As a manager, do you know how to give feedbacks that help your employees grow?
I thought I did... But I was mistaken.
Especially the consulting industry, giving and receiving feedbacks is the A&O of our daily work. We are told to be openly praise and criticize just about everything we do and this shall help us to grow and become better.
However, to my surprise, research shows a different picture, especially when it comes to giving “critical feedbacks”.
“First it shows that people can’t reliably rate the performance of others: More than 50% of your rating of someone reflects your characteristics, not theirs.
Second, neuroscience reveals that criticism provokes the brain’s “fight or flight” response and inhibits learning.
Last, excellence looks different for each individual, so it can’t be defined in advance and transferred from one person to another. It’s also not the opposite of failure. Managers will never produce great performance by identifying what they think is failure and telling people how to correct it.”
So what should we do instead?
Firstly, when we see great results, we need to help employees identify these patterns of success, and then recreate and refine it. Best learning is based on what we do well, not what we door poorly.
Secondly, share that you are their ally, not their critic. Acknowledge their feeling and express that you have confidence in them to succeed.
Finally, rather than solve it for them, enable them to solve it themselves. That involves to help them to find out what is not working, identify an outcome they are willing to own, and empower them to come up with steps they feel confident to execute.
There, some of the basic coaching techinques can be very helpful:
What do you think you did well? What didn't go so well?
What are the reasons?
What did you learn from the excercise?
What can you do better next time?
...
Another feedback structure tool, AID (Action, Impact and Do) can be also very helpful:
What action did I observe? (e.g. I observed you spoke quite fast during the presentation)
What impact/effect did it have on me or others? (e.g. I did not have a lot of time to reflect on the points you made)
What can you do next time? (e.g. It would help if you could speak slower next time to give the listener enough time to process the information)
What are some of your best practices to give feedbacks and enable employee growth? What worked and what did not work?
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