Understanding Feedback

Many of us are familiar with this statement - “Feedback is the breakfast of champions”. Perhaps it’s time for retrospection as to how we actually accept feedback. Before that, may be you want to introspect on the following questions –

• Does your workplace follow the culture of provide regular feedback that affect performance?
• How do you make the less-than positive feedback useful and not feel discouraged?
• If you have received unpleasant or negative feedback, what steps have you taken to move past it?
• Do you feel that the culture at work is one of openness and honest, where opinions can be stated in a free manner?

There are many organizations who do not encourage their leaders to provide feedback on regular basis, engage employees to make them understand where they are doing well and where they can improve their performance, practice the culture of dialogues to ensure people understand their strengths leverage them complement skills with their team and create a win-win situation. 

In many smaller organizations, where everyone has a sense of ownership, you may find people giving feedback frequently and in detail. This is ingrained in their culture and forms a strong foundation. A good practice of this is the immediate feedback provides the person receiving it to understand impacts well and the person providing feedback is able to ensure they do not forget any important points that they observed. It is always better to provide feedback in person. When specific facts are placed in a good manner with a soothing tone and a positive body language, this is well received even if it is negative feedback. When feedback is written, it is a good practice to read it aloud to you before sending it. This helps in ensuring the tone and words used are correct and will help the reader understand the message well. 

When the culture of the organization does not have regular feedback mechanisms inbuilt, then it is best to ask for feedback directly. There are many times people are not aware or are unable to articulate in a positive manner what they wish to convey and hence it is important that if you are at the receiver of the feedback, you need to be very open-minded to first listen completely what people have to say. You may then wish to probe them about some specific examples which will help you to understand why they have perceived certain aspects in a particular manner or why a specific impression was created. It becomes easy to then address things differently next time. 

Giving feedback is an important part of making sure the team members understand their job duties and performance. May be they would not want to hear something difficult, but it is necessary and helps them to improve. It is important that everyone in the team hears something positive at least once a week. This also needs to be authentic. Positive feedback is vital to making team members feel valued and appreciated and they are key factors of job satisfaction and employee engagement.