Constructive Feedback: Developing Your Skills

Constructive Feedback: Developing Your Skills
“I don’t know how to turn her performance around; she never used to have these attendance problems and her work used to be so good; I don’t know why this is happening or what to do.”
This manager is struggling with one of the most important yet trickiest and most difficult management tasks: providing constructive and useful feedback to others. Effective feedback is absolutely essential to organizational effectiveness; people must know where they are and where to go next in terms of expectations and goals-yours, their own, and the organization.

Feedback taps basic human needs-to improve, to compete, to be accurate; people want to be competent. Feedback can be reinforcing; if given properly, feedback is almost always appreciated and motivates people to improve. But for many people, daily work is like bowling with a curtain placed between them and the pins; they receive little information.

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Be aware of the many reasons why people are hesitant to give feedback; they include fear of causing embarrassment, discomfort, fear of an emotional reaction, and inability to handle the reaction. It is crucial that we realize how critical feedback can be and overcome our difficulties; it is very important and can be very rewarding but it requires skill, understanding, courage, and respect for yourself and others. Withholding constructive feedback is like sending people out on a dangerous hike without a compass. This is especially true in today’s fast changing and demanding workplace. Why managers are often reluctant to provide feedback? As important as feedback is, this critical managerial task remains one of the most problematic. Many managers would rather have root canal work than provide feedback to another-especially feedback that might be viewed as critical. Why are managers so reluctant to provide feedback? The reasons are many:

• Fear of the other person’s reaction; people can get very defensive and emotional when confronted with feedback and many managers are very fearful of the reaction.
• The feedback may be based on subjective feeling and the manager may be unable to give concrete information if the other person questions the basis for the feedback.
• The information on which the feedback is based (eg. performance appraisal) may be a very flawed process and the manager may not totally trust the information.
• Many managers would prefer being a coach than “playing God.”
• Other factors get in the way of effective communication or feedback sessions. Some of these reasons are:
• Defensiveness, distorted perceptions, guilt, project, transference, distortions from the past.
• Misreading of body language, tone.
• Noisy transmission (unreliable messages, inconsistency).
• Receiver distortion: selective hearing, ignoring non-verbal cues.
• Power struggles.
• Self-fulfilling assumptions.
• Language-different levels of meaning.
• Manager’s hesitation to be candid.
• Assumptions-e.g. assuming others see situation same as you, has same feelings as you.
• Distrusted source, erroneous translation, value judgment, state of mind of two people

Characteristics of Effective Feedback

• Effective Feedback has most of the following characteristics:
• Descriptive (not evaluative) (avoids defensiveness.) By describing one’s own reactions, it leaves the individual fee to use it or not to use it as he sees fit.
• Avoid accusations; present data if necessary.
• Describe your own reactions or feelings; describe objective consequences that have or will occur; focus on behavior and your own reaction, not on other individual or his or her attributes.
• Suggest more acceptable alternative; be prepared to discuss additional alternatives; focus on alternatives
• Specific rather than general.
• Focused on behavior not the person. It is important that we refer to what a person does rather than to what we think he is. Thus we might say that a person “talked more than anyone else in this meeting” rather than that he is a “loud-mouth.”
• It takes into account the needs of both the receiver and giver of feedback. It should be given to help, not to hurt. We too often give feedback because it makes us feel better or gives us a psychological advantage.
• It is directed toward behavior which the receiver can do something about. A person gets frustrated when reminded of some shortcoming over which he has no control.
• It is solicited rather than imposed. Feedback is most useful when the receiver himself has formulated the kind of question which those observing him can answer or when he actively seeks feedback.
• Feedback is useful when well-timed (soon after the behavior-depending, of course, on the person’s readiness to hear it, support available from others, and so forth). Excellent feedback presented at an inappropriate time may do more harm than good.
• Sharing of information, rather than giving advice allows a person to decide for himself, in accordance with his own goals and needs. When we give advice we tell him what to do, and to some degree take away his freedom to do decide for himself.
• It involves the amount of information the receiver can use rather than the amount we would like to give. To overload a person with feedback is to reduce the possibility that he may be able to use what he receives effectively. When we give more than can be used, we are more often than not satisfying some need of our own rather than helping the other person.
• It concerns what is said and done, or how, not why. The “why” involves assumptions regarding motive or intent and this tends to alienate the person generate resentment, suspicion, and distrust. If we are uncertain of his motives or intent, this uncertainty itself is feedback, however, and should be revealed.
• It is checked to insure clear communication. One way of doing this is to have the receiver try to rephrase the feedback. No matter what the intent, feedback is often threatening and thus subject to considerable distortion or misinterpretation.
• It is checked to determine degree of agreement from others. Such “consensual validation” is of value to both the sender and receiver.
• It is followed by attention to the consequences of the feedback. The supervisor needs to become acutely aware of the effects of his feedback.

It is an important step toward authenticity. Constructive feedback opens the way to a relationship which is built on trust, honest, and genuine concern and mutual growth