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One of the key leadership skills when going through change is to be able to deliver feedback with empathy, focus and clarity.
Giving feedback that creates change in future performance is something that a lot of leaders don’t do well. And it’s also something that a lot of leaders worry about.
Mindset and Purpose
The key thing here is the mindset. It’s really important that your mindset is really clear on what the purpose of feedback is. We often give feedback because we see something that someone does, and that’s not how we would do it. But it’s not really the purpose of feedback.
The most important part of this is about correcting future behaviour. It’s not overemphasising what happened. It’s focused on learning from what happened and what happens next time.
Timeliness
Best done immediately. Ideally within 6 to 8 hours after the event, and it’s a specific conversation (not done generally). It also doesn’t have to be done formally.
So it’s a chat. About something that just happened recently. Don’t leave it a long time to do it, and it’s about correcting what we do next time. That can even be your intro and how you do the feedback conversation.
How do you have this conversation to change performance or behaviour?
A lot of people are good at giving technical feedback. If you’re a software developer, how would you code that differently? If you’re a lawyer, how would you provide that advice differently?
What we often struggle with is changing subjective behaviour.
We have to find a way to have specific conversations about immediate things that have happened, because if we don’t get behavioural feedback, people don’t align with your culture or teams’ way of working and may eventually not fit in and leave.
I would recommend thinking about these types of things from the beginning, middle and end of your conversation. So imagine your conversation is gonna be 5 minutes max.
- In the first 30 seconds we want to give the conversation some focus. The key thing is that people are gonna be saying “What is this all about? Why are you talking to me? I thought there was no problem. I thought that it went particularly well”. Do this with respect and empathy. Understand that these messages, if they are delivered in a clumsy way, can be really difficult to understand. So even saying something like – I just wanna give you feedback about that X client meeting, is that okay?
- In the next 2-3 minutes we want to have a shared understanding of what happened – What’s your understanding and my understanding? The more you dilly dally around, it makes them feel that you got something to hide. Give specific examples of behaviour and describe the impact. And then give them space to process it. Respond and ask questions. The point of this middle part is to get a shared understanding.
- The last 30 seconds to a minute – Where do we go from here, what do we do next time? We got a common understanding – I see it this way you saw it this way we see in middle grounds. What’s the learning for you? How do we need to do this next time?
Don’t dilly dally around, get to the point.
Summary
This is about correcting the performance or behaviour of people that worked with you. It needs to be calm, objective, kind and constructive and you wanna have a conversation that’s got a beginning, middle and end with three components. Giving really focus to the conversation, creating a shared understanding with the person and then clarity of where to and where from here next time.
Start with positive feedback, so if you think about changing if you don’t give any feedback at all, start with positive. So when you do this it has an amazing impact. And then slowly work your way into giving change in performance feedback overtime.
When you are ready…. let’s work out if we are a good fit.
If you are a 50 person plus business, have budget to develop your organisation, and you have challenges with teamwork in your top 3 levels of leaders than we may be a good fit to work together. For more information, click below to watch a short video on my teamwork model and read testimonials from previous clients.
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