Giving feedback: 8 tips for how to deliver positive impact immediately

Author’s Note: This weekly column offers detailed guidance for leadership actions you can take to build a better workplace, become a highly-productive leader and improve your leadership impact right now, today. Stay tuned to WRAL Techwire each Wednesday for the next edition as lessons build one top of one another. Most recently, we talked about leading better meetings as part of a focus on better management for leaders.

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Feedback is a critical component to building strong and agile teams, and so knowing how to give great feedback is one of the most important skills a modern leader should have. Without it, you’re likely to find yourself frustrated by your employees’ seeming inability to understand what you want and execute successfully against your directives. And, you’re also likely to find that they feel frustrated by you as well, unclear on what they should change in the future in order to meet your expectations.

By being intentional about what we say and how we say it, we can unlock each employee’s – and each team’s – capacity for excellence. We can make people feel valued, capable, and encouraged to try again and keep moving forward, and we can help them stay open to growth. On the other hand, feedback that is poorly communicated often has the opposite effect, contributing to feelings of confusion, burnout, helplessness, and more. In that context, here are my recommendations for giving great feedback to all employees.

8 TIPS FOR GIVING BETTER FEEDBACK:

BE TIMELY – Give feedback on behavior, projects and events as soon afterward as you can, not just once but throughout the process when the work is still fresh in your employees’ minds. By building this sort of real-time feedback into the flow of work, you’ll make sure things don’t get too far off course, and you’ll position yourself as a mentor and teammate who’s participating in this person’s success, not just watching from the sidelines.

BE SPECIFIC – Keep your comments relevant, and limit yourself to one or two pieces of actionable advice. For instance, instead of saying “our social media posts aren’t getting the traction that I want to see,” you might say “the post we shared on LinkedIn this morning could have made a bigger impact if you’d tagged 2-3 of our strategic partners and included a link to download our recent white paper for free.”

BE DIRECT – Remember, you’re not doing anyone a favor by holding back on feedback that could help them do a better job. Real respect means honest, actionable feedback and a high expectation for every person’s success. Yet I often see people hold back their comments, especially when they’re managing someone from a different demographic group. For example, women get less actionable feedback overall and much more feedback about their personalities, instead of their work. Being direct means staying focused on performance and being honest when things don’t hit the mark.

KEEP IT PRIVATE – Positive praise can be shared in public, but negative feedback should always be private. The only exception is that constructive advice for a whole department should be shared in a single communication with the full team in attendance to help you avoid miscommunication.

GIVE FREQUENT PRAISE – Celebrate the small wins by giving people immediate praise for a job well done. It takes almost no time to send a quick email or Slack message saying “great work on this document” or “I appreciate you stepping outside your comfort zone.” Yet, those small moments are key to building a foundation of trust and collaboration within your team. Then, when you do need to edit their performance, that negative feedback is not the only conversation you’ve had about their work.

USE “YOU” FOR POSITIVE FEEDBACK – When giving praise, say “you” and “your” to give the person full credit for success, as in “Your leadership on this project helped close the deal” and “you did a great job keeping people engaged at your speaking event last Friday.”

USE “I” AND “WE” FOR NEGATIVE FEEDBACK – When you’re not giving praise, use “I” and “we” instead. Statements like “You didn’t get this right” and “you aren’t developing fast enough” feel accusatory and defeating and can leave people feeling incapable of success. To give negative feedback without being discouraging, try “I would have liked to see this in final format by now” or “as a team, we need to give a stronger presentation next time; I’d like to know how you think we can make that happen.” These phrases emphasize your co-ownership in the person’s improvement and encourage them to keep a growth mindset.

THROW AWAY THAT COMPLIMENT SANDWICH – For years, we were taught that the nicest way to give “constructive criticism” is to surround your negative comments with positive compliments before and after. In my experience (which is supported by recent data), this “sandwich approach” is almost completely ineffective. When you have negative feedback, be direct with it. And when you have positive feedback, be direct then too.

Remember that the point of all workplace feedback is to learn – and keep communicating – how we can get better, together. Whether you are giving or receiving that feedback, ask yourself “What am I learning right now so we can do better as a team in the future?” By keeping focused on future growth and success, you’ll be sure your feedback inspires trust, confidence and collaboration.

About the Author

Donald Thompson is co-founder and CEO of The Diversity Movement, a results-oriented, data-driven strategic partner for organization-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives recently named to Inc. Magazine’s 2021 Best in Business List in DE&I Advocacy. With two decades of experience growing and leading firms, he is a thought leader on goal achievement, influencing company culture, and driving exponential growth. An entrepreneur, public speaker, author, podcaster, Certified Diversity Executive (CDE) and executive coach, Donald also serves as a board member for several organizations in marketing, healthcare, banking, technology and sports. Connect with him on Linkedin or at donaldthompson.com