As an executive coach, you may be asked to provide team mentoring feedback to help your clients improve their performance, collaboration, and alignment. However, giving feedback to a group of people can be challenging, especially if you want to avoid bias and foster trust. How can you provide team mentoring feedback without bias? Here are some tips to help you.
Before you give any feedback, you need to clarify the purpose and scope of your team mentoring. What are the goals, expectations, and outcomes of the feedback process? How will you measure and evaluate the results? How will you communicate and follow up with the team? By defining the purpose and scope, you can set clear and realistic expectations for yourself and the team, and avoid confusion and misunderstanding.
Having a conversation with Team stakeholders to understand the vision, purpose and strategy of team coaching helps coach to get a clarity on the same. Need to check on what criteria would be used to measure and evaluate the results, along with frequency.
To give unbiased team feedback, establish clear criteria and a culture of openness. Use specific examples and balance positive with constructive feedback. Be consistent and focus on behaviors, not personalities. Encourage self-assessment and regular check-ins, and be open to dialogue. Remember, feedback is a tool for growth, not criticism.
A structured framework can help you organize and deliver your feedback in a consistent and objective way. For example, you can use the SBI model, which stands for Situation, Behavior, and Impact. This model helps you describe the specific situation where you observed the behavior, the behavior itself, and the positive or negative impact of the behavior on the team or the organization. By using a structured framework, you can avoid vague or subjective feedback, and focus on facts and evidence.
Yes, and additionally, ensure that some KPIs are involved in the feedback. That helps them better understand whether the feedback is for improvement or appraisal. Transforming soft skills into indicators is more challenging than it may seem. However, observable conduct aligned with the core values is an excellent way to do it.
A common mistake when giving team mentoring feedback is to focus only on the negative aspects, or to praise the team without providing any suggestions for improvement. This can create a biased impression of the team's performance, and demotivate or discourage them. To avoid this, you need to balance positive and constructive feedback, and highlight both the strengths and the areas of development of the team. By doing this, you can acknowledge and appreciate the team's achievements, and also help them identify and address their challenges.
Another way to reduce bias in your team mentoring feedback is to involve the team in the feedback process. This means asking the team for their self-assessment, their perspectives, and their feedback on each other. By doing this, you can create a dialogue and a learning opportunity, rather than a one-way transmission of information. You can also encourage the team to share their feedback with you, and to give you constructive criticism on your coaching style and methods.
I use this approach extensively. This leaves me to observe what they notice and bring up, as well as how the rest of the team responds. I may then add a very observations of my own - including what I noticed about their own feedback. My ultimate aim is to build their own capabilities to give each other feedback to improve performance.
Finally, you need to adapt your feedback to the team's context and culture. This means understanding the team's background, values, norms, and preferences, and tailoring your feedback accordingly. For example, some teams may prefer direct and candid feedback, while others may prefer indirect and polite feedback. Some teams may value individual recognition, while others may value collective achievement. By adapting your feedback to the team's context and culture, you can avoid cultural or personal bias, and respect and connect with the team.
One of the best ways to set up for feedback success is to have the conversation about feedback ahead of time: why is feedback important to you? How do you tend to react to it and how do you best receive feedback? What is going to be our main channel for delivering feedback and how shall we handle more tricky feedback delivery. Think of this as a prebiotic for the main feedback conversation!
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Mentoring feedback implies some element of mission, purpose or goals are not where they need to be. Who set the expectations, what were they, how was it communicated & agreed. Clarity of mission, purpose and goals allows for team self diagnosis and remedy by the team. Which brings up culture. How have the team agreed to belong to each other and the purpose? Ideal is to set the right expectations (as a team) for mission, purpose and goal commitment to allow for self diagnosis and self remedy with how people will belong to each other in dialogue agreed before pressure is on. Then it’s (everyone’s) observations for where they are seeing / not seeing gaps and asking questions to foster discernment. Iterate and learn together.
Providing unbiased team mentoring feedback can be achieved by understanding the archetypal motivations and performance qualities of each team member. Each individual operates based on certain archetypal qualities, which strongly influence their motivations, actions, and reactions. Basing your feedback on these qualities ensures that it's tailored to the individual's inherent tendencies and is thus free from bias. This approach allows for fair, effective feedback that respects and fosters each team member's unique potential, hence promoting a more harmonious and productive team environment.