FOR LEADERS: The Ten Rules for Giving Amazing Feedback
Have you ever worked at a place where feedback was ignored, forgotten, or non-existent? If so you know how devastating it can be, for all.
It’s a motivation killer. In fact, almost 80% of all millennials wish they got MORE feedback from their direct manager.
“Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man’s growth without destroying his roots.”
Leaders who don’t provide accurate appraisals threaten good organizational performance. That’s because, we as humans, are HORRIBLE self-evaluators. We need feedback to grow. PERIOD.
This article poses a series of questions to distinguish the difference.
No Leader likes to think of themselves as scared to give/receive feedback, but if you’re in doubt ask yourself these questions:
- Do you store feedback and wait to provide it at a periodic evaluation?
Don’t. This can be incredibly detrimental. Remember, it’s always better to over communicate feedback, especially to younger people who still are looking to expand in their roles and careers. Note: If you only provide towards the negative, your missing rich opportunities to give feedback about the positive. All of these rules get infinitely harder to follow if you don’t provide feedback on the good, as well as the not so good.
Rule 1: Feedback must be a day-to-day, continuous exercise for and from all hands. Don’t store feedback.
2. Do you often notice people getting mad at feedback?
Look, everyone is uncomfortable about negative judgments to some degree. You and they have to get over that. Don’t make anything personal, and as a Leader, offering both your feedback and guidance on how they can improve is vital.
Rule 2: Leaders must focus on getting better results, and less on preserving images.
3. Do you view feedback as a necessity or a nice to have?
Okay, make sure you file this away in the front of your brain so it’s easy to remember: Feedback lies between two very important things — our need to grow as humans and our needs to be accepted as who we are. Because of that, it can be intensely powerful.
Rule 3: Take the art of giving and receiving feedback very seriously.
4. Do you allow your people the opportunity to honestly appraise you?
Listen Leaders cannot grow in one-way evaluation schemes. Give your people the rich opportunity to appraise you fairly and accurately. Listen to understand, don’t listen to respond.
Rule 4: Feedback MUST be two-way.
5. How do you make people feel safe to share their most honest feelings?
Man, this is a hard one. Reason is because everyone has an innate fear of losing their livelihood, their job, food on the table, stability — basically everything a job can provide. So if I think my job could be in jeopardy by speaking the truth…yeah…I’ll just keep my mouth shut. Leaders cannot afford closed mouths. Closed mouths means closed minds.
Rule 5: Safety = transparency
6. Are you worried that people won’t like you if you tell them the truth?
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want a bunch of people reading this to think you can just be a jerk by “telling it how it is”. Giving feedback, accurate feedback, is an art. But never put yourself in a position to be less than truthful — because being truthful is the best thing you can be for someone.
Rule 6: Your job as a leader is to judge accurately, not kindly.
7. Is the end result the only thing that matters?
Most people will say “of course not!” to that statement. But then we give feedback, and we are totally results oriented. We fail to observe and take notes of the intentions of the person followed by the effort. Results are just a third of the equation. Don’t forget to look at that other 66%.
Rule 7: Appraise the intentions, effort, and results
8. Do you give feedback on a gut feeling or do you reference past performance metrics/conversations?
If you give someone feedback, they should be able to ask for proof. Period, end of story. Lazy Leaders LOVE to throw out baseless observations based on “gut feeling”, “instinct”, and “what I’ve heard”. You need to be able to state your position, good or bad, and provide specifics. Or else you might just be full of it. And people can sniff that out.
Rule 8: Be prepared to provide data to support your position
9. Do you often feel like your feedback is going to hurt someone’s feelings?
This question ties together a lot of the previous rules. The rule below explains why this one is so important. At the end, as a Leader, you are accountable to everyone’s performance who is reportable to you. If they are not performing, that is a reflection of your leadership whether you want to admit it or not.
Rule 9: If you’re afraid to hurt someone’s feelings, you’re either feeling the guilt of failing to lead or you’re preparing to be dishonest.
10. Do you often shy away from giving feedback or only do it when you have to?
If you want to get better at pushups, you can’t read about pushups. You need to do pushups. Now take the same thought process to feedback…
Rule 10: Giving feedback is a skill and should be trained as such.
Final Thoughts
A lack of feedback WILL create a toxic work environment. A culture that chops down relationships, communication, and growing future leaders. Employees can only tolerate this for a short time before heading for the exit door.
“When two people work together, the most important common bond is their relationship. It, therefore, must be constantly appraised with feedback.”
Leaders who neglect or struggle with feedback complain that their staff lack initiative, rarely coming up with new ideas. They don’t realize that they are the problem, they inhibit, falsely validating that they are the only ones qualified to do the job.
Elon Musk said it well…
“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.”
Follow these ten rules and you’ll never struggle again!
So what are you? Someone who loves or hates feedback? It’s never too late to change your ways.
I would love to know what you’ve experienced with feedback, giving and receiving — do these lessons resonate with you? What have you learned that I didn’t put here? What feedback do you have for me?!
If you want to expand feedback in your organization, you may want to consider Critical. Check us out here!
