PRACTICES. Giving negative feedback

If you’re reading this, it’s perhaps because you want to help develop someone and get them to be even more efficient at what they do. Yet, giving them feedback seems like one of the more difficult tasks you face.

The good news is that the skills needed to give feedback are completely learnable. Below are five ways that will help you deliver negative feedback effectively and keep the receiver from flinging your valuable feedback onto the discard pile.

Create safety One way to create safety is to avoid shaming. Instead of causing your recipient to feel shame or loss of respect, make them feel cared for and valued. Help them see that your feedback is actually a ‘gift’. Don’t stop at that. Go on to show them how changing their behaviour will help them. If you understand and manage people’s emotions and speak to their interests, they are much more likely to be receptive to your feedback.

Time it well Knowing when and how often to give feedback is very useful. Generally speaking, early feedback is more productive. People tend to grasp better and can make changes while they are still mindful of the performance or behaviour in question. However, don’t give feedback too quickly. Give people reasonable time to reflect and self-evaluate before offering any feedback.

Be specific Give your recipient information about specific aspects of their performance that they can actually change. One way to achieve this is through the SBI Feedback Tool developed by the Centre for Creative Leadership. Here’s how it works:

Situation Definition: First, contextualise your feedback by specifying the where and when of the situation you're referring to.

Behavior Description: Next, objectively describe specific aspects of their job or behaviour that you want to address, without making any assumptions. Let the receiver know exactly what they did that had impact.

Impact Assessment: Finally, encourage the other person to think about the impact of their performance or behaviour on you or others. Stick to the facts from your point of view. Avoid making statements such as “You NEVER listen to me.’’ Instead, try “I have trouble getting my point across to you and, more often than not, I feel unheard.”

Don’t Confuse A classic mistake people make while delivering negative feedback is mixing positive messages with negative ones. People like to believe that it’s easier for recipients to hear and accept negative feedback when it is ‘balanced’ with positive feedback.

However, in practice, this is not true. “Sandwiching’’ bad news between good news leaves the recipient very confused, causes them to doubt the genuineness of your positive feedback, and makes them ever more anxious and uncomfortable.

If you want to give negative feedback productively, do so in a direct yet considerate manner.

Help set goals The purpose of giving negative feedback shouldn’t be to criticise endlessly someone’s work or get to them change their personality. In fact, if your feedback is closely related to the recipient’s self-concept, they will be distracted from task or behaviour improvement and begin to feel angry, indignant and exasperated.

Instead, focus on motivating the receiver of your feedback to move into a problem-solving conversation with you. Help them set goals that will shrink the gap between actual performance and desired performance.

When you are done playing the critique’s role, evolve to being their coach. It is the receiver, and not you, the feedback giver, who decides what to let in and what to keep out.

However, if you develop a solid feedback strategy, you will no longer need to ‘push’ your feedback through people. Instead, you can get them to improve their ability to ‘pull’ feedback from you.

The writer is Co-Founder, Work Better Training & Development

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