Giving and receiving feedback
Pens in A Box Feedback Exercise
The pens in a box feedback exercise illustrates what it feels like to work blind vs being given high quality feedback.
The Importance of Giving and Receiving Feedback
We’ve all been there. Those times when you’ve slogged your guts out on a project or piece of work, you press save and send feeling pretty pleased with your efforts, only to receive a cursory ‘thank you’ email from your manager in response.
In the short term, some us with high emotional intelligence could possibly shrug it off temporarily and move on, but for most of us, this lack of feedback could open a huge can of worms.
People naturally want to succeed at work so receiving no feedback could lead to them doubting their own abilities, believing that others are more qualified than them, feelings of anxiety about job security or promotion possibilities. In a nutshell, not giving your team members constructive feedback, can leave them feeling rudderless!
4 reasons to give and receive feedback
Feedback is a gift; it provides valuable information that gives us an opportunity to look at ourselves in a different light.
It helps us to understand how others perceive us and the impact that our behavioural style or ways of working has on others.
Feedback can enable anyone to improve their focus and results - to grow.
Feedback is key to engaging people; we generally think about feedback between a manager and a team member. However, feedback can and should be given up, down and sideways.
How to effectively give and receive feedback
Feedback needs to be heard, understood and accepted. Those are the areas in our control, we have no control over whether the person that we’re giving feedback to chooses to act upon our feedback, that’s for them to decide.
There are a number of key principles for giving and receiving effective feedback:
be timely, do it regularly, be specific, be structured and use “I” statements ‘I was surprised when you criticised the team at today’s review’.It’s also important to think about the skills that we need to receive feedback, especially when it is something that we may not want to hear or when it’s given clumsily. Active listening, using questions to clarify the situation and focusing on managing our emotions can help us to open the gift of feedback more readily.
According to the Harvard Business Review, 72% of people feel their performance would improve if their managers provided corrective feedback. The same survey found that 57% of people prefer corrective feedback to purely praise and recognition.
Remembering to provide considered, constructive feedback for every task, to every employee and fostering a culture where team members provide feedback more freely is a powerful tool that could reap long term rewards across your organisation.
References:
Your Employees Want the Negative Feedback You Hate to Give (HBR, 2014)