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Transcript
You’re driving a car through the desert trying to get to the other side. You keep following the markers one after the other that keep and make sure you’re on track. However the marker stops so you stop. And then you have to decide: what are you going to do?
Because if you keep going forward you might get there but there’s nothing letting you know if you’re going the right way or not. You could easily get lost in the desert. What would you do?
I tell you this example because, just like having feedback while you’re going through the desert is important, so is feedback for your employees and for you. Because without feedback, you don’t know if you’re on track. You don’t know if you’re where you’re supposed to do. Your employees don’t know if they’re where they’re supposed to be unless they’re given feedback.
And the thing is, generally people want feedback. They want to know how they’re doing. Are they doing a great job? Are they doing a bad job? How can they improve? They can’t know unless they’re given feedback.
Now there’s different kinds of feedback and people associate different words with feedback such as positive or negative or constructive. And feedback is showing appreciation, letting people know they’re doing well and also how they can improve.
But really having the term negative feedback isn’t really the right term if we have the right mindset. Because if we have a growth mindset and we’re about learning and growing and get better, we want feedback. It’s not negative. It’s a good thing because it helps us grow.
You want a culture of feedback
So if you really want to be the best you can be, you want to maintain that growth mindset and accept and receive feedback because that’s how you can get better.
Too often cultures are toxic or it’s about posturing or status and people are afraid to make mistakes because it might hurt their career. You don’t want to build that type of culture. You want to grow a growth mindset in your employees where feedback’s a normal. It’s a cultural norm. People share with one another because your focus is on getting better, not maintaining some kind of status or image or protecting one’s career because that’s not needed to do.
You want where people are giving each other feedback just to be a normal, them telling each other, them telling you, you telling them, it’s just part of what you do.
The “sandwich”
Sometimes when people give feedback, they always try to put it in the sandwich. And the sandwich is this, you have something negative or constructive you want to tell people, so you sandwich it between two positives.
You say, “Oh, you’re doing great at this, but you really stink at this. Oh, but you’re such a great employee.” And they sandwich it or try to make the feedback better by putting it between two positives.
Don’t do that, because here’s the thing. It’s not that you can’t share positive with negative, but when you give constructive feedback and the only time you give positive is when you’re trying to sandwich it, that positive will seem so fake. You don’t need to do that. Again, you want that culture where it’s normal.
Appreciation is feedback
And speaking of appreciation, positive feedback, that should be a norm of what you do. When you give appreciation, that’s so motivating to people. People often work harder because of it. And it also tells people what kind of behaviors you want.
So if you want people to admit mistakes or to bring up problems or to disagree in meetings, then when you praise and show appreciation for that, that lets people know, hey, we should be doing that and other people will start doing that.
Make giving appreciation a norm of what you do. If possible, try to give appreciation to everyone at least once a week.
The real reason many of us avoid feedback (generally)
Sometimes people don’t like to give feedback to people because they’re afraid of the people’s reactions. Now, don’t get me wrong, we often don’t say it that way. We may say we don’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings. But generally it’s because we don’t want to deal with the uncomfortable emotions that can come when you give feedback to other people.
Sometimes it can be hard. Sometimes the person may not accept it well initially. But that doesn’t matter because if you care about someone, you’re going to give them feedback. If they are doing something that hurts their career or that’s hurting them in their job, and you’re like, well, I don’t want to tell them I might hurt their feelings, what you’re really saying is you don’t care enough about them to deal with those negative emotions that might happen to let them know how they can improve in their job and how they can improve in their career.
You’re not willing to make that sacrifice to help them stop doing what’s hurting them. Hopefully if you see me walking around with spinach in my teeth, you’ll say, “Hey Thomas, there’s spinach in your teeth,” and not be like, well, I don’t wanna hurt his feelings, he might get offended if I tell him he’s got spinach in his teeth.
No, please let me know, so I don’t walk around with spinach in my teeth. Same thing for your employees, let people know so they can get better.
So then, how do you give feedback?
How to give feedback
Well, the feedback you give kind of depends on what you’re giving feedback about. But here are some basic guidelines that you can follow when it comes to giving feedback.
Be specific
First, you want to be specific. If you’re showing appreciation, be specific about what you’re showing appreciation for. If you’re talking to somebody about something negative or how they messed up on the project, whatever it may be, you want to be specific about it.
Being vague is like, well, you really stink at making reports. Doesn’t help them and doesn’t help anything. You want to be specific about what’s going on and how someone can improve.
Be timely
You also want to be timely. Sometimes people wait for the annual review or the quarterly review or whatever it may be and that makes absolutely no sense. It’s like if I get on to one of my kids a week later after they throw the remote across the room. That would make no sense, and they probably won’t even remember it.
If you really want feedback to be effective, it should be timely, like right then as soon as you can. If someone’s not doing a good job on their work, don’t wait a few weeks to let them know because they’ll keep doing that negative work because they don’t know better. You should go and then tell them as soon as you can, “Hey, this is how you can improve.”
Or if someone does a good job on something, waiting a month to let them know they did a good job, they may not even remember it, and they may even feel unappreciated because they did it and they haven’t heard anything for so long. You want feedback to be timely, generally, as soon as you can, that makes sense.
Separate the person from the event or action
You also want to separate the person from what they did.
Sometimes when people do things, we attribute it to their character. So, if someone has a bunch of sloppy errors in the report, we call them lazy versus focusing on, well, they have errors in their report. When you’re dealing with people, you separate the person from the behavior or the event that occurred.
Jim Collins and Bill Lazier in Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 says it’s like dealing with a kid’s messy closet. The closet is messy, not the kid is messy.
So if someone’s late to work day after day, you don’t focus on what you think they may be, such as lazy, you take that away. You focus on the fact you were late this day, this day, and this day and that’s how you talk to them about it. On the events, not on anything on them.
Captain David Marquet in his book, Leadership as Language, talks about being objective when we give feedback. He says there’s a difference between “this is written poorly,” “this is filled with mistakes,” or “there’s three spelling errors in this report.”
He also recommends using nouns instead of verbs. He says, instead of saying, “You performed poorly,” you say, “Your performance was poor.”
Aspects vary based on the situation
Now, depending on the feedback you were giving, how you give that feedback may vary. For example, if you’re in a meeting and one of your teammates or employees is presenting and you notice they say um a lot, then you may pull them aside afterwards and let them know how the ums hurt them in their presentation and make them look unconfident.
When people are underperforming
If someone messes up on their report or they’re underperforming, you probably want to call a one-on-one meeting and have them come and meet with you. And one of the best things to do then is to start off by asking questions. Because sometimes, especially as leaders, we can assume we know why someone’s underperforming or why this issue is happening, but often we don’t.
So by asking questions, getting their viewpoint on it, what’s going on, you may learn maybe there’s issues they’re having that’s outside their control.
Maybe they can’t get another department to work with them. Or maybe there’s other issues that you don’t know about. But maybe it is them.
Either way, by asking questions, they can point out the issue, and then you can offer support or training or whatever they need to be able to do their job better. And if it is something that they are struggling with, having them come up with the solution and asking questions… what can you do better? What do you think could help you get this project on time? Or whatever it may be.
By asking questions and them coming up with solutions and you helping as needed, then when they create those solutions, there’s more ownership in them for doing that. They’ve owned that because they helped create the solution that they’re going to implement.
If you just go in there and say, “You did this wrong, you did this wrong, and this is what you’re going to do differently,” there’s not much ownership in that.
When there are behavior issues
If it’s a behavior issue, you probably still want to ask questions. But it may be a little bit different depending on the conversation. If someone is frequently late, you probably want to start off stating the fact that you’ve noticed that they’ve been late this day, this day, and this day. Then you can ask them what’s going on or what’s causing you to be late.
Depending on the behavior and depending on the issue, then maybe it’s something you can work with them on. For example, if they’re late because their kid’s been sick, then maybe you can work with them somehow or they can work later or whatever it may be.
However, of course, there are situations that you can’t do that. Are those behaviors that’s not good that you need to stop? So to deal with those, you definitely want to reset expectations. So you talk to them, you laid out what was going on, you get their feedback of what was going on, then you lay out the expectations. This is the expectation. You’re here at 8 o’clock in the morning. Then you talk to them about how if they continue that behavior, then these will be the consequences and the process and the steps that will happen if that behavior continues.
The three-step process
One way to give feedback is following this three step process. You start off with the situation, then you talk about the behavior, and then the effects of the behavior. For example, the situation: work starts at eight o’clock. The behavior: you’ve been late for work for the past three weeks. The effect: everybody else has to pitch in and do your work for you because you’re not there on time.
Another example, in meetings: “You sometimes interrupt others when they’re presenting ideas. You interrupted Sue and Joe when they were trying to present ideas. When you interrupt people, it makes people feel unvalued, and then they don’t want to speak up anymore because they think you’re just going to interrupt them again.” Situation, behavior, effect.
And you can use that for appreciation, too. “In the meeting you gave us some great feedback which helped us make a better decision.”
Going back to talking to your teammate or employee about their umms, you can say, “Hey, I noticed in that meeting during your presentation that you said um a lot. And the thing is, when you say um a lot, it makes it look like you’re not very confident about what you’re saying.”
And then you can go from there. You’re not attacking the person, you’re just talking about the behavior and the way they can improve.
A key part of giving feedback
Now, a key part about giving feedback is that you have to actually care about the people that you are giving feedback with. And you have to have influence with them. If you don’t, it’s going to be much harder to give feedback.
