Good and bad feedback
The sub-title is only to attract your attention. I intend to avoid the terms ‘good’ or ‘bad’ due to their subjectivity, as I haven’t seen a case when it adds any value to a conversation. Labeling is not helpful as well.
What to use instead? I see that the terms ‘in our interest’ vs ‘not in our interest’ instead of ‘good vs bad’ keep the conversation focused.
When speaking of feedback in a professional setting, what helps to structure the knowledge in the domain is asking a question first: what principles of giving feedback work and which don’t, or, constructive vs unconstructive.
| Constructive | Unconstructive | |
|---|---|---|
| Observations/features | assumed a dialogue which builds a bigger and the same time more nuanced picture of the topic discussed. | one person speaks, delivered as a monologue |
| Assessment focuses on… | the behaviour | the personality |
| Style of communication is… | encouraging | judgemental |
| Attitude | personal, trusting | formal |
| Support level | full support in finding options and ways towards a solution to the behaviour in question | no intend in collaboration to overcome the undesired behaviour |
There is also a term ‘negative feedback’, which is not only destructive but also doesn’t solve anything except bolstering a manager’s ego. An example of such a feedback could be: “You did a bad thing!” or “You are wrong!”, “I’m always right not you”. Keep in mind, that adults are often more rigid to changing the behavioral patterns.
A thing to avoid - misalignment in evaluation
In other words, a feeling of unfairness. One of the de-motivational factors. (there are studies confirming the importance of the feeling of unfairness, click).
The 1:1 meetings have several goals, one of them is to reduce the risk of your direct report being demotivated. One source of demotivation comes from being not in sync in how you evaluate a direct report professional performance and how your direct report evaluates themselves.
With time of cooperation you would better keeping the difference as minimum as possible. What helps is asking for self-evaluation and listening carefully (as always) to look for even slight differences, clarifying interpretations with facts following the principles of constructive feedback described above. You can also read about constructive confrontation.
Keep in mind what evaluation ‘horizon’ a 1:1 type of meeting should address.
| Horizon from an employee perspective | Frequency of the feedback |
|---|---|
| WHAT do I do? do I do the right thing? | Immediate, daily |
| HOW do I do that? is it the way expected or not? | 1:1 meeing, current activities |
| What are my overall longer term results? | 1:1 meeting and/or 3-6-12 months perf. evaluation cycle |
How to deliver feedback
There are multiple good tools that work in many but not all of the cases (remember, management is not science About people management).
One of those is Situation-Behaviour-Impact frame, which helps us to avoid aforementioned personality judgement. E.g. your partner at work makes a claim in public that their team was not able to deliver the expected results due to delays from you. You disagree but avoid public confrontation to get more data as a proof it was not a case in reality. You reach to your partner after the meeting with a feedback:
“During the call we had (situation) you said “quote” (behaviour) which is not true given the facts I can share with you now. That requires me to have stakeholders informed about the reality which takes my time for extra management, as well as you might not be seen as a person who verifies the facts (impact on both).”