How The Best Leaders Deliver Difficult Feedback (5 Practices)

One of the most important aspects of a leader's role is to deliver difficult feedback to help their employees grow, adapt, and perform. Too often, I have seen leaders choose to ignore this important responsibility, usually because they are uncomfortable with challenging feedback conversations. Unfortunately, by the time an employee becomes fully aware of their performance issue, it might be too late for them to recover.

Leaders who genuinely care about their employee's career success and well-being will readily have these difficult feedback conversations because they understand feedback is essential for employees to succeed. Leaders must focus on achieving results and building strong relationships when preparing to engage an employee in a difficult feedback conversation. Below is a list of the most common result and relationship impacts that leaders should strive for when providing employee feedback.

5 Practices for Delivering Difficult Feedback

1) Building a Foundation of Trust and Support

Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. - Theodore Roosevelt

Employees are motivated by leaders who care about them as people. These words are never truer than when a leader gives an employee difficult feedback about how their behaviors need to change or evolve to improve performance.

There is only one way for leaders to build a relationship and trust with their employees, and it is by a leader investing their most precious resource—TIME. By time, I mean energy invested in asking questions and listening to understand an employee's goals, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. This investment is the only way for leaders to demonstrate that they genuinely care about the employee's professional success. A strong leader and employee relationship sets the stage for productive conversations about employee performance and growth, including providing positive and constructive feedback.

2) Aligning Your Goals and Intentions

To achieve this elusive balance between driving results and building relationships, leaders must intentionally manage their mindset when feeling a loss of control, frustration, or threat. We have witnessed or experienced first-hand when a leader's passion for their work and urgency for driving results is used to take an autocratic and directive approach when delivering employee feedback. A leader must be careful of the message this type of reactive interaction sends employees about dealing with challenging and difficult conversations. As leaders, your employees are always watching what you do and say, especially in times of stress.

An exercise I use when coaching leaders about bringing their best mindset to their important, complex, and challenging conversations is to have them answer the following questions about the situation.

• What are my long-term results and relationship goals for this person or group?
• Based on my answer to question number one, what are my best result and relationship intentions in providing constructive feedback to this person or group?

The leader can define the mindset that will serve them best during their conversation by aligning their "in the moment" intentions with their long-term result and relationship goals. This short reflection can completely flip how a leader views and approaches their difficult and potentially charged feedback encounters.

3) Leading with Questions

One of the primary skills leaders need to develop is to stop telling and lead through questions. Making the shift of leading through questions when providing difficult feedback will help leaders create an environment where employees feel valued, empowered, and motivated to improve their performance.

Leading with quality questions helps the leader to surface underlying assumptions, invite new possibilities and create a foundation of trust for generating solutions for positive change. It also demonstrates that the leader understands they need all the information and wants the employee's perspective to make a more informed opinion. Below are some questions leaders should ask employees before providing feedback.

• How do you feel about the current situation?
• What is going well? What could be improved???
• What challenges are you encountering??
• Can you give me an example of that?
• How do you think it went?

The best-case scenario is that the employee is aware of the behavior that needs to change and accepts accountability for adjusting their behaviors or approaches to improve their performance. If, when listening to your employee's responses to these questions, it becomes evident that they are not aware of the issues or the negative impact of their behaviors, then it is time for the leader to provide their feedback perspective. Taking the time to ask questions before giving perspectives doesn't stop leaders from sharing their constructive feedback; it just means they choose to ask questions and understand other views before sharing their own.

4) Providing Behavioral-Based Feedback

Behavioral language is important not only for leaders to get the results desired when giving employee feedback, but it is also critical for clarity and building trust. Behavioral feedback is the ability to describe the behavior(s) that you can hear or see – things that a video or audio recording might capture. This approach to providing feedback supports leaders in delivering a clear message about the employee's behaviors while avoiding the conclusions and judgments the leader may have made about the employee. Research has shown that feedback that uses behavioral language to focus on task performance or actual behavior is more likely to result in improved performance than feedback information that focuses on the individual's sense of self.

Behavioral language helps the leader provide clear feedback and eliminates abstract language that can be perceived as judgmental and ambiguous. See the difference in the two examples below.

Judgmental feedback: "You are not performing well. You lack initiative, and you don't function as a team player. I'm not sure you have what it takes to be successful."

Behavioral feedback: "You frequently submit reports late. You said no when I asked you to do additional reports or memos. When one of your peers struggled to get work accomplished on deadline and asked for your help, you said that was not your job or concern."

You can see the difference. Judgmental feedback can cause defensiveness and relational damage. This type of feedback is unclear in describing what the employee needs to change to receive better results. The behavioral feedback example clarifies the behaviors the leader needs to see the employee improve for better performance – setting the stage to problem-solve solutions for improvement. Using behavioral feedback doesn't mean an employee will not be defensive about the feedback; it just ensures that the defensiveness is not caused by the leader using ambiguous and judgmental language.

5) Asking Solution-Oriented Questions

The leaders who are best at delivering difficult feedback understand when to shift the focus of the feedback conversation toward generating solutions for improvement. Leaders should always look for the right opportunity to shift their feedback conversation from looking backward to asking the employee future-focused questions that will help them begin the process of generating ideas, insights, and solutions for improvement.

Leaders need to suspend the habit of quickly sharing their solutions and take the time to focus on questions that will empower the employee to take ownership of problem-solving solutions for improvement. Below are some examples of questions leaders can use to move their employees into a forward-focused solution space.

• How would you suggest moving forward?
• What are your ideas for the next steps?
• How can we work together to make progress?
• How can I best support you?

Taking the time to ask the employee for their ideas, insights, and ideas for action will help the employee regain their feelings of autonomy, relatedness, and competence which are foundational for human motivation and well-being.

Conclusion

These 5 practices for delivering difficult feedback act as a guide to help leaders engage their employees in meaningful feedback conversations that drive results while building relationships. The ability to build trusting relationship the enable an ongoing dialogue for employees to adapt, grow, and evolve is foundational for leadership success.

(NEW) Instagram:?@ClearViewLeaders

ClearView Leadership Website

Forbes Leadership Strategy Homepage?

_______________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:?Tony Gambill is the President of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping organizations, executives, and managers bring their best leadership selves to their most challenging situations. He is the author of,?Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life. Learn more about Tony's bio, content, and services at?www.clearviewleaders.com.