Getting good at giving effective feedback is one of the most important parts of leading — right up there with learning to delegate.

Shoving employee feedback into a once or twice a year appraisal event increases the chance that you’ll rely on subjectivity or recency rather than objective data. Plus, it robs your employees (and you) of numerous opportunities to improve their performance.

Having those conversations, sometimes difficult, is crucial to their development and to your organization’s success.

Here are my tips for doing it well.

Providing feedback as a coach

In our last post, I talked about the benefits of coaching rather than managing your team. Feedback is part of both of those relationships. You may currently think of feedback in a very managerial way — for instance, telling someone they did well or didn’t do well on a recent project.

Coaching also involves a lot of feedback. It’s less about judging the success or failure of particular skills or assignments and more about helping someone see where they may have strengths or be struggling in meeting their goals.

For instance, if an employee keeps saying they’re going to do something — perhaps sign up for a continuing education class — and they never do it, you’d offer them feedback on that.

A client told me they wanted to hire several new employees so they could be working more “on” their business and have a better work-life balance. When I checked in with the client a couple of weeks later, they hadn’t made progress on hiring anyone.

I asked what they were doing to move the hiring process forward. They’d notified some staffing agencies and hadn’t gotten any candidates. Then I asked my client how much time they were spending on recruiting every day.

The answer: none.

I clarified what my client said was their highest priority: to hire more employees so they could work on their business and improve work-life balance. And I clarified that the client was spending no time on that effort.

I gave feedback by reflecting back what I’d heard and what my client’s goals were. When I checked in a few weeks later, they had hired two new employees.

Establish rapport

Brené Brown coined the phrase “rumble starter.” Rumbles are conversations where people commit to “lean into vulnerability.” They can be messy and scary, and everyone agrees to stay honest and curious rather than judgmental. Rumble starters are the types of phrases you can say to get one of these rumbles going: something like “I’m curious about…” or “Tell me why this doesn’t work for you…” or “Help me understand…”

Of course, if you don’t have an established safe rapport with your employee, they’re probably not going to feel comfortable getting vulnerable with you.

Strong rapport is built over time. You can begin to build it by using some of the techniques effective coaches use within a coaching conversation.

Try to see the world and any particular situation from their perspective
Check your assumptions by asking questions and paraphrasing back what you’ve heard
Mirror the other person’s breathing, energy level, tone of voice, or body posture
Check in with them to see if they’re ready to participate in a meaningful discussion

Building a strong rapport takes time if you’ve primarily had a more traditional manager-subordinate relationship.

See: What Does a Good Business Coaching Relationship Look Like?

Create a consistent system for continuous mutual feedback

Authentic continuous feedback is much more effective than one or two performance reviews each year. Having a system makes it more likely that you’ll continue it — the one you choose is less important than actually making it happen.

One I see clients use a lot is 15Five (or, alternatively, Lattice). Here’s how it works:

Typically, an employee spends 15 minutes every week reporting up, and the manager takes five minutes reviewing that report every week and responding as necessary. If the manager has a manager, they also spend 15 minutes reporting up.

These reports create a threaded dialogue, so there are things from weekly check-ins that you can tag for one-on-one conversations. And there are things from your one-on-one conversations that you can tag for periodic performance reviews.

The problem that many leaders run into is that they only give feedback when something is wrong.

Then at the end of the year, they do a performance review, and they have recency bias. The performance review ends up being about what happened most recently and not the employee’s tenure as a whole, their cumulative performance.

When you have a continuous system for feedback, you eliminate the recency bias and thread the conversations into one another. You don’t end up losing data, and you remove a lot of the subjectivity that we often find in how leaders give feedback.

See: How to Build an Effective Leadership Team

Presume motives are virtuous

Don't assume that someone wants to do a terrible job. Don’t assume they’re resistant or reluctant to meet their goals. Nearly everyone wants to do well. Approach conversations with them in the understanding that they want to be successful.

Your goal in the conversation is to work with them to figure out how to make that success happen.

Assumptions are dangerous when trying to build rapport and offer feedback. It’s why inquiry and acknowledgment are the first two steps of a coaching conversation. Get the employee’s perspective and offer your own. Once you’ve talked about their perspective and about yours — compare the two.

This tip goes beyond coaching, right? It’s helpful in all relationships, especially with all the divisiveness we have right now in our society. Try it next time you have a conversation with someone you disagree with — commit to seeing their motives as virtuous and see how the discussion differs from ones you’ve had in the past.

See: The Coaching Process: Coaching Your Team.

Provide a face-saving device

I use face-saving devices a lot. It’s never good to back someone into a corner so the only way out is for them to look bad.

Allow me to share a non-coaching example. A former business partner once threatened to sue me for competition after I left. The fact was, he’d previously acknowledged and agreed to everything I was doing — in writing. He hadn’t shared those emails with his lawyer.

I sent the emails to my lawyer, who saw right away that my former partner had no case.

Now I could’ve shown my former partner the emails and made him look foolish to his counsel and team. I won’t pretend I wasn’t tempted.

Fortunately, my lawyer was a great coach to me. He told me that my former partner would keep fighting me if he felt like he was the loser. So I offered a compromise, something so he didn’t feel like he’d lost. It worked and we settled quickly.

In a coaching relationship, it’s about helping move someone in the direction of their goals without making them feel embarrassed or like an idiot.

You can provide face-saving options by offering renegotiation around goals, focusing on problem solving rather than punishment, and never criticizing publicly.

See: Are You Displaying These Poor Leadership Qualities?

Giving positive and negative feedback

If you have a really good relationship with an employee, you may have a fluid experience between giving them positive and negative feedback.

Most managers and leaders are better at one or the other. Some are really good at finding the positives, and they're great cheerleaders. And when it comes to confrontation or conflict, they choke. Generally, they avoid it. Giving critical feedback is a skill that good managers and leaders must develop.

Then there are others who more easily see the critical things. I’m like that. I warn new hires working with me that when they show me a document, the first thing I might do is find all the typos. My brain is wired that way.

Of course, I can’t stop there. I know I have to take that extra step and be more intentional about finding the good stuff.

For clients who forget to praise the good stuff, I often share an exercise that I learned from another consultant.

Start the day with 10 rubber bands around your right wrist. Then look for 10 opportunities throughout the day to give positive feedback. Each time you give positive feedback, move one rubber band from your right wrist to your left wrist.

At the end of the day, you’re expected to have 10 rubber bands on your left wrist. It’s a way of training yourself to offer those positive statements. Because ultimately you need to be able to do both.

See: All Employees Should Have Professional Development Plans: Do Yours?

When to get prescriptive

In general, most good coaching relationships aren’t prescriptive. The idea is to help someone else come to their own conclusions or decisions.

There’s one caveat: If you’ve been in someone else’s shoes, there may be occasions where it makes sense to be prescriptive. You might be offering a little “when I was in that situation, I did this” advice.

It’s the sort of thing we do with medical professionals (“If this were your dog, would you do the surgery?”) and restaurant staff (“Which would you get — the pasta or the risotto?”).

We may not take the same action they did, but we appreciate their insight.

When you’re considering being prescriptive, it’s also a good time to remember empathy. What did it feel like when you were in their shoes? Put yourself back in that situation and remember what it was like to be there.

In my years of leadership and management, I have become comfortable with a 90/10 balance. When a coachee might ask for an answer, or I see an opportunity to give a shortcut by being prescriptive, I’ll offer it ten percent of the time. The other 90%, I’m not being evasive or guarded, I’m just being a good coach.

Final thoughts

The Golden Rule:
Treat others as you would want to be treated.

The Platinum Rule:
Treat others as they would want to be treated.

We all know the golden rule and the platinum rule. They’re basic human relationship constructs. And when you’re giving someone feedback, you’re investing in a human relationship with them. You’re more than just the roles that you have at the office. You’re human.

How you offer feedback is important. If you don’t do it well, you could make things worse rather than better. If you present feedback in a way that makes the other person feel defensive or causes them to shut down, you won’t have accomplished your goal.

It’s about empathy and caring. When someone knows your feedback comes from a place of caring, they’re going to respond more positively. And they’ll know it’s from a place of caring when you’ve built that rapport, when you’ve approached the conversation with empathy and made sure they have a way to save face and maintain their dignity.

If giving feedback is on your list of things to improve, contact Trajectify so we can help you grow your feedback skills and build a better team.