How to give constructive feedback
Feedback is essential to the progression of anyone’s career. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to develop talent within your team by providing feedback. Providing constructive feedback should be done regularly and not after a single incident. The purpose of providing this is to acknowledge and encourage positive behaviour and to improve troubling behaviour or attitudes quickly. We have put together our top 5 ways to deliver constructive feedback to your team:
Be direct: it’s important to get to the point to be most effective, but don’t tear the person down.
Delivery: Your tone and manner need to reflect the feedback, joking around or being sarcastic is not the way to deliver your feedback.
Listen: Speak first and then sit back and listen to what the staff member has to say, don’t get defensive and take into consideration their viewpoint of possible solutions that might want to express to help you move forward. It’s going to be far easier to have the matter dealt with if the staff member feels like you have listened to them and valued what they had to say.
Attention: Give some attention to why the need has arisen to share this feedback to help with the solution to getting things back on track.
Opportunity: Point out the opportunities to grow from this and to potentially take on more responsibility or further skills training.
Constructive feedback starts with respect, remove emotion and prepare for the meeting. Set a plan together to move forward and regularly check-in, giving credit where it’s due to maintain the professional relationship and respect with your employee.
