 Do you just cringe inside when you think about having to give feedback? Today's tips will help you make it a more pleasant experience for everyone involved. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Effective feedback is so important to helping our teams be successful, but a lot of us hate doing it. Today I've got five tips that will help make giving feedback a much more pleasant experience for you and the person you're giving feedback to. And stay tuned to the end, I'm going to give you a link to download our free leadership development plan workbook. That'll help you set your career goals for the next two, five, and ten years and build a plan of action to achieve them. Giving feedback to others can be really hard and a lot of us have an aversion to it, partly because we've had some bad experiences getting feedback in the past, partly because we don't like giving bad news to other people and almost certainly because we want other people to like us. But giving feedback doesn't have to be an uncomfortable or unpleasant experience if we follow a few steps and make a conscious effort to think about the feedback we're giving and prepare ourselves before we actually go give that feedback. And these five tips today will help you do that. It'll help you get in a conscious mindset and put together your thoughts in a conscious way to help make that feedback a positive experience for both you and the person you're giving the feedback to. Tip number one when you're giving feedback is to focus on improvement, not on criticism. What we want to do with feedback is we want to build people up, not tear them down. And sometimes as human beings, our first emotional response is to tear that person down, but that's what we want to avoid. There's a thing I've heard before, and you've probably heard this before too, called the Sandrish method, where you start out with something good that the person has done, then you get to the meat of what the the feedback you want to give them, where the room for improvement is, and then close with something that positive that they've done as well. And that's an effective technique if you're looking for a place to start. Now sometimes the Sandrish technique isn't always appropriate. Sometimes there's a lot more that needs to be improved than there is positive. But in most situations, there's very rarely a case where there's nothing positive to build on. You almost always have something positive that you can build on, and you need to start the feedback with that or end the feedback with that, and then talk about the areas that need improvement. Tip number two is to make sure you choose the right venue for giving the feedback, and this is really important. If you've got to give someone negative feedback, you really want to do it in public in front of everyone else. Maybe you do that privately in your own office, or if you're going to give them some positive praise and you want to recognize them for something great they've done, maybe you go down to their work area and do that in front of everybody else. The rule we used to use in the Air Force as a general rule was to praise in public, punish in private. And again, that doesn't cover every situation, but that's kind of a good general rule. So if you're getting started giving feedback, or if you're looking for a tip to improve, think about the venue, praise in public, punish in private. Now there are times that punish in private, well, punish in private should always be. But if you've really got to give some negative feedback, like in a safety situation or a security situation, sometimes it's important to gather the whole group together and say, look, here's the thing that happened. Here's what we need to do to improve it. This can't happen again because it's a safety or security issue, and we need everyone to knob their heads up and down saying they understand this, they need to look you all in the eye and make sure you understand it. So praise in public, punish in private is a good general rule, but think about the situation and if something's urgent, you might need to gather everyone together and talk about, here's the problem, here's how we're fixing it, let's go forward. As you're preparing yourself to go give this feedback, go back to what the expectations were of what you asked the person to do in the first place. Did they meet the expectations? Did they fall short of the expectations? Or did they exceed the expectations? And it's important to think carefully, was that expectation communicated clearly to this person? So many times people fall short of expectations because they might not have been communicated clearly, whether that was by us or by someone else. When you go have this conversation, if the person comes back and says, I didn't understand that was the expectation, now there's a whole new conversation to have about setting that expectation clearly and what do we do going forward. So, but if it turns out that expectation was set clearly, focus on the expectation. Did the person meet it just barely, but met it at the bare minimum? Did they exceed it, which is great, we want to give them a lot of recognition for that? Or did they fall short? And if they did fall short, why did they fall short? What areas they fall short in? And what can be done? What are the steps forward going to be to get to that minimum expectation? Tip number four is don't make it personal. We want to address the behavior and not the individual. As much as we might feel hurt or disrespected because someone didn't do something that we asked them to do, we don't want to attack them personally. Their value as a human being isn't tied up in whether they met a deadline we gave them or not. If we insult them or judge them or make them feel like they're being judged while we're talking to them and giving them this feedback, they're probably going to tune out all the important, valuable feedback we have for them in addition to the insults we might be hurling at them. So, what we want to do, even when someone's done something egregiously bad, if it's not bad enough that we're getting rid of them, that we're taking them off the team, we want to improve them, we want to focus on that behavior and not the individual. We aren't attacking the worth of an individual. We're trying to improve the behavior. Final tip for you, have a plan going forward. Don't just tell whoever it is that you're giving the feedback to that they didn't do a good job. Have a plan for how, as a team or even as an individual, they're going to go forward and improve the situation and improve their skills and traits in order to keep this from happening again in the future and develop them as an individual and as a leader. If you've got positive feedback to give to someone, think about how you're going to do this. What's the plan you're going to use? What are you going to put together to make sure that they get praised, they get recognized, and you do it in such a way that it encourages that same kind of behavior among the team, like we said before with the praise in public, punishment in private. If this is behavior you want to encourage on the rest of your team, you probably want to have a plan to recognize this person in front of the whole team so that it encourages the behavior that you want to see as part of your team. I presented these five tips as if you're a manager trying to give feedback to one of your team members and improve your team member or multiple team members. These five tips work just as well if you've got to give feedback to a peer or even to your boss. Telling your boss that their idea is not a great one or having to give them some bad news is probably more difficult than trying to tell someone who you're a manager of that they didn't meet the expectation. But try to apply these five tips. If you've got a peer you've got to go give some feedback to or even give some feedback to your boss on some of their decisions or the policies they're putting in place or the path forward. Try these five tips. I think you'll find that these will make what could be a really unpleasant experience for anyone giving feedback. You can turn this into a really positive experience where your folks done improvement not just for yourself but for the team and everyone around you. If you found this helpful please like comment and share it with a friend or co-worker. Click on that link below in the description. That'll take you to where you can download our free leadership development plan workbook and that'll help you set your career goals for the next two five and ten years and build a plan of action to achieve them. If you have any leadership or business questions leave us a comment below. We love to hear from you or email us at info at EvilGeniusLeadership.com. EvilGeniusLeadership.com is also where you can find out about all of our leadership coaching and training programs. So if you want to do some one-on-one work or even have us do some work with your team check that out and we'll set you up with a free consultation and talk about how we might be able to help you. Thanks for watching today. I really appreciate it and remember the future is out there. Leave the way.