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Feedback - the food of growth?

Giving feedback is a key management skill, yet, so many managers I meet worry about how to do it. Let’s face it – we don’t have many great role models out there, do we? Looking at some of the TV programmes with a ‘feedback’ element probably won’t help ….

Britain’s Got Talent has a great feature – if the judges don’t like someone’s performance they press a loud buzzer and a big red cross lights up, how well would that go down at work? To be fair, they do back it up with comments, ‘that was lousy’, ‘You have a dreadful singing voice’, ‘ I hated it…’ How helpful is that to the individual? How does it help them to improve?

The ‘X Factor’ works along similar lines, quite subjective – not always helpful even with the positive comments: ‘ I really love your voice’ ‘ You did really well tonight’ WHAT did the singer do that was good? We learn a lot from feedback about what we do well but it has to contain information about our behaviour or performance for it to be useful to us.

A recent series on BBC 2 – The Speaker, was looking for the Young Speaker of the Year and there were some amazingly confident 14-18 year olds on that programme. The judges and mentors were particularly good at giving helpful, constructive feedback. They clearly described what they liked or didn’t like, why it worked or didn’t work and if it didn’t what else the presenter could have done instead. So there’s a great structure for you …

What and Why for positive feedback and for things you’d like someone to do differently or better, use the What, Why, What structure. For example:

WHAT – you asked that customer some great open questions

WHY – that worked well because you were able to gather all the information needed in order to solve their problem.

Or

WHAT – you did most of the talking in the last meeting and gave no opportunity for the team to contribute

WHY – that didn’t work because you didn’t get any ideas from the team

WHAT – you could have done instead was ask questions and pause more …

Try it next time you have to give feedback and let us know how it works for you.

Margaret Burnside