Master the Art of Feedback: 6 Key Tools for Leaders at Every?Level

Actions That You Must Take to Ensure?Success

Once you see the magic of executing this process, these critical tools are easy to adopt into your leadership style.

Make feedback the?norm

You must create a habit of providing meaningful feedback on a regular basis to help your team grow. It becomes normal once your team and you get comfortable having feedback sessions. No blood pressure spikes or nervous sweats.

Make it a part of your brand.

How? You must be critical in your thinking. Not negative, critical.?

Critical is defined as:

Having a decisive and crucial importance in the success, failure, or existence of something.

Here is an example:

First, rank the positions you have that contribute the most to achieving the objectives that you have as a company. Then, rank your existing team using the critical skills required to deliver the results needed. You must identify the one or two leaders who, with development, will provide the highest return.

Prioritizing is critical.

It is like the coaching I received when I first became a manager. My boss asked me to rank my sales reps. Then he asked me how much time I spent with the top-performing reps vs. the others. I explained that I spent more time with the reps who were not high performers because the high performers didn’t need my help.

He said, “Mike, you have it backward.” I thought, “What?”

“It’s been proven that if you provide more support to high performers, they deliver much higher returns than an underperformer who improves.”

So, I learned to prioritize high performers and feed them my time and big opportunities because they naturally take advantage of them.

Create dissatisfaction

What happens when you identify areas that need development in one of your team members?

The inescapable bright light shines on them, increasing the pressure. They either step up or succumb to the pressure and walk away.

Either one is fine because you must be prepared for a change in this position, whether it is behavioral or individual.

As you focus on one or two of your leaders, the rest of the leadership team will see this and take note that they do not want to be next in line.?

In my career, coaching one leader has a trickle-down effect on your entire team. We all hate feedback. It makes us uncomfortable, and it makes us self-reflect.?

What is remarkable is that the pressure you place on one leader by giving them critical feedback so they will improve seems to spread to the other leaders. Especially the ones who are insecure about their abilities.

It creates dissatisfaction. If there isn’t dissatisfaction, change will not happen.

Right person, right?seat

Provide specific examples that support your feedback so that they understand the context.

Reflect on the principle of “Right person, right seat.” This means getting the best(right) person in the right job. It is critical to demonstrate tough-mindedness. If it’s not the right person, then you must make a change.

Realize that the rest of your team already knows that he wasn’t in the right seat. They work with him every day and it becomes obvious.?

Every leader has someone they work closely with whom they trust. Expect them to share the highlights of your feedback with their trusted colleague. It is a validation step for them, which is helpful.?

Stay visible

Make sure you engage with your team broadly and frequently to ensure that any “acting out” is avoided. Acting out is drama which is distracting and unprofessional.?

Being visible does two things; it makes you more approachable and it acts as a deterrent to drama.?

One emotion:?Empathy

As leaders, we all have emotional quotients that we use to interpret behaviors. Before you deliver feedback, prepare yourself so that you do not react negatively to any response you may get.?

Take all emotion out of the conversation except empathy. This is you helping one of your team get better.?

Feedback is not happy, sad, sorry, or funny. It is simply a matter-of-fact conversation that puts one person on their heels.

Don’t smile, frown, or be animated. This is serious developmental feedback to support one of your team members in their efforts to develop their skill set.

Provide tangible?examples

You have to have fact-based feedback, ideally that you experienced yourself. Secondhand feedback is a risk because you don’t have first-hand knowledge that it happened.?

If someone tells you that “Katie, was disrespectful to one of the customer service team.” How are you going to defend this if Katie denies that it happened??

That someone, is going to need to either give Katie the feedback on their own or bring you along given Katie reports to you.

If you don’t do this, the time that will be invested in validating this feedback will not be productive. And you run the risk of losing the respect that Katie has for you.

In conclusion, like most things, if you have a process and practice it, you get better. Delivering feedback is nothing different.

You must get better at delivering consistent feedback to your team. Without it, success will be minimized.

I hope you will try these tools on to see how they fit your style of leadership. Mastering the art of feedback WILL make a difference.