Please Give Your People Real Feedback!

In the context of our organizations when we hear the word feedback, we automatically think of performance appraisals and with this you may also feel a sense of dread rising within the pit of your stomach. Giving and even receiving feedback is no easy task. Let’s think about giving feedback. You either avoid it altogether or you may try to choose your words ever so carefully because you don’t want to hurt or offend anyone. At times such careful selection causes the real message to get lost in translation. And because you dread the very act of providing feedback in the first place, you don’t do it as often as you should. Especially in cases where the feedback is not necessarily positive. But why do we avoid such difficult conversations when they are so absolutely necessary. The fact is the longer you avoid it, the longer you leave issues to fester and possibly grow into something that becomes uncontrollable. We have all experienced this, either in our professional or personal lives, where we may have avoided a conflict situation only to have it not only expand but blow up, both literally and figuratively. We may have avoided discussing the issues due to fear, our own self defense, timing, past experience, etc. But looking back on those instances, was the avoidance worth it? I can guess not from my own experience. And sitting in the office of HR, the longer a Manager avoids having that much needed difficult conversation with a team member, the more difficult my life gets.

I often say to my leadership team that you are doing your people a disservice rather than helping them grow when you do not provide accurate and timely feedback that comes from a genuine and/or authentic place. Without a mirror being held up to us so that we can see ourselves the way others may see us, we cannot grow. We may remain stuck in the fallacy that all is well and that we are doing fine in relation to our performance. If this goes on for too long, it may be quite difficult to accept any future negative feedback that may now seem to have come out of nowhere. That’s when comments such as victimization come into play. With no one having provided real feedback previously, another reason outside of the self must be found for this now sudden negative view of performance.

And while I implore you to give real feedback to your people, I know that providing feedback and having difficult conversations in a skill. And with any other skill, it requires practice. So, stop avoiding it because the issue is not going to simply go away. Deal with it head on and with as much empathy as you can. And if you need help developing this skill, there are resources everywhere to point you in the right direction. If that still doesn’t do the trick, drop me a line and we can further the discussion.