 Giving honest, useful feedback can be hard to do. If the feedback is critical, we're worried about offending the other person, creating resentment, ruining relationships and making our own lives harder at work. When we're giving compliments, how do we make the feedback useful to further improve performance or behaviors? In this video, I share how to tackle giving really useful feedback, positive and negative to others on their performance that they will appreciate and that will help them improve what they do. My name is Jess Coles and I've spent 25 years managing teams in corporates and household names through to SMEs at all management levels. And I've won best team prizes at national and company level. If you're new to this channel, Enhance.training provides online business courses to help professionals, managers and business owners improve their performance. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe and share it with friends. So let's talk about how to give performance feedback to team members. It can feel easier and safer not to give feedback. If you don't give feedback, you probably won't offend others. I can understand why this can be appealing when you have to work alongside your team members most days and keep good professional relationships. When you become a manager, I don't believe you have a choice. You have to give feedback on the team performance if you want the team to perform and improve. If you want to do a good job as a manager and if you want to keep your team members longer. So let's explore this a little more before we talk about how to give feedback. If you're new to management, giving feedback is probably something you're nervous about. I certainly was in my early management days. The best way to get more comfortable giving feedback is to practice. And of course by practicing, you get better at delivering feedback. The worst thing you can do is not give any feedback to your team members. On the screen is research by Gallup showing the impact of no feedback. 40% of employees are actively disengaged compared to 1% who receive positive feedback and 22% who receive negative feedback. As a manager, if you want to do your job well, you must give feedback and this study confirms this. So let's talk about how to give performance feedback to team members. Why you give feedback to your team members matters. Now for instance, if we're giving feedback because that is what you have been told to do and you've read that's what managers should do then the feedback you give will probably have mixed results at best. If you're taking the time to give feedback then make sure you're genuinely trying to help the other person. Make sure you're trying your hardest to help the other person improve their approach, improve their skills or improve their attitude. Then it's up to the other person to choose to use that feedback to improve or not. If you care, if you want to help the other person improve this will absolutely come across in how you give your feedback on what you choose to compliment them on and what you choose to pull them up on. And just as importantly, the other team members will see you trying to help them. There is nothing better than working for a manager that puts time into trying to improve our careers. And if the manager cares it certainly takes a sting out on some of the criticism. So if you think this feedback business all seems like work with no reward then think again. The more you help your team do a better job the more they will be able to deliver. The better they perform as a team the more rewards you get as a manager of that team. Promotions, more staff added to your team, bonuses, et cetera. And in my experience the work put into improving each person in the team as much as you're able to do is payback many times over. So from my point of view improving your team is an absolute no brainer as a manager. Give feedback to team members in a timely fashion. You know if they've just finished a great piece of work then tell them that shortly after you finish reviewing it don't wait two days or a week or until their next appraisal. Tell them as soon as practical. The longer you wait the less valuable the feedback becomes. You imagine this sort of conversation. Manager, I was really impressed by that report you did. It was a really good work. Team member, what piece of work do you mean? Manager, the report you gave me three months ago. Team member, thanks for the compliment. I'm still not sure which report you mean. If I were the team member I'd be pretty disappointed by this point and I wouldn't feel like I've received a compliment. When you give feedback make sure it is as soon after the event or the behavior that prompted the feedback. This way it is fresh in everyone's mind and it comes across as more spontaneous and more genuine. Another reason why you should give feedback quickly is that if they've done something really well you want them to repeat it. If they've done something poorly you want to help them correct it quickly not in a week's time or a month's time or so on. If the team member doesn't know if what they're doing is good work they may not repeat it as much as you'd like. If what they did is poor they won't know they need to change it unless you tell them. So you'll have poor work for longer which doesn't make much sense. So give yourself time to think through the feedback that you want to give and then give the feedback as quickly as practical. Be honest when giving feedback. If you genuinely want to help the other person and your team overall then being honest is the best approach. Being honest gives the most accurate picture that you can provide to the other person. If someone did something that was okay don't pick out the good part and only compliment them on that. This doesn't help them or you or the team. If you do this the other person will think what they're doing is actually fine and do more of it or repeat it to the same okay standard. Say that the overall work was okay. Then pick out the bits that were done well and then pick out the bits that could be improved upon. Offer suggestions on how they can improve the weaker areas. I would suggest that you don't beat around the bush and that you get to the point. Be direct and be honest in your feedback. Of course be as sensitive and as empathetic as practical. You'll need to work out the approach that works best for you while being honest with your feedback. Don't shy away from the more difficult conversations. No one finds them easy even if you've had the experience of 20 years managing teams. You must be honest which means talking about the areas that the other person may not like hearing about or may resent you for raising or they may dislike you because you bring it up. And lastly the research shows to keep a team member happy you need to compliment them about three times as much as you criticize them. So keep an eye out for the good work and behaviors and shout about them. That said, don't step away from the harder conversations either. The clearer and more specific your feedback the more useful your feedback. Let me give you an example. Imagine there was a dispute between two team members and you diffuse the situation so that both parties accepted the compromise without any hard feelings towards the other person. Your manager says, well done, that was good work. Or your manager could have said, great work in sorting out that situation. I particularly liked how you listened to both sides point of view without taking sides and then got them both into a room and got them to iron out their own differences. You kept yourself from making a decision for them forcing them to reach a joint conclusion making sure both were brought into the outcome. I was really impressed, well done. Let me ask you, which piece of feedback is more useful? Which piece of feedback tells you that your manager really was paying attention and thought about what they're gonna say before complimenting you? Which shows your manager cares more about your development? Taking the time to be specific takes effort and the rewards of that effort are staff that care about what you say and are much, much more likely to take what you say in. You have made the effort therefore they are more willing to do so too. Being specific also gives them much more direction as to what they're doing well and what they're not and this is so important. Think about the first compliment given in the examples we just talked about. Does it tell you anything other than your manager is happy? I don't think so and you don't really know what the manager really likes so you can't repeat it. I've been extremely lucky in my career to have had some amazing managers that gave me lots of specific feedback good and bad. They were amazing to work for. I've also had the other end of the scale in which you get absolutely no feedback at all. So remember, make sure your feedback is clear to the point and specific. Try to make your feedback about what has happened not about the other person. For example, imagine that someone has done a piece of work poorly. As a manager if you said to that person you're rubbish or you didn't really think about that did you? I would imagine the other person would tune out everything else that you might say and be pretty angry at you as well. This is hardly gonna help improve performance or help their goodwill. And if you think this type of thing doesn't happen unfortunately it does. I've spoken to quite a few people that have experienced this themselves or have seen other people experiencing it. So keep your comments specific as mentioned previously and keep them focused on the task or the approach as much as possible. Asking questions to get the other person thinking can also be a very useful approach. Here are two examples of giving feedback. Firstly, a direct approach. I don't think you spent enough time analysing data which is why you're struggling to get solid insights for this group of customers. You've looked at the revenue and the gross margins. You haven't done much on the mix of products. This is where most of the problems are. Should we sit down and go through the product mix together? And an indirect approach could be used by asking a set of questions to get the team member thinking and giving you the answers. Here's some examples could be how well did you feel this piece of work went? Or what areas of analysis might you have missed that hampered you getting insights? What stopped you looking into the mix of products for each customer? What would you do differently next time? Asking questions can be a good approach to really get by in and drive the learning home. Keep your feedback about the actions or the lack of them or about what they could have done rather than about the personal traits or about them more generally, where it all possible. And finally, ideally, feedback should be a two-way street. If you're giving feedback to improve the performance of team members, then it makes just as much sense to get feedback to improve your own performance as a manager or leader. As a manager, getting useful feedback from your boss can be hard. Getting feedback or useful feedback from your team members is even harder. We have a natural tendency to present the good news to our managers where after all they control or influence our bonuses, our promotion prospects, what projects we work on and so on. It can be quite scary to give honest and useful feedback to our manager. So as a manager, if you want to get useful feedback, then you've got to make it as easy as possible for your team members to give you feedback. Ask them regularly for feedback. And if they're only giving you positive feedback, then ask, what is the one thing you think I should improve upon? Or a similar type of question. When they give you feedback, listen carefully. Thank them. And then go away and think about what has been said. If it's been critical, don't get defensive. Don't justify why you've done what you've done, et cetera. If you think that the person has a point, then work on changing what they've been highlighting. Other very useful options for getting useful feedback as a manager are, anonymous 360 degree feedback surveys, third party coaching with a qualified coach, you're a third party mentor, or maybe potentially coaching or mentoring from an internal person who's not your line manager. If you want to improve your management leadership skills, then getting feedback from any source is a very good idea. If you don't know what is going well or what is not, it's harder to change what you do to further improve. So in summary, giving useful, honest feedback can be hard work, yet if you want your team to improve, then you must give feedback. Tell it how it is. Make sure your feedback is honest and clear when you give it. And remember, to keep a team member happy, you need to compliment them three times more than you criticize. That doesn't let you off the hook for delivering the critical feedback. Just make sure the feedback you do give is as useful as possible to the other person. The more you practice, the better you'll get at delivering feedback. And the better your team will get and the better you will be viewed as a manager and leader. So giving feedback means everyone wins. Do visit us at enhance.training and take a look at the courses and resources to help you manage your team more effectively. If you liked this video, please hit the thumbs up button below and subscribe and hit the bell to get notified of a weekly video releases. This really helps us to produce more videos to help you. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon.