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How to give feedback effectively Are your employees too sensitive to negative feedback, or have you just been delivering it poorly? Aytekin Tank outlines five ways to ensure feedback is well received
PAUL GREEN and his colleagues at Harvard Business School believe negative feedback – on its own – rarely leads to improvement. Instead, it spurs us to remove ourselves from the partner or group where we’ve received the feedback and ‘shop’ for confirmation among new social circles. At work, that means we will seek out a new arrangement for our next project. If stuck with a certain partner or in a specific department, we might feel the urge to form relationships with people in other departments – anything to confirm the positive view of our actions and values within the company. When we can’t maintain that positive confirmation, it isn’t pretty. Physical consequences like anxiety and depression can threaten to pull us deeper into a spiral of poor behaviour and, in turn, negative feedback. This need to protect our psyche is how and why we end up creating – and subconsciously locking ourselves into – our own echo chambers. Yes, feedback is a necessary evil – and
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there aren’t many things I’d say that about. Feedback is a multi-faceted concept that’s vital to the way many of us work and live. So I thought I’d dig into just why feedback is such a hard pill to swallow and a few ways I’ve learned to deliver it effectively over the years.
Setting the stage for feedback delivery Delivering feedback, especially negative, is far more complex than telling an employee what they need to fix and expecting them to scamper off and focus on those items in a vacuum devoid of their own emotions. The tactical tricks that I’ll get into here won’t prove effective without setting the stage with an affirmative work environment in which opportunities for positive confirmation and supportive relationships flourish. Think of your relationship with your partner or a longtime friend. A single discomfiting remark from one of them certainly wouldn’t send you running for the hills, would it? Negative feedback can lead to improve-
ment when given in a confirming environment where the receiver feels supported and valued. When it comes to the workplace, there are many systems in place that erode the sense of value employees feel they offer the organization. Competition for promotions, commission-based salaries and poorly executed peer reviews can certainly degrade any positive confirmation and lead to feedback falling on deaf ears. Once you’re able to create an environment in which your workers feel valued and confirmed in their positive attributes, you can try these five methods I’ve used to deliver feedback they can actually act on.
1. Encourage continued conversation with subjective feedback It’s tough to give feedback that people don’t want to run screaming from. And it can be even more challenging when it comes to giving feedback for creative work. On JotForm, our users use our online form
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5/04/2019 3:16:57 AM