Managers play a key role when it comes to providing employee feedback. Their impact is so much more than just providing positive or negative words. The work managers do during feedback can ultimately make or break an entire company culture.
The employee feedback we provide and the conversations we use to deliver that feedback is crucial. While we read a lot of advice about what to do during employee feedback cycles, we don’t see as much about what to absolutely, positively avoid.
Here are a few traps to avoid if we want our feedback to build up our team’s strengths, confidence and engagement.
Thinking of feedback as a statement and not a conversation
Feedback is a tool used to better engage employees. However, it can be difficult to engage someone when you’re providing critical feedback. Our first instinct when we hear anything negative about ourselves is to become defensive, which often leads to shutting down. Managers, especially those who are highly empathetic, realize this and may sugar coat the feedback or provide a praise sandwich which hurts everyone involved and downgrades the possible impact of the conversation.
However, when we use feedback as a tool to not only engage employees, but to nurture our relationships with them, mindsets shift. According to a recent article by Harvard Business Review, feedback powered by partnership can frankly be downright delightful. This type of feedback helps foster authentic conversation, deeper bonds between the manager and employee and higher productivity post-feedback cycle.
In fact, Joe Hirsch, author of The Feedback Fix: Dump the Past, Embrace the Future, and Lead the Way to Change, has studied the joy of getting feedback when it’s used as an employee-confidence strengthening tool and recently spoke about it during a TedX event.
Hirsch asks his audience to question themselves with every single feedback conversation, “What’s my goal? Is it to force a change or provoke an insight?”
Forcing change without buy-in is something that is likely not synonymous with great insight and deep involvement on the employee’s side. Provoking an insight can change a person’s viewpoint on a topic for life, and give them a deeper understanding of the “why” behind their changed behavior.
Your answer to the question Hirsch poses will drive different word choices and perhaps even completely reset your tone and perspective when providing feedback.
Like Hirsch said, “When you think employees need a lecture, perhaps they only need a lift.”
Deciding not to give feedback at all
A recent study showed that only 14.5% of managers believed they were capable of providing good feedback. That leaves an overwhelming majority of leaders lacking confidence in providing feedback that would generate productivity, engagement, and success.
With the odds this high that we are failing when it comes to feedback, it’s likely that we will try to avoid the situation at all costs. If you’re reading this, answer this question honestly: Have you ever not had a tough conversation with someone at work because you deemed it to be something that you could “let go “ or you believed would be easier left unsaid?
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. There’s so many ways we can combat this lack of confidence when providing feedback so that the conversations become more productive and useful.
First, we need to remember that they are just that: conversations. We so quickly get wrapped up in the word feedback and see it as a performance by managers to say just the right thing at the right time. But when we lead with it being a conversation, it helps put our worries at ease because the pressure is no longer on just one person to perform well.
Conversations are easy to maneuver since the viewpoint of one person is no longer the main focus. When we engage an employee about a behavior or an outcome that was less than desirable, we can engage our curiosity to find out the root cause. By doing so, we’re giving the employee an opportunity to provide feedback on what might have ultimately caused the undesired effect and maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn a thing or two too to help our team perform better in the future.
Over-engineering the conversation
I’m about to type something that will make Type A personalities reading this cringe: It’s okay to approach employee feedback sessions without an agenda. In fact, studies have shown that frequent informal feedback sessions can increase the performance of an employee by nearly 40% in one year.
What do I mean by informal? A great example is something as simple as chatting with an employee after a major presentation. Perhaps their points weren’t as clear as you’d want them to be, but they did a nice job overall.
You might stop them in the hallway and say, “Great job getting the vision out. Next time, please stop by my office before the meeting to go over the finer details together so we can really knock it out of the park and keep this project moving forward.”
Something as simple as this can open the door for you to help an employee get more out of their work while still feeling good about what they’ve contributed so far.
The more we begin to define the conversation above as feedback as well as the annual review process, the more we’ll be able to help guide our employees to success.
While we’ve outlined three traps to avoid, there are dozens more. What are a few things you’ve made sure to not do at your workplace to help the employee feedback cycle be more productive?