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Giving feedback to improve business performance

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

Heather Townsend has an interesting article at Real Business on how to give feedback to a poorly performing team member. She has five key tips to making feedback work for you, the recipient and their team:

1. Don’t shy away from the conversation – Townsend says the longer you leave it, the tougher it gets to open the discussion. Also, I’d add, the further you are in time from the event that caused the need to give feedback, the more likely it is that both you and the recipient of the feedback will have begun to forget the details of what happened, allowing them to get into denial about the situation and you to start to feel insecure about your own memory of the event/situation if you were present.

2. Be specific – Townsend recommends using the Situation – Behaviour – Outcome approach, which is a good way to establish the grounds for feedback. You need to state the situation in which the behaviour occurred, and outline the behaviour which needs to change before describing the outcome you require. As an example:

Situation – a busy day in the office when everybody was under pressure
Behaviour – the person was heard speaking rudely to a client on the telephone
Outcome – In personal terms this person needs to recognise her pressure levels and manage her own well-being by taking regular short breaks in high-stress situations. Professionally, ensuring she uses a script for the calls she makes means the person can avoid losing her temper and get through calls without losing her cool.

3. Be clear about what you and don’t want to happen – using a technique described in Crucial Conversations, Townsend outlines how to handle a feedback session: “I’m having this conversation because I want to see you be more successful in meetings. I don’t want you to think that I’m getting at you, or for you to think that I think you’re incapable. I do want you to be listen and digest this feedback carefully – and I don’t want you to dismiss the feedback as not important. I am giving you this feedback because I want to see your career develop further in this firm, and in my opinion, changing this behaviour will have a positive impact on your career development.”

4. Listen to the reaction – defensiveness, undue emotional response or an attempt to avoid the conversation, means you need to make the conversation safe again, before you give more feedback and you do this by restating what results you do and don’t want to happen.

5. Work with the other person’s agenda – Townsend says that feedback works best your purpose is supportive, so talking to somebody when you are in a bad mood with them is counterproductive, because you need to be able to see the benefit of giving constructive feedback, not just wanting to let off steam.

I’d add that what you do before, during and after the feedback session can make a substantial difference to how your feedback is received and how the person you’re talking to handles the need to change their behaviour:

• Prepare yourself by making sure you’ve double-checked facts and positions (perhaps the employee was dealing with a personal call, not a work one, in which case your feedback needs to be about time use in the workplace, rather than rudeness)
• Deal with excuses calmly but factually – and don’t fall into dealing with the excuse rather than staying focused on the behaviour that needs to change
• Make sure people can make the changes you are asking of them – this may mean providing training or a mentor, setting a target that will be monitored or just something as simple as giving them a go-to person if they feel they are slipping back into an unacceptable behaviour – the role of the go-to is to provide a safe space in which the individual can explore why they aren’t keeping up their performance so that if they need something further, they have identified it before they go to their line manager or mentor to request further support to maintain their constructive change.

Photograph by Stan Random under a creative commons licence

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