HBR Guide to Delivering Effective Feedback (HBR Guide Series)

Harvard Business Review

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781633691643
• eBook ISBN: 9781633691650
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Personalmanagement

Take the stress out of giving feedback.

To help your employees meet their goals and fulfill their potential, you need to provide them with regular feedback. But the prospect of sharing potentially negative news can be overwhelming. How do you construct your message so that it's not only well received but also expressed in a way that encourages change?

Whether you're commending exemplary work or addressing problem behavior, the HBR Guide to Delivering Effective Feedback provides you with practical advice and tips to transform any performance discussion—from weekly check-ins to annual reviews—into an opportunity for growth and development. You'll learn to:

• Establish trust with your direct reports
• Assess their performance fairly
• Emphasize improvement, even in criticism
• React calmly to a defensive feedback recipient
• Recognize and motivate star performers
• Create individualized development plans

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, from a source you trust. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

Section 1

Ongoing Feedback

Chapter 1

Giving Effective Feedback

If you’re like most managers, the prospect of giving feedback to your employees can be nerve-racking. Perhaps you’re worried about how your staff will react. Or maybe you’re doubtful that your comments will make a difference in their work or behavior.

But feedback is a vital tool for ensuring that your employees are developing in your organization. A feedback discussion is an opportunity for you to share your observations with your employees about their job performance and elicit productive change. Without it, they will have no idea of how you see them. Avoid having a tough conversation with your underperformers early on, and their performance (and possibly your team’s) plummets. Assume that your high performers know their value and will keep up the good work, and they may start “phoning it in” or leave your company altogether to advance their careers.

Feedback increases employees’ self-awareness and fosters positive change throughout the organization. There are two main types: Ongoing feedback occurs on a regular or ad hoc basis; it can be delivered up (to your boss), down (to your employees), or across the organizational chart (to your peers). Formal feedback, typically shared during annual or semiannual performance reviews, tends to be between you and your direct report. This guide will prepare you to discuss both types with your employees.

Ongoing Feedback

Grounded in the goals you and your employees have set together at the beginning of the year, ongoing feedback provides opportunities for early intervention if someone is not hitting the mark. It also allows you to recognize and reinforce good work. Ongoing feedback includes on-the-spot conversations (for example, constructive comments about an employee’s presentation delivery at a board meeting), the weekly check-in meetings you have with each member of your team to gauge progress on both little- and big-picture objectives, and career coaching sessions. Such frequent interactions not only help keep people on track but also make it easier for you to prepare your formal annual appraisal. By taking note of your observations and discussing your employees’ progress throughout the year, you’ll already know where your direct reports’ strengths and weaknesses lie, and your employees will already be working on areas for improvement and development before the formal feedback session.

Formal Feedback

Formal feedback enables you to summarize all the evaluations and support you’ve provided throughout the year. Like ongoing feedback, these yearly assessments afford you the opportunity to identify what’s going well with an employee’s performance and to diagnose problems before they worsen. This discussion shouldn’t contain any surprises: You’ll have already talked about performance issues in your ongoing feedback sessions, as well as expectations that affect pay, merit increases, bonuses, and promotions. But the formal review also gives you the chance to plan for the future. It allows you and your direct reports to discuss where they might develop and collaborate on new goals for the upcoming year, so they can move forward in their job and career.

Think of both ongoing and formal feedback as part of a partnership with your employees, one that promotes trust and candid dialogue. For example, encourage them to pinpoint factors that support or impede their work; they can do this in the face-to-face discussion or in a written self-assessment in advance of the meeting. Perhaps solidifying relationships with team members through lunches or after-work drinks is helping them achieve important objectives. Or maybe difficulty controlling e-mail tone is alienating key IT project managers. Encourage them to also note achievements (“I closed two new deals worth $100,000 and established a weekly check-in with our new distributor”) and identify resources they need for future development (such as training on a new sales-reporting system or a mentor to advise them in a new job function).

Given how widespread the fear of feedback is (on both sides of the exchange), you may think you can’t possibly overcome your anxiety and have a meaningful conversation with your direct report. But you can—and the articles in this guide will help.

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Adapted from Giving Feedback (product #348X), Performance Appraisal (product #12352), both from the Pocket Mentor series, and the 20-Minute Manager series books Giving Effective Feedback (product #13999) and Performance Reviews (product #15035)

Chapter 2

Sometimes Negative Feedback Is Best

by Heidi Grant Halvorson

If I see one more article about how you should never be “critical” or “negative” when giving feedback to an employee or colleague, I think my head will explode. It’s incredibly frustrating. This kind of advice is undoubtedly well meant, and it certainly sounds good. After all, you probably don’t relish the thought of having to tell someone else what they are doing wrong—at minimum, it’s a little embarrassing for both of you.

But avoiding negative feedback is both wrongheaded and dangerous. Wrongheaded because, when delivered the right way, at the right time, criticism is in fact highly motivating. Dangerous because without awareness of the mistakes they are making, no one can possibly improve. Staying “positive” when doling out feedback will only get you so far.

Hang on, you say. Can’t negative feedback be discouraging? Demotivating?

That’s perfectly true.

And don’t people need encouragement to feel confident? Doesn’t that help them stay motivated?

In many cases, yes.

Confusing, isn’t it? Thankfully, brilliant research by Stacey Finkelstein from Columbia University and Ayelet Fishbach from the University of Chicago sheds light on the seemingly paradoxical nature of feedback by making it clear why, when, and for whom negative feedback is appropriate.

It’s important to begin by understanding the function that positive and negative feedback serve. Praise (for instance, Here’s what you did really well . . .) increases commitment to the work you do by enhancing both your experience and your confidence. A more critical assessment (for example, Here’s where you went wrong . . .), on the other hand, is informative—it tells you where you need to spend your effort and offers insight into how you might improve.

Given these two different functions, positive and negative feedback should be more effective (and more motivating) for different people at different times. For instance, when you don’t really know what you are doing, encouragement helps you to stay optimistic and feel more at ease with the challenges you are facing—something novices tend to need. But when you are an expert and you already more or less know what you are doing, it’s constructive criticism that can help you do what it takes to get to the top of your game.

As Finkelstein and Fishbach show, novices and experts are indeed looking for, and motivated by, different kinds of information. In one of their studies, American students taking either beginner or advanced-level French classes were asked whether they would prefer an instructor who emphasized what they were doing right (focusing on their strengths) or what they were doing wrong (focusing on their mistakes and how to correct them). Beginners overwhelmingly preferred a cheerleading, strength-focused instructor. Advanced students, on the other hand, preferred a more critical instructor who would help them develop their weaker skills.

In a second study, the researchers looked at a very different behavior: engaging in environmentally friendly actions. Their “experts” were members of environmental organizations (for instance, Greenpeace), while their “novices” were nonmembers. Each participant in the study made a list of the actions they regularly took that helped the environment—things like recycling, avoiding bottled water, and taking shorter showers. They were offered feedback from an environmental consultant on the effectiveness of their actions, and were given a choice: Would you prefer to know more about the actions you take that are effective, or about the actions you take that are not? Experts were much more likely to choose the negative feedback—about ineffective actions—than novices.

Taken together, these studies show that people who are experienced in a given domain—people who already have developed some knowledge and skills—don’t actually live in fear of negative feedback. If anything, they seek it out. Intuitively they realize that negative feedback offers the key to getting ahead, while positive feedback merely tells them what they already know.

But what about motivation? What kind of feedback makes you want to take action? When participants in the environmental study were randomly given either positive or negative feedback about their actions, and were then asked how much of their $25 study compensation they would like to donate to Greenpeace, the type of feedback they received had a dramatic effect on their motivation to give. When negative feedback was given, experts gave more on average to Greenpeace ($8.53) than novices ($1.24). But when positive feedback was given, novices ($8.31) gave far more than experts ($2.92).

I’m not suggesting that you never tell rookies about their mistakes, or that you never praise seasoned professionals for their outstanding work. And of course, negative feedback should always be accompanied by good advice and given with tact.

But I am suggesting that piling on praise is a more effective motivator for the rookie than the pro. And I’m saying, point blank, that you shouldn’t worry so much when it comes to identifying mistakes with someone experienced. Negative feedback won’t crush their confidence—it just might give them the information they need to take their performance to the next level.

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Heidi Grant Halvorson, PhD, is associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School and author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently and No One Understands You and What to Do about It.

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Adapted from content posted on hbr.org on January 28, 2013

Chapter 3

Giving Feedback That Sticks

by Ed Batista

“Can I give you some feedback?”

When you ask your employees this question, their heart rate and blood pressure are almost certain to increase, and they may experience other signs of stress as well. These are symptoms of a “threat response,” also known as “fight-or-flight”: a cascade of neurological and physiological events that impair the ability to process complex information and react thoughtfully. When people are in the grip of a threat response, they’re less capable of absorbing and applying your observations.

You’ve probably noticed this dynamic in feedback conversations that didn’t go as well as you’d hoped. Some people respond with explanations, defensiveness, or even hostility, while others minimize eye contact, cross their arms, hunch over, and generally look as if they’d rather be doing anything but talking to you. These fight-or-flight behaviors suggest that your comments probably won’t have their desired impact.

How do you avoid triggering a threat response—and deliver feedback your people can digest and use? The guidelines that follow will help.

Cultivate the Relationship

We lay the foundations for effective feedback by building relationships with others over time. When people feel connected to us, even difficult conversations with them are less likely to trigger a threat response. Social psychologist John Gottman, a leading expert on building relationships, has found from his research that success in difficult conversations depends on what he calls “the quality of the friendship.” Gottman cites several steps we can take to develop high-quality relationships:

• Make the other person feel “known.” Making people aware that you see them as individuals—and not merely as employees—is a critical step in the process, but it need not be overly time-consuming. Several years ago, a coaching client of mine who ran a midsize company felt that he was too distant from his employees but didn’t have the time to take someone to lunch every day. His efficient compromise was to view every interaction, no matter how fleeting, as an opportunity to get to know that person a little better. He made a habit of asking employees one question about their work or their personal lives each time he encountered them. “Whenever I can, I connect,” he told me. Although at times this slowed his progress through the office, the result was worth it.
• Respond to even small bids for attention. We seek attention from those around us not only in obvious ways but also through countless subtle “bids.” As Gottman writes in The Relationship Cure, “A bid can be a qu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• HBR Press Quantity Sales Discounts
• Copyright
• Contents
• Section 1: Ongoing Feedback
• Section 2: Formal Performance Appraisals
• Section 3: Tough Topics
• Index