I found that people were using the open forum comments section to criticise and denounce aspects of the survey they did not agree with. It staggered me as to how damaging this feedback was.
Feedback is supposed to be a gift
Usually I find that managers find it hard to give valuable and constructive (but often negative) feedback to support and develop their employees. I work hard to support them to have the management courage to ignore the short term uncomfortable situation in order to give this ultimately positively impacting feedback.
Here I found feedback being given but in entirely the wrong way. I could see it being taken in no other way than negatively, with no real support to help the individual improve. One of the biggest problems was that it was given in an open forum, hardly an environment where the individual would be focused on the feedback itself and learning from it, rather than worrying about what everyone else reading it would be thinking.
Would you walk up to one of your employees in the middle of the office and give them feedback in front of everyone else on what they did wrong and what you therefore thought of their work? Of course not.
That's the key message with feedback.
It has to be given in a way that helps and directs the individual to make the improvement by promoting reflection and learning. Anything other than that is scoring points against them. You may not mean it, but that's the impact.
Feedback is a gift but as the giver of it (the communicator), you have to responsibility to ensure you do it right.
Please see my website at www.managingforthefirsttime.com for more techniques, tips and advice on this topic and others.
(Photo by striatic via flickr used under a creative Commons Licence)
No comments:
Post a Comment