I’ve spent the past few weeks talking about the importance of the mid-year performance review. Giving effective feedback is a leadership competency that is crucial in your one-on-one discussions with your employees.
Keeping your team members motivated during this feedback session can be tricky. Below are some tips on giving feedback:
Effective Feedback Techniques:
- Prepare by gathering information about specific behaviors or outcomes you want to discuss with your employee. “Capturing” the moment will set the context for your feedback and resonate better with your team member. An example might be “At our sales meeting yesterday…”.
- Ask for permission to give feedback rather than just going into examples. This demonstrates respect and instills a sense of dual partnership. Give balanced feedback about things they are doing well as well as those that need improvement. It’s also helpful to show empathy around your own experiences about receiving performance feedback!
- Describe behavior in terms of someone’s actions, not about them as a person. Simply stating what you observed can make the behavior known without bringing emotion into play.
- Share the impact their behavior had on you, as their leader. For example: “When you talked over Cindy in the meeting last week, I felt like you didn’t think her information was important to you.” Sharing this way helps your employee see beyond their own behaviors and how it affects others.
- Ask what they want to do to improve their performance. People are much more motivated to respond to your feedback if they “have skin in the game” and are part of the solution.
As you can see, there really is an “art” to giving feedback! If giving feedback poses challenges for you especially at performance review time, I’m here to help!