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How to give feedback: Your six-part checklist
Feedback can feel like an emotional minefield, yet it is a leadership responsibility. This first article explores three essentials: timing, intent, and balance.
Feedback matters. It matters enormously for your team’s personal and professional growth.
We know that giving people feedback accelerates self-awareness, encouraging them to embrace and leverage their strengths while helping them define new areas or objectives to build towards. Feedback is also a critical way of connecting work to meaning and purpose; away of ensuring that people feel seen, their needs and goals are heard and understood, new skills mastered, and potential future career paths are determined. At the same time, feed back creates space for any obstacles, workplace or teammate issues, or other problems to surface for discussion, analysis, and resolution.
The benefits of giving feedback are clear, and employees crave it. According to Deloitte, just under 60% of Millennial and Gen Z workers expect active guidance and support from managers, yet less than 35% experience it. PwC reports that those organizations that implement real-time feedback see a 25% increase in Gen Z engagement. Meanwhile, a large-scale Yoh survey shows that 24% of all employees would consider quitting their job over insufficient feedback on their performance.
Giving feedback drives growth, fuels engagement, and supports the development and retention of your talent. Yet, so many managers still struggle to get it right. One Gallup poll shows that less than 15% of managers feel confident about giving effective feedback. Gallup also finds that just 17% of younger workers receive meaningful feedback regularly; worse still, of those who do, only 14% say that it inspires them to improve in their work.
So what’s going on?
Giving performance feedback isn’t easy. For leaders, it can feel uncomfortable and awkward –agonizing even. Some may dislike the idea of causing hurt or provoking emotion or negative reactions. Some leaders might be conflict-averse or worry that criticism – however constructive – might be taken the wrong way; that it might detrimentally impact the working relationship.
Others might wonder if it’s worth the hassle, the interpersonal minefield that they have envisioned, or whether feedback even works in practice – whether it has the desired impact on longer term performance and development.
In my experience working with hundreds of leaders and senior executives, nearly everyone has at some point struggled to give their teams timely, purposeful, balanced, empathic, specific, and effective feedback. Others cleave to unhelpful notions or assumptions about what effective feedback should and should not be – and all of which misses the point, which is this: As a leader it is your responsibility to observe, assess and evaluate the performance and development of the people that work for you, and to share insights with them that will help them to grow, personally and professionally. It’s your responsibility. So how do you go about getting it right?
Your six-part feedback checklist
In my research, working with leaders and through analysis of the most prevalent feedback models and frameworks used in coaching and development, I’ve identified a six-part checklist for managers; a checklist that ensures that when you give feedback, it will always be timely, purposeful, balanced, empathic, specific, and ultimately effective.
Giving effective feedback hinges on six prerequisites:
- The right timing and setting
- Clear intent
- A positive/negative ratio
- Empathy
- Effective communication skills
- Specificity
In this article, the first of three features on giving (and receiving) feedback the right way, I’m going to dive into the first three prerequisites: timing and setting, clear intent, and the positive/negative ratio. The next feature article will look at empathy, communication, and specificity in action. In the final article, we’ll look at why it can be hard to be on the receiving end of feedback, and the practices and techniques you can use to ensure that you reap the full benefits.
Let’s get into it.
Giving feedback effectively really hinges on choosing your moment and place.
1. The right timing and setting
In your organization or your own leadership practice, there might be clear-cut times when you will give feedback to your direct reports – a scheduled performance review, say, or following the completion of a major project. There will be other times – after something specific, some particular action or event – when it’s also opportune to let someone know how they have performed and what they might want to look at in terms of improving or growing.
Giving feedback effectively really hinges on choosing your moment and place. Whether it’s a project or an event, or some kind of behavioral issue, don’t wait too long to give feedback. But don’t do it in the heat of the moment either. You’re going to want to be as objective and dispassionate as possible, and to minimize stress as much as possible.
As a rule of thumb, the right time will be:
- Soon after the event or behavior, and not too late.
- When all parties are calm.
- When you all have time to dedicate to the conversation.
- And when there are few or no distractions.
As for the setting, you should seek to give your feedback:
- Somewhere private where you won’t be disturbed.
- Somewhere neutral where the power balance feels less acute.
- Face-to-face, if possible.
- Somewhere where you can avoid having to multitask.
In Formula 1, speed is everything. This applies to learning, too.
In an article published by McLaren and its partner NEOM, it’s clear that the organization not only prizes feedback but also pays close attention to when it is given. They use two complementary approaches.
A “hot” debrief happens immediately after an event – when there’s a pit stop, for instance.This means that the team can capture ideas while memories are fresh, and it can be emotional. Hot debriefs can spark constructive conflict and ensure nothing is lost in the moment.
The “cold” debrief takes place two to three days later, when additional input and data have been collected and reviewed.
This more structured process emphasizes facts over opinions and identifies root causes and key learnings around the why over the what.
Crucially, insights from the “hot” debrief feed forward into the agenda for the “cold” debrief, creating a continuous learning cycle that balances immediacy with perspective and impact.
2. Clear intent
Let’s be very clear about something. Giving feedback is not and nor should it ever be, a power play. It’s not your goal to put someone down or gain some kind of advantage here, nor is this about blaming, criticizing, or over-asserting your own position or take on something. Your objective is to help clarify and rectify a situation and to lay the ground for growth and improvement. So be clear about that, and make it your priority to ensure that the other party is clear about it too.
To quote Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, communication is measured at the listener’s ear, not at the speaker’s mouth. That means that if someone doesn’t understand something, if they take it the wrong way, it’s likely because you haven’t communicated it effectively or with the requisite clarity.
With that in mind, as you give your feedback, you will want to:
- Be clear about your intent.
- Assume that others also have good intent – but be careful not to demand that they assume it of you.
- Keep the true focus on the outcome of your intent – its impact – and not just the intent itself.
3. Positive/negative ratio
Balancing the positive with the negative can feel fraught. Too much negativity in your feed back and you risk demotivating your employee. Too much positivity, and you might end up avoiding the issues that really need to be improved and inadvertently hindering that person’s growth. You also run the risk of not treating an issue with the gravity or sincerity it warrants, failing to resolve conflict, or even leaving your employee feeling unheard or misunderstood in some way.
While you do need to flag areas for improvement, research does suggest that positive feedback has a more favorable impact on subsequent performance. So, on balance, you will want to skew more to the positive than the negative.
You might want to opt for a negativity sandwich where the more critical elements of your input are framed by feedback that is more constructive or affirmative. You may also want to use Gottman’s 5:1 Magic Ratio: where for every negative interaction, you purposefully opt for five positive ones, be they expressions of appreciation, understanding, or even humor.
As a rule, aim to:
- Avoid being overly negative so as not to demotivate your employee.
- Avoid being overly positive to maintain balance and ensure your input is complete.
- Skew in general towards more positive interactions that favor growth and enhanced performance.
- Remember that your ideal ratio will vary according to individual differences and contexts.
Finding the right time and the place to give feedback, being upfront and clear about your intention, and keeping things essentially positive will help you get it right. Nailing it will also take empathy, specificity, and effective communication skills, and we will explore this in the next article.
Remember, giving feedback is a function of your leadership. Avoiding it squanders important opportunities to help your people grow and achieve their fuller potential. Difficult as it may feel, it’s really not as hard as you think.
In our next article, we’ll look at the next three steps in the six-point checklist on giving feedback: empathy, communication skills, and specificity. Stay tuned.
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