 Want to get the years started off right at work? Let's all commit to giving effective feedback to each other. And congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Now that we're starting 2016, let's all start off on the right foot and make a promise to ourselves to give each other effective feedback all year long. And you may be saying to yourself, didn't we just do our annual appraisals or something like that? And the answer is, I don't know, maybe. I don't know your life. But what I do know is that if we get in the right mindset to give effective feedback to each other all year long, it'll help us out a great deal when it does come to annual appraisals. There are a lot of reasons we give feedback to others. And most commonly we give feedback to correct efficiencies or problems that we see. And this is absolutely cool because these problems will never get fixed if we don't say something. But a lot of times we get so fixated on solving problems that we forget there are other times we should be giving feedback. One of the other times we should be giving feedback is to praise or highlight others for meeting or exceeding expectations. Once you let someone know that they've met or exceeded expectations, now they have an example to strive for in the future to have even better performance. And let's be honest, everyone likes to hear that they've done a great job. So who do we want to be giving feedback to? First, it's absolutely essential to let your team know how they're doing, meeting the objectives you've given them both as individuals and how they're working with each other. If they're exceeding expectations, challenge them to keep it up. If they're falling short, show them how they can do better. And if you've got a mixed bag, use your top performers to help the other ones along. Giving feedback to our peers is some of the most valuable feedback we can ever give. When we're honest with each other about how we can all work together better, we all benefit. A rising tide lifts all boats as they say. Providing feedback to our superiors may be some of the hardest feedback we have to give, but it's also some of the most important. We owe it to our bosses to give them honest and candid feedback about the initiatives they propose. This has to be navigated carefully based on the amount of trust we have with our boss, but if you need more advice, check out our video on the one challenge rule. So it's usually pretty easy to give people positive feedback, but here are some tips you can use of what you have to say isn't all that positive. First, it's important to give feedback in the context of previously stated expectations. If the expectation wasn't stated ahead of time, it's hard to hold someone to it. The idea here is to get the expectation clarified and send them off on their way so that they can meet it. It's also important to be compassionate. Try to anticipate what the person's reaction to your feedback will be. Be prepared to listen to what they have to say without judgment. Doing this can go a long way towards getting them past their emotional reaction and getting them back on the right track. The environment you choose to give feedback is also important. In the Air Force we always use to say praise in public, punish in private. Making this choice correctly can go a long way towards rewarding excellent behavior and setting a good example for others and handling a difficult situation where someone's not meeting expectations. And most importantly, don't take it personally. What you want to focus on is the bad behavior that's going on and not the individual and their worth as a person. Even though these tips were focused on giving negative feedback, you can flip them around and apply them when you're praising someone. The important thing to remember when you're praising someone for excellent work is to get it out in public and show what a great example they've done. If you're highlighting a whole team, make sure you show the individual contributions of each member of the team and how that contributed to success. The important thing to remember here and take home is that we need to give feedback as often as we can to as many people as we can and what we're trying to do is just show when people are doing a great job and maybe when they can be doing a little bit better. If you found this helpful, we still have some room and our essential skills for Millennial Leaders Workshop coming up January 16th to 18th here in Las Vegas. And if you can't join us there, every Friday morning at 10 a.m. Pacific time we have an interactive leadership discussion on BLAD and we'd love to see you there. Join us on Facebook and Twitter and also click on that globe off to the right. That'll get you to subscribe to our mailing list and that'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. I want to thank you for watching again as always and remember the future is out there. Lead the way.