How do you give feedback?

How to give feedback? The goal of feedback is to help employees improve their performance. We want employees to improve their performance. Make a valuable contribution to the team. We want our company to become a workspace where employees can openly communicate with each other to develop and improve their performance. 

#How to give feedback? 

Over the past 20 years, many companies have struggled to create a motivational feedback culture. What has often been forgotten is why we do it in the first place. Telling employees that they’re missing the mark doesn’t move the company forward. It’s not the same as helping them reach the goal. 

And what about positive feedback that highlights what employees have done well? It’s really just another form of criticism. By focusing on the positive, you don´t necessarily address the weaknesses that stand in the way of better performance. 

#1 Feedback: Shift from critic to ally. 

Everyone wants to talk to an ally. No one wants to talk to a critic. As an ally, you show that you care, trust, and advocate for the employee. 

So how can you make it clear that you are an ally and not a critic? It’s best to follow these three rules: 

Have compassion. 

Express your confidence. 

Request permission. 

Imagine a colleague is struggling as a team leader and can’t get along with a team member. Starting a conversation with an “ally” can go like this: “That sounds really frustrating. And I know you can handle it. Shall we think through the team situation together?” 

#2 Feedback: Determine a motivating outcome. 

Once you’ve said “yes,” it’s tempting to go back to the problem – the frustrating past. Don’t do that yet. 

Instead, focus on motivating outcomes you want to create. “What is the outcome you are striving for?” Allow your colleague to articulate what they want to achieve for themselves and for the company. “I’d like to build a high-performing team where we can openly communicate, collaborate, and forge ideas.” 

#3 Feedback: Discover hidden opportunities. 

Once you are clear with your colleague about the desired outcome, then you can revisit the problem. But don’t try to “solve” it, ask, “How can this problem help us achieve the outcome?” 

You may find, along with your colleague, that the employee labeled “disruptive” is actually the only one on the team willing to engage in conflict to address important issues. 

#4 Feedback: Evaluate the chances of success. 

In this step, you guide your colleague on how to now choose an action plan and commit to implementing it. Ask your colleague to rate the likelihood of success for their action plan: “On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you that you will implement this plan?” 

Skillful feedback can be a tool to help people identify their blind spots. In this way, opportunities for growth can be unleashed. How do you give Feedback?

How do you give feedback? 

How do you give feedback? You might also be interested in this agile feedback technique… 

Throughout their careers, employees are taught to adapt – to the status quo, to the opinions and behaviors of others. This pressure to adapt increases the higher we climb the career ladder. The price employees and companies pay for this is a decline in engagement and innovation rates. 

To succeed and thrive, organizations must strike a balance between compliance with formal and informal rules that provide necessary structure and freedom that helps employees do their best work. Kill the Stupid Rule is a technique for breaking down too much conformity and creating freedom for new things. 

Why is conformity so prevalent? 

Early in life, we learn that there are tangible benefits to following social rules. When we conform, we feel accepted and part of the majority. 

Conformity in the workplace takes many forms: mimicking the behavior of others in similar roles, expressing appropriate emotions, wearing appropriate clothing, condoning poor decisions by a team. 

And all too often, giving in to peer pressure leads individuals to care less about their work. That’s understandable: conformity often conflicts with our true preferences and beliefs. 

We get too comfortable with the status quo. In organizations, standard practices and the usual ways of thinking and acting play a crucial role in shaping performance over time. 

But they can also keep us from moving forward, diminish our commitment, and affect our ability to innovate or deliver excellence. 

You can break this conformity with positive feedback. Use Kill the Stupid Rule as an agile feedback technique. 

Agile feedback technique: What is Kill the Stupid Rule? 

This method is used in the feedback process to identify paralyzing, demotivating, turnover-destroying ballast and replace it with simpler, more contemporary procedures. This helps us to question our processes and procedures. This creates more time for customer-centric work and more agility at work. 

Kill the Stupid Rule helps you identify and, if possible, eliminate barriers and obstacles in the form of rules with the help of input and feedback from your employees. You learn to give feedback openly and honestly, to question and improve what has been tried and tested. 

How do you give feedback? Using the Kill the Stupid Rule strategy, leaders can encourage constructive nonconformity in the feedback process. 

#1 Give your employees the opportunity to be themselves 

Encourage your employees to think about what makes them authentic. This can be done at the very beginning of the feedback process. 

How do you give feedback? Give your employees half an hour to think about what is unique about them, what makes them authentic, and how they can express their authentic nature at work. 

As a leader, you can encourage this kind of reflection even if employees are already with the company. Challenge your employees and your leaders to think about what makes them unique and authentic and how they can shape their work. 

Tell your employees what task to do, not how to do it. 

Let your employees solve their own problems. As a leader, you can promote authenticity by letting your employees decide how to handle certain situations. 

Let your employees define their tasks. The following set-up will help you: Employees write their personal mission statements, expressing who they are and setting their goals for a specific period of time. As an employee, what do I want to contribute to the success of the company? 

#2 Encourage your employees to highlight their particular strengths. 

Give your employees the opportunity to recognize their strengths. You can do this best by tailoring jobs to employees’ strengths.  Employees can design tasks to match the strengths of newcomers. This ensures that employees end up where they fit best. 

How do you give feedback? Discovering employees’ strengths takes time and effort. 

#3 Question the status quo 

And this is what maximum conformity looks like: The way we’ve always done it. With Kill the Stupid Rule, you encourage employee engagement and innovation. Standard practices are consistently challenged. 

Ask “why?” and “what if?”. Leaders who challenge the status quo in the feedback conversation give employees a reason to engage and often introduce new ideas that can rejuvenate the company. 

Emphasize that the company is not perfect. Emphasizing that we are all human and that the company will never be perfect gives employees the freedom to constructively address nonconformity. 

#4 Create challenging experiences 

When work offers little variety and challenge, employees easily become bored and fall back into routine. And employees who find their work boring lack the motivation to perform well and creatively. With Kill the Stupid Rule, you create new challenges in the feedback process. With positive feedback you create a framework that promotes the commitment of your employees.