Take Five Tips: Feedback

Feedback is the breakfast of champions

-Ken Blanchard

The ability to provide constructive feedback to others is really helpful in terms of helping them to tap into their personal potential and can certainly help to forge really positive and mutually beneficial relationships.

Some people find it very challenging to accept feedback and can get very uncomfortable around giving it, even when it is positive.

In terms of being good at giving feedback, it is really important to first of all ask yourself: will this feedback be useful and, actually, can this person do anything about it?  Here is some advice about giving feedback to others:

Take 5 Tips

1. Choose your timing – Tactful feedback is letting someone know your intentions by asking “I would like to give you some feedback on something.  Would that be all right and when is a convenient time for you?”
2. Be honest – The purpose of giving feedback is to align the person’s perception of their behaviour with your observation.  An honest and assertive approach will create a “win-win” outcome
3. Listen to your own voice – The tone of your voice can communicate as much, if not more, than the words you choose.  If there is a hard critical edge to your voice it will have an effect on the feedback you deliver
4. Talk about the behaviour, not the person – This is really important.  Feedback is not about insulting someone’s behaviour, it’s about telling them how to be better and achieve better outcomes
5. Let it go – Once you have given your feedback, don’t keep feeling the need to repeat yourself, you need to then allow the person to absorb the information and take action.  Once you have reached an agreement or agreed to disagree, let it go and move on

Champions know that success is inevitable; that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. They know that the best way to forecast the future is to create it.

-Michael J Gelb