Giving feedback

Management is all about people. A good manager ensures that his team is continuously improving. Improvement demands that weaknesses and gaps be identified and suitable actions be taken to address them. For action to be taken, you need to apprise people of their weaknesses without demotivating them and that is non-trivial. Giving feedback is one of the most important and delicate tasks that a manager needs to perform.

When?
When to give feedback is something that many get wrong. In most organizations giving feedback is an annual ritual that most employees and managers dread. If you, as a manager or a team member, feel anxiety as feedback time approaches then you should reevaluate the way your current feedback process has been constituted.

Giving feedback is a continuous process. You should give feedback at an opportune moment as soon as you evaluate a task. This helps in more ways than one. Firstly, the task and experience is fresh. It is so much easier to discuss and take away actionable items at that time rather than after several months have elapsed and entire process becomes dependent on recollections - where there is bound to be significant disconnect. Secondly, continuous feedback is easy to assimilate and act upon as compared to when a whole lot is dumped on the receiver once a year. It provides ample time for learning and course correction. This is what truly provides an opportunity to learn from mistakes. Thirdly, employees tend to finish tasks with higher quality when they know that they would be evaluated immediately.

What?
Feedback is of two kinds - positive and negative. Most managers tend to provide only negative feedback. While the underlying intent might be to point out areas of improvement, it is equally important to let the team members know what they are doing well and encourage them to keep doing it. Giving positive feedback, encouraging team members, and helping them find their strengths is just as important as helping them find and improve their weaknesses.

How?
Useful feedback is direct. It addresses the actual issue instead of beating around the bush. Being direct does not mean being judgmental or focusing on recipient's personality. Instead it should be considerate, encouraging and focused on specific behavior that needs to be addressed. E.g. If you were to tell an employee that they are poor at software design, they would become defensive and would argue hard to defend their designs. After all, no one intentionally does a bad design - they are doing what they believe is the best. Instead, if you were to nudge them towards a better design approach and let them come up with a better design and later on just ask them to consider more approaches and possibly read up on few good software design books, they would feel good about it and work enthusiastically to design better. Same applies to feedback about one's conduct. Telling a person that they are rude is much less likely to produce desired results than discussing a specific instance and asking them if situation was handled a little differently, could the results have been better.



For feedback to be effective, you need to think it through before entering a feedback session. If you as a provider, do not have any specific message before you enter the meeting, it is highly likely that the recipient would also part without any specific message.

Two additional things that influence the effectiveness of the feedback session are sincerity and sensitivity. Each individual is unique and if you need to communicate the same message to two different individuals, you may have to fine tune it to match their personalities. You have to be sensitive to their needs and reactions. Lastly, insincere feedback that is not aimed at helping others improve is easily detected and quickly discarded by all.