Giving Feedback 101: The Art of Giving Feedback That Actually Helps
My name is Adam Melnik, leadership coach and owner of Seeding the Lead. Today we’re going to be talking all about feedback.
This topic really came around because I was doing volleyball the other night. While I was on the court, we were in the middle of a game: I’m setting the ball, my teammates are spiking it. One of my teammates noticed something—they noticed that when I was spiking the ball, my shoulders and elbows were coming in and they weren’t coming out. He stopped the game and publicly said to me, “Hey, what you’re doing is improper. It’s wrong. You’re not setting the ball properly. This is how you do it: you need to put it into a diamond, you need to set the ball, and you need to keep those elbows out.”
I didn’t ask for this feedback. I didn’t want this feedback, but I still got it. I remember thinking in the moment, “I just feel so angry with them, because I feel publicly shamed in front of not only my team but the other team,” and I didn’t want this. To make matters worse, it gave permission to everybody else—both on my team and the other team—to start correcting my volleyball behavior, my skills, and techniques to make me a better volleyball player.
This just frustrated me, and unfortunately it caused me to check out during the game. I didn’t care anymore, and I ended up leaving through intermission—because thankfully for me, this was just a drop‑in, this wasn’t an actual team I was playing on. Too often leaders give poor feedback or they give feedback in inappropriate ways.
For example, when I look at how leadership tends to give feedback, it’s always when somebody screws up. That is not how you give feedback. That’s not the reason to give feedback. The reason we’re giving feedback to somebody is because one, we genuinely want to help them; two, we want them to become a competent individual; and three, we want to build up their independence. We want them to be an individual that stands on their own two feet and we don’t have to intervene. That’s why we’re doing it.
Which means that anytime we’re going to give feedback to somebody, we’re doing it with the understanding that we are trying to make them better, we are trying to improve who they are, and make them a solid member of our team. This means that the most important thing around feedback is ensuring we give good feedback.
Why do we give good feedback?
The reason for that is when we give feedback only when somebody is screwing up, or we give feedback inappropriately, or we give feedback that is fundamentally worthless to the individual, we encourage them to check out—like me in that volleyball match. Oftentimes, because we’re only focusing on the other person and how they screwed up, what ends up happening is that person starts believing that they’re a failure, that they’re a screw‑up, and that their leader doesn’t care about them. To be honest, if I got that feedback, I wouldn’t care—I’d feel the same way.
Which is why it’s so important that we give feedback in the appropriate way.
Reinforce Good Behaviors First
The first thing we always must do to give good feedback is reinforce the good behaviors we like. Anytime one of our team members is doing something that we want to see more of, we need to say, “Hey, I like that—you’re doing this; continue to do more of it.” We want to encourage the positive behaviors that we’re seeing.
How we do that is very specific:
We stop the flow of conversation. We don’t say it in passing—“Hey Jim, you did a good job.” No, no, no. That’s not what we’re going to do.
We stop the flow and say, “Hey Jim, I really appreciated it when you went out of your way to do this.”
Then we state the result: “I noticed that when you did that, these things happened, and I’m very grateful that you did it.”
That’s great feedback. That’s positive feedback. We’re giving them a compliment, we’re rewarding their good behavior, and we’re building them up. They’re going to walk away from this meeting thinking, “Hey, that’s awesome that I did this good thing—I should do more of it.” That’s what we want. We don’t want to focus on the negatives and how they’re screwing up. We want to show them the good things that they’re doing, and we want to reward them for doing those good activities, those good things, those good habits so they start doing it more often at work within our team.
Correcting Poor Behaviors: Timing & Privacy
Unfortunately, there will be times we have to correct somebody who screwed up—they did something wrong. For example, when I was in that volleyball match, I understand my team was getting frustrated at me because I was screwing up. But there’s a way to approach it when we need to correct a behavior.
Timing
Stopping a game to correct me then and there is the wrong timing—you should not do that at all. Be appropriate about when you approach an individual. For example, in the volleyball game it should have been during an intermission or at the end of the game.
Privacy
On top of that, it needs to be private. By having feedback and correcting a behavior publicly, we are encouraging public shaming, which is not what we want to do. Again, the goal of feedback is to build somebody up, not tear them down. By pulling them aside into a private place, we open up the doors so that they are more receptive to the feedback we are going to give them.
Ensure Receptivity: Ask Permission
The next point is ensuring that the other person is open to the feedback. We can do that in many ways, one of which is just ask for permission: “Hey Jim, can I provide you a little bit of feedback?” If he says no—awesome. Then the next question is, “When can I provide you that feedback?” We want to make sure that they are in the right mind‑space or head‑space to have that conversation.
Typically I see some managers give a calendar invite and already say, “Hey, in the description I want to give you some feedback around this issue,” and make sure that the other party is mentally prepared for the conversation.
Now they’re open to that feedback, as opposed to just hauling somebody into the room and telling them, “Hey, let me tell you how you screwed up.” Because now we’re going to encounter what’s called the fight‑flight‑freeze response, and they’re going to shut down. We don’t want that when we give feedback, because we’re trying to build them up, we’re trying to improve them as an individual, and we want them to be open to the possibility that, “Hey, maybe I should do things differently.”
Facilitate Their Own Problem‑Solving
Our job isn’t just to tell them what they did wrong and tell them how to fix it—that’s not how we give feedback. Again, the goal is to create an individual that is independent, confident, and skilled. To do that, we need to have them solve the problem on their own, and we need to support them.
How do we go about doing this? When we sit them down, we open up the conversation by saying, “Hey, I heard about last week in regards to da‑da‑da—what happened?” We open up the conversation. Ninety‑nine percent of the time the other party already knows how they screwed up and what the problem is, and they’ll tell you, “Awesome. We don’t need to retread old ground.” If they genuinely don’t know, then we have that conversation: “This is what happened, these are the complaints, these are the issues,” and we educate them on the problem.
The next phase is to say, “How can we make this better? What can we do to ensure success next time?” We encourage them to problem‑solve on their own. We encourage them to reach into their own resources: “Maybe I could have reached out to a colleague. Maybe I could have reached out to you. Maybe I could have done this differently.” It doesn’t matter—we help them make their own game plan so that they can overcome this obstacle.
Because the problem that many leaders, many managers, and many individuals face is when they correct the individual and they educate them on how to solve their own problem—or tell them how to solve the problem—all we’ve done is told the team member, “Hey, rely on me. I know best. Don’t solve your own problems; come to me.” That’s not what we want.
In that volleyball game, the individual who came up and started correcting me in front of all those people was really saying, “I know best; you don’t know what you’re doing—follow me, rely on me.” This is a big problem if you’re a leader, because guess what: you’re managing a team of ten, twenty people. You can’t have ten or twenty people constantly coming to you asking you to solve their problems—that’s how you encounter burnout. We don’t want that.
Which is why we encourage them to solve their own problems. We encourage them to figure out how to fix that problem, and we can be a part of that solution, but we shouldn’t be the ones telling them how to fix it.
Follow‑Up and Check‑In
After that, we might want to consider a check‑in. We just check in on them, see how they’re doing. If the problem is a big screw‑up, we would just check in with them down the road and see how the problem is being solved and handled. We are a resource to help them troubleshoot how to fix that problem—we are not the resource to solve that problem.
By helping them continuously work through this issue, guess what? They’re going to be competent, they’re going to be stronger next time, and they’re not going to make the same mistake—because we gave appropriate feedback and we helped them solve that problem.
If you found this conversation helpful, please give it a like, subscribe, and share with an individual that could use it. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the next video. Cheers.