In many of my leadership and management workshops I ask participants how many of them give regular feedback to the staff they oversee. Disappointingly few hands go up. The reasons are varied: I don’t want to hurt the person’s feelings, I believe they already know this, I’m worried they’ll react badly. All of these concerns make sense, but most of them stem from problems we as managers create. Here are five common mistakes:

1. You’ve let the feedback pile up. If you lay into someone with six things he or she has done poorly, you can pretty much count on seeing an angry, defensive reaction. If instead you focus on a single high-impact concern, you can reasonably hope to have a limited and positive conversation about how this mistake affected people, productivity, etc. and what to do differently in the future.
2. You deliver a “BUT” sandwich. When your comments begin with something vague and positive like “You are a great employee” followed by “BUT your team skills could use some work,” you have employed an eraser word. Suspecting that the positive comment was only a dishonest segue, your employee will feel manipulated. You won’t have the receptive listener you intended to create. Better to begin with a respectful, positive greeting, then follow with “the reason I wanted to talk with you….”
3. Your comments judge the person, instead of his or her actions. You can certainly expect a bad response from someone if you label them as “having a bad attitude” or “demonstrating a poor work ethic.” The person will definitely not agree with you, or even understand what you mean. You will have more success if you start with a specific action you witnessed, beginning with some fact-based phrase such as, “In today’s meeting I noticed….”
4. You launch into a long sermon. If you routinely go on too long when you bring up feedback to a staff member, they naturally start to dread discussions with you. When you make feedback specific, neutral, and limited to facts, impact, and next steps, you can usually expect more receptivity to future conversations. AND better follow-up!
5. You repeat yourself. If you’ve already spoken to the person about a particular problem, don’t just play the same scene again, like in that old “Groundhog Day” movie. Play it differently, starting with words to this effect: “When we talked a couple of weeks ago, you agreed to….” Then wait. And wait more, if you have to. The ball is now in the employee’s court. See what they say, and then move on to a question like, “What would you need to do differently in order to follow through as we agreed?” Remain positive and affirming, but show that you have an expectation. If there’s still no follow-through, go ahead and move forward with the next step in your organization’s progressive-discipline system.

Should you just send the person to HR? Not yet. There will be real costs to your working relationship. I’ll discuss those in my next article.

Meanwhile, join the conversation below to share feedback strategies that have worked for you.

What tactics do you use to give good, consistent feedback?  Join the conversation by adding a comment below.

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