How Effective Leaders Give Feedback and Build Superstars
Giving effective feedback is a powerful leadership skill that lifts performance and fosters growth and development. Effective feedback is clear, constructive, and actionable. It fosters an environment of trust and performance.
.Here are the six key elements for delivering effective feedback.
Be Timely: Provide feedback, reinforcing or redirective, soon after the action or behaviour concerned. Timely feedback ensures that details are fresh in both people’s mind, has greater impact, and is perceived to be more accurate and fair than delayed feedback.
Be Specific: Instead off generalised comments like “good job” or “try harder”, be specific about what was done and its impact. Use the Situation-Behaviour-Impact (SBI) model. Identify the particular action or behaviour concerned and be clear about its impact.
Focus on Behaviour, Not Personality: Keep the feedback focused on the action or behaviour rather than making comments about personality. Identify the specific behaviours or actions and their impact rather than generalising. Instead of “You’re disorganised,” you could say, “I noticed that the meeting agenda was missing key points. Let’s work on organising it more for next time.”
Don’t Balance Positive and Constructive Feedback: The proportion of reinforcing (positive) to redirective (negative or corrective) feedback can significantly affect employee performance and motivation. The best ration is not 1:1. The "Losada Ratio" suggests a positive to negative feedback is ration of about 3:1. Other research suggests 5:1 or even 6:1. The insight for leaders is that most people perform better with significantly more reinforcing than redirective feedback.
Encourage Dialogue: Effective feedback is not a one-way street. Encouraging a two-way conversation by asking them how they see the action, or behaviour or why they did it, allows them to express their perspective, ask questions, and engage in problem-solving. If it is a redireective conversation, giving them voice by asking how they see it opens the door for them to respond positively to a coaching approach.
Be Calm, Genuine, Respectful, and Empathetic: It’s emotionally easy to give reinforcing feedback. Providing redirective feedback, when someone’s action or behaviour is not acceptable or you want it to change, is harder. This is about how you approach a feedback moment and it starts with your emotions. Negative emotion has no constructive role and the calmer and more steady you are the better. A clear, candid but almost low-key approach to redirective feedback encourages the same emotions and approach in them.
By mastering the art of effective feedback, you can empower the people you lead to reach new levels of success. They will learn they can trust your feedback and realise how it is helping them grow. When you foster this in the people you lead you create a culture of engagement, accountability, and high performance.