How am I doing?

Before you criticise people, you should walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, when you criticise them, you're a mile away. And you have their shoes.
Author unknown

Constructive feedback is one of the main contributors to organisation, team and personal effectiveness. Faulty feedback is one the biggest contributors to their learning disabilities. If I don't know how I'm really doing because you don't or can't tell me or if I can't hear what you say because of the way you say it, I can't improve.

Managers often shoot themselves in the foot on this score: the gains they want are impossible in the working environment they create. Making a mistake in front of some managers is like cutting yourself in front of Dracula, according to Jim Clemmer, a leading transformation and improvement thinker/writer: the working environment becomes too poisonous for innovation, enthusiasm and efficiencies.

Those particular outcomes require individual self-confidence, collective learning and real teamwork. They depend on managers' ability to develop trust and effective communication, skills that are often lacking or insufficiently present.

My own informal research with many hundreds of workers (at all levels) found that typically, performance feedback is avoided, given insufficiently or poorly. Many supervisors lack the necessary confidence: they dread confrontations and delay giving feedback, never quite finding the right opportunity. This often results in retrospective correctional feedback being unhelpfully "dumped on" individuals at times of formal appraisal or performance review. Some give negative feedback indirectly with attempts at humour, often confusing or barbed humour, which can hurt. For example:

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because
someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
English Professor, Ohio University

Others underestimate the importance of "positive" feedback or assume their positive impressions are already known, so don't give it.

Too many managers respond to mistakes or uncertainty with criticism, sarcasm, ridicule or unpredictable outbursts of hostility. As a result, people become anxious. They hide errors and their vulnerability. Experimentation and innovation slow. Team members are reduced to learning only from their own experiences, an expensive waste of time and resources.

Constructive performance feedback is easily given, easily heard and understood, and helpful. It clears the air, keeps performance on target, acknowledges people and their progress, shifts energy and improves attitudes, reduces frustration and difficult conflict. Above all, it enhances learning, the key to responding to change.

As managers our frequency, sensitivity, and action (or lack of it)
on personal performance feedback sets the pace and tone
for the rest of our team and organisation.
Jim Clemmer.

Want to make a difference?

Learn how to identify opportunities for giving constructive feedback; recognise, compose, time and deliver feedback; sequence it when it contains both negative and positive observations. Learn what to do if your delivery is reacted to, argued with, causes distress or hostility.

Become more sensitive to and respectful of the other party's needs and feelings, while also respecting your own.

Become more able to accelerate others' learning on-the-job.

Our Hear and Be Heard programme goes to the nub of this matter, developing the self-confidence and practical relationships-building skills required to bring out the best in ourselves and others. Self-confidence is the basis of trust. Trust is the basis of collective performance. Where self-confidence and trust exist, experimentation, innovation and open sharing of ideas flourish. Team progress accelerates.

Hear and Be Heard is available as a training programme or may be self-studied with our publications and mentoring support.

Select and contact a Mentor if you'd like to discuss these ideas or want support to make progress with your own issues.

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