perfect this skill, but like anything, we need to start somewhere.
Two questions to ask yourself before giving feedback are – what am I trying to achieve with the feedback? What’s the point in saying it?
Usually, feedback should be given to either improve a situation or a person’s performance.
Once you know your ‘reason’ for giving feedback, you can start to work on what to say.
You may have heard of many different models to use and a favourite I often hear (and don’t like at all), is the ‘feedback sandwich’. This means you start with a positive piece of feedback, slot the negative feedback in the middle, and end with another positive. I believe the theory here is that the person receiving it has more good things to think about than not. Managers have even said to me “it’s a great way to get across what I am not happy with whilst giving some praise too”. Let me say now – NO! The truth with this model is, the person generally is so focused on the sandwich filling that they don’t remember the positives at all. Also, if you use this regularly as a style, then people will be expecting it and will just wait for the ‘negative’ you want to tell them. This style worked many years ago, but in my opinion is now a bit outdated.
So, let us try something else next time you want to give feedback and see how it works out.
1) Ask, don’t tell
If you start by just telling someone something you are not happy with, you are likely to be met with a defensive reaction and you may close the person off to want to talk about it in more detail.
Also, if you wade in first, it never gives the person time to chance to identify their own areas of improvement (and let’s be honest, that’s the ultimate end game).
The best way is to just open up the discussion with a question. Something really simple which worked well for me in the past is – “how do you think that went?”
The best outcome is that the person identifies the very thing you observed / noticed / wanted to mention. If they do – hurrah! You didn’t need to say anything about it at all and can start focusing on how to help improve it. If they don’t, you can ask some more questions linked to broken down parts of what you observed. Use some follow on questions such as:
“could you have done anything differently with that customer? If so, what”?
“what went well with that piece of work?”
“what were you not so pleased with?”
Asking some nice open questions should open up the chance for you to have a discussion with them rather than you just telling them what went wrong.
Tip: It takes a while for people to recognise this is how you work! They may just want you to ‘tell them’ what was wrong, but persevere and eventually people will answer the questions in the way you want them to as they will learn your new style.
2) Don’t make judgements
Sometimes we have opinions on other people which may be based on our beliefs, values or another core part of our own make up. This can sometimes lead us to making judgements about others and even down to ‘why they would have done something in a certain way’.
This isn’t helpful when giving feedback as some people may find it offensive, rude or even worse, they will put barriers up to talking about it.
Making a judgement sometimes means in your head you have already allocated blame. Please don’t! Make sure you find out what is really going on before jumping to conclusions based on your judgements.
Spend your time trying to build up trust and confidence with this person as this is such an important basis for a good feedback discussion and a positive relationship too. The more someone feels this, the more likely they are to be open to an honest conversation.
3) Stick to observed behaviour
The key thing here is just to stick to the issue being discussed. Don’t go bringing other things into it – it won’t help you and will also make a smaller problem feel huge to the person you are talking to.
Stick to the things you have actually observed which means you are really owning your feedback, but also the person you are speaking to can link back to that same period of time.
Try where you can to avoid using over emotional words and 2 words I would try to leave out of this are always and never. More often than not, you don’t mean those words. Imagine if your boss said, “I watched you speak to that customer poorly and you always do that”. Pretty damning and I would say – how do you know? Have you observed this person speak to every single customer every single time? Probably not! So just stick to the occasion where you saw them speak to Mr Smith and discuss that rather than knock someone’s confidence further.
4) Be specific
Try to get to the point of what you are wanting to talk about. Giving feedback can be a nerve-wracking thing do to, so some people instead of giving detail, can be a bit general and ‘nice’ about it. It’s good you care about the person you are talking to and that you don’t want to upset them, but the risk if you are too general is that they may not take away the same ‘message’ you thought you were giving them. They may think you had just a nice little chat!
So be specific about you want to talk about – whether it link to an event, or an aspect of their performance. This is more than likely going to help the person to be able to refer back and they can then analyse their own performance too. It also gives you a chance to be able to ask more probing questions too.
5) Be constructive
It can be easy to fall into the trap of being negative and critical to a person when giving feedback, however, this doesn’t help the person to improve their performance. Be constructive and where you can remove the ‘person’ from it and talk about the issue.
For example, instead of saying “Joe, you are really not very good at writing reports are you?”… try something like “Joe, I noticed a couple of typos on the Example report which is really unusual. Is everything OK? Is there anything I can do to help with it next time round?” You have been specific as it was about the two errors on the Example Report and Joe might just open up about what was on his mind as he was doing it.
With Steps 3, 4 and 5, a good concept to practice is to ground your feedback in facts and observations. So:
“This is what I saw…”
“This is the impact it had on the team…”
“This is what impressed me, because…”
“Here are some suggestions you might want to consider…”
6) Make it a two way process
Remember at the start of this, I said the ultimate aim of feedback is to improve performance. Well, let’s try it both ways round! When you have had a feedback conversation with someone (and make sure it is a conversation, not just you talking), be brave at the end and say “what do you need from me to help” or “how I can support you better next time”?
The person you are speaking to will soon get to realise you really mean this ‘open way of working’ and may open up more in the future. You may have to be prepared to hear something back which is a surprise, but it’s the start of a beautiful two way working relationship based on open feedback! You may learn something about yourself you didn’t realise you do, or you may get told that you are already a great support. Either way, it’s a great question to show feedback can be truly two way.
Some take away summary points for you:
Sharing your feedback and giving your opinions are not the same thing!
Feedback is there to help a person or a situation improve
Always ask the person their opinion first – they may well save you an ‘awkward conversation’
Focus on the issue at hand, don’t bring in other things. Small steps remember!
If all these styles are new to you, it may take a while for the person you are speaking with to get used to it. Stick with it, it will get easier and will help improve performance if you keep doing it.
Also, remember it can be hard to ‘receive’ feedback. Cut people some slack and put yourself back in that ‘ouch’ feedback moment you had at school, in the gym or at work personally – you don’t want to be like that!
Take it slow, stick to what you observed and most importantly, ask questions first to allow an open discussion.
There are many models you can use to give feedback, if you want to chat any of them through, want some help ‘practising’ giving feedback or want to start trying to embed this amongst your team, please get in touch as we would love to help.
