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Quite often people perceive feedback as negative .They associate it with pointing of fingers and blame. When you call a team member in to talk, the first thought that crosses his/her mind’ is ‘where did I go wrong?’ anxiety, fear, stress and frustration usually prevent people from taking inputs in the right spirit.

So, before you give your valuable suggestions and advice to your team get the buy-in for feedback from them. Your feedback will be effective only when the team is positively inclined towards it. As a first step, try and disassociate feedback from negative perceptions.

This is by no means an easy task. To make people feel excited and not cynical about feedback, you must make quite a few changes in the way you deliver the critique.

Continuous exercise:

Don’t wait until the work is over to give your feedback. Learn to discuss performance on a regular basis. This will help to reduce stress and remove fear out of the process. Your team members will start perceiving feedback as a natural and essential part of work.

Feedback is an important tool to rectify mistakes and to reinforce good performance and hence should be used effectively. Delaying your conversation with the team members will lessen the impact of what you intend to convey.

Change mindset:

Managers typically regard giving feedback as inviting trouble. Do you also subscribe to such thinking and view feedback as a necessary evil? If yes, then it is only natural for your team to perceive feedback in a negative light.

First of all you must acknowledge the value of feedback in managing performance. When you take forward the process with conviction things will fall in place.

Share thoughts:

When issues arise listen to what your people have to say. Your efforts to understand their take on the matter will certainly help in building the necessary trust in your relationship. Once trust is established automatically. They will be willing to respond positively to your inputs and also share their thoughts with you.

When things go wrong don’t look for scapegoats, look for solution—oriented approach will prevent people from turning defensive and helps them to focus on improving performance. Create opportunities for your team to solve problems collectively.

This will not only increase emotional bonding within the team, but will also help them become adept at learning and building on each other’s work.

Don’t decide the team goals on your own. Instead involve your team in the exercise. Let them explore and find out ways by which they can meaningfully contribute towards the overall objectives of the organization.

This will perk up their enthusiasm for work. Goal achievement becomes a matter of prestige and pride. When this happens, they will begin to seek feedback voluntarily to know how they are faring.

Holding regular meetings with the team is the best means to ensure that they get the feedback they need on time.

You can use these meeting to highlight the hits and misses and plan next steps.

Apart from this you must also hold one-to-one meetings with individuals at least once in a month to build a closer rapport with them.

This will give an opportunity to discuss with the individual his expectations, concerns, what needs improvement.

The information will help you to provide appropriate support and to contribute effectively towards the individual’s growth, development and progress.

Feedback need not be an elaborate exercise always. Simple comments if given regularly are more than sufficient to help the team proceed in the right direction.

Courtesy: The Hindu

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 19th, 2010 at 3:55 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.