Back-Ground

When a manager approaches his direct report and says 'I have to give you a feedback. Can we talk?’ the first (and mostly true) anticipation in the mind of an employee is that it has to do something negative. This feeling is not only limited to the employee. A manager also calls on his employee mostly when he has to tell him on where has he done wrong or where he has to improve him self.

There are many terms used around negative feedback-

• Constructive Feedback
• Improvement feedback
• Developmental Feedback ...etc...

A manager may use some more positive sounding words as above, but the bottom line is that both manager and the employee view feedback as something like sharing a bad news.

TIP

Slowly and gradually, one should build an environment, where both positive and negative feedback is shared with same level of intensity and sincerity. A negative feedback works on making an employee to improve upon his weaknesses. A positive feedback encourages an employee to reinforce his strengths.

One does not have to get into the trap of 'balanced feedback', where five negative feedbacks have to be matched with five positive feedbacks. The key is that when the manager feels that employee has done a good job, he should be as elaborate and fact based as he would have been in case of a negative feedback. For example,

If an employee has not done a good job in making a presentation, the feedback will be-

• You spent too much time in setting the context. The learning is to spend maximum 1-2 minutes on the agenda slide
• You got into the trap of answering all the questions. Learning is that you should park some of the questions and agree to have an offline discussion or follow-up.
• You needed to give a better feeling to the audience that you are listening to their suggestions. Learning is that you should sometimes repeat what you have understood and also note down their suggestions.

If an employee has done a good job in making a presentation, the feedback may not be limited to 'great presentation'. It should carry some details like-

• I liked the way you linked the whole story line from slide 8 to slide 11. There was a risk that you could loose the audience, but you managed it well.
• I liked the way you thought on your feet, on the specific question raised by Rick...

The essence of this tip is that you give online positive feedback as you will give a negative feedback AND give it sincerely. Over the time a culture is built where people take both kinds of feedbacks as a 'matter of fact' and view them equally dispassionate. The additional benefit is that managers will become better in giving positive feedback. You may not believe it, but many managers are bad at giving negative feedback, but they are worst in giving positive ones.