“The Leadership Perspective” is a series of articles designed to assist millennials and emerging leaders with navigating difficult situations. Each week, successful business leaders provide targeted, actionable advice to enhance your perspective and improve your leadership skills.
This is part one of a two-week series on feedback. Today’s article features Chris Cigna, Vice President Sales at Groups 360.
For many professionals, constructive feedback can be difficult to effectively deliver. According to a 2014 survey conducted by Zenger/Folkman, participants consider constructive feedback to be a critical to their individual and professional development. In fact, they want to receive it more than positive feedback. However, leaders can tend to avoid giving it. A Gallup poll recently found that only 26% of employees strongly agreed that the feedback they received helped them improve.
Your ability to effectively give constructive feedback is a significant component of your leadership abilities. It not only propels team performance and organizational success, but also separates you from other leaders within your organization. In this way, how you deliver feedback can often be more important than what you deliver. So, what can you do to begin delivering feedback that improves performance and advances success?
1. Be Timely and Consistent
Reflecting on past performance is important to the learning process and individual growth, but it is often discussed way too long after the fact. At that point, feedback is often perceived as blanket criticism rather than targeted feedback, which can spark defensiveness and suppress motivation.
Chris says, “feedback should be timely and consistent, meaning it is on-the-spot and applicable to all participating team members.” This is an especially important concept in our seemingly interminable virtual workplaces. Chris suggests that, “in a work from home environment, the manager needs to be more deliberate in his/her approach to feedback… they can’t let too much time pass without engaging with their team members, and that can happen easily when you aren’t seeing them in-person, which may have previously served as a natural reminder.”
When feedback is immediate, clear, and constructive, individuals can make the connection points that are necessary to correct and improve, which produces widespread personal growth.
2. Schedule Engaging Conversations
“Feedback is something that should be regularly scheduled, as part of standing 1-on-1 meetings, for example,” according to Chris. While frequent feedback is essential to cultivating a productive learning environment, it is imperative to ensure that formality does not get in the way of productive conversation. To be most effective, you must encourage collaboration and engagement within a formalized and seemingly rigid structure. By encouraging your subordinates to share perspectives, present issues, and ask questions, you foster an ongoing dialogue. This is an integral component in supporting the continuous overall improvement of your team members.
3. Be Intentional
Throughout my basketball career, my best coach was intentional and direct with her feedback as a result of her strong ability to read the room. More specifically, she knew how to handle us both as a team and as individual players when we were not at our best. Sometimes, she resorted to yelling. Other times, it was a controlled lecture with undertones of disappointment. On one memorable occasion, she had us return to the court after a game for shooting drills once the gym had cleared. She worked at adapting her approach to what the team needed most in that very moment and was intentional with her every word and action. As a result, we improved as individuals and as a unit.
These qualities transition seamlessly to my experiences with good managers in the workplace. To be most effective, they must both observe and listen. They must ask meaningful questions and have a future-focused mindset. What does it look like when we meet or exceed our goals? How can we improve for next time? How do we best prepare for future opportunities? By anticipating and initiating dialogue, and acting with intention, their feedback supports improved future performance. Most importantly, the best managers are able to sense the needs of their employees and shift the conversation in order to deliver productive feedback.
4. Sprinkle in the Positive
As humans, we can be all too quick to notice flaws and focus on the negative(s). Just as important as addressing a weakness is recognizing positive performance and attributes. As Chris advises, “be sure that the feedback also focuses heavily on positive recognition and does not just represent a pathway for training and/or performance management.” By crafting conversations around strengths, leaders create a dialogue that is both constructive and positive in nature and ultimately supports individual development.
Every time you have the opportunity to provide feedback, it is a chance to strengthen your relationships. As a leader, your ability to create an environment in which your team members feel appreciated and understood when you deliver corrective feedback is essential to the process of sustaining long-term improvement.
