Feedback is a powerful tool to help your team members grow and develop. And when delivered the right way, it enables you to align goals and expectations with your employees, address what’s working well, pinpoint areas to improve, and empower your team members to deliver their best work.
That said, feedback can also be a sensitive matter for employees, and when it doesn’t come out exactly as you had intended, you risk harming morale, triggering resentment, and potentially leading valued team members to seek opportunities elsewhere.
So, how can you give meaningful and productive feedback to your team members?
Focus on behavior
When you give your employees feedback, it’s so important to address behaviors as opposed to characteristics, because behaviors can be changed, while personalities can’t. For example, telling someone, “You’re too aggressive” is pretty vague and can sound like an attack on the person’s character, while saying, “You tend to interrupt people when they’re sharing their ideas in meetings” is more actionable and easier to fix. Critiquing a behavior is less personal and more solvable, making it way more productive and useful to your team members.
Share positive feedback, too
Feedback shouldn’t only be given when something goes wrong. In fact, it can also be an extremely effective way to highlight what’s working and the kinds of behaviors your employees should continue. So, do your best to give your team members positive feedback when you believe they’ve done something really well. Doing so not only instills confidence in them, it also reframes feedback as a mechanism for helping them maximize their performance, so that it’s not just some scary thing that only comes up when there was a misstep.
Use inclusive language
When your employee messes up, recognize that you are the manager, which means there are likely shifts you too could make to ensure different outcomes next time. Putting all the blame on the team member is not the sign of a strong leader, so be intentional about how you frame your feedback to avoid making it sound like an attack. When you use words “we” and “us” to discuss ways to improve, it shows your team members that you see necessary changes as a shared effort and that you hold yourself accountable as well. For example, rather than saying something like, “Next time you should update me earlier on,” saying, “Next time we should sync earlier on.”
Avoid too many examples
While it can be helpful to give examples relating to your feedback in order to provide context, it can also open the door to defensiveness and lead employees to focus too much on the specific scenario you referenced as opposed to the message you’re trying to convey. So, do your best to frame your feedback around the future and discuss what can be done going forward, rather than diving too deeply into what happened in the past.
Try to be proactive
When you give feedback, do your best to not just state what went wrong, but to actually offer tangible direction and ways to improve going forward. For example, instead of just saying, “You push back too much when teammates give you feedback,” saying something like, “When you don’t agree with the feedback your teammates are giving you, try to ask follow up questions to understand it better as opposed to just rejecting it right off the bat.” The more solution-oriented you can be, the more prepared your employees will be to navigate these situations better going forward.
Keep it casual
Don’t wait for formal feedback talks to offer your input and guidance. Do your best to work feedback into regular conversations with your team members because the more casual it feels, the less overwhelming and nerve-racking it becomes to receive feedback. Whenever you’re discussing a project or assignment, try to openly acknowledge things that are working well and where there may be room to improve going forward. This also helps you trust your team members to navigate future situations because you know that they have the feedback they need to make the right decisions going forward. It also allows your team members to feel confident that they know what behaviors to repeat and what to look out for the next time around.
