A Simple Model for Effective Feedback

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Imagine one of your team members was a bit rude in a meeting with a customer. And you decide to give him feedback. How would you go about it?

If your answer is, I'd be straightforward, come to the point, and say "You were pretty rude to Satish. Please go and apologise", you don't quite get it.

Many leaders I meet claim to be good at giving feedback. When I ask them to give me feedback, or give me an example of any feedback they have given, it turns out that they don't quite get the point.

Good feedback has to be specific. It has to be specific about the situation - time, location, people involved, and anything else that provides the context of the conversation. While you are very clear about what you are referring to, the person you are giving feedback to probably needs more context.

Feedback should be factual. It should describe observable behaviour - something that you can see - not your evaluation of it. While you may think that your evaluation is "correct", like all judgment, it is up for debate. So it is better to stick to describing what you saw - interrupting, heckling, not responding, glaring - or other observable behaviours that you saw your team member performing.

Your feedback  should include the impact that the behaviour has on you and others, and why that is important. This means you need to provide a reason for why you are making a point about their behaviour - why they should stop doing it. If you are providing positive feedback, this might be about why they should do more of whatever they did.

Putting all this together, your feedback in the above situation might look like:

"Vivek, I wanted to speak with you about our meeting with Satish yesterday. I noticed you kept interrupting him, and glaring at him throughout the meeting. Satish is an important customer, and such behaviour will make it less likely he continues engaging us"

The above is popularly referred to as the Situation - Behaviour - Impact model of feedback. While this is a good model for setting the context and making your point clearly, it fails to address the ultimate objective feedback - change in behaviour.

We will look at how to fill this gap in Part 2

What are some other models of giving feedback that you have found effective?

Please leave a comment below or send me an email, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.


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