In my last post, I talked about the power of focusing on what is going right when giving performance feedback. Now this is typically contrary to how managers give feedback. Managers often feel it is their job to improve performance by pointing out what an employee is doing wrong and help them to correct behavior. After all, isn’t it their job to show employees how to do things right? It doesn’t even seem intuitively correct to point out what people are already doing right. If they are doing things right, then what is the role of the manager? So the question becomes, how do you give positive appreciative feedback in a way that improves employee performance?
One way is to start with a strength. The best way for me to explain this is to demonstrate using an example. I had the pleasure of having a presentation coach watch a presentation I was going to give to a large audience. Now I have been presenting for close to 20 years now and I think it is a strength area (if any readers have seen me speak, I hope I am not delusional here!).
She pointed out what I was doing well and asked me to do more of that. So instead of saying, “You didn’t smile enough.” She said “When you smile, it lights up the room. Do more of that.” The difference was, instead of me being worried that I wasn’t smiling enough, she made me feel like my smile was a strength and an asset – something wonderful – that I should share with my audiences. Quite a different feeling. She also found my transitions into new topics kind of boring. Now she could have said “Your transitions are so boring.” Instead, she said, “I have a great new technique for handling transitions that I think you’re going to love.” She demonstrated the technique and it was so far superior to what I was doing that I instantly incorporated it into my repertoire. She got me excited about using a new technique.
I walked away from that coaching session energized and feeling good about my presentation. The other thing is, I remembered the feedback even weeks later! This is an effective tool that is useful when wanting to improve performance in a certain task and take the person’s skills to a higher level.
We are so programmed to be deficit-based when managing people we can forget the power of the positive when giving performance feedback. This kind of feedback has a triple bottom-line benefit – it improves performance, energizes the person in a positive way and improves the person’s self efficacy which builds the confidence to try for higher level goals. And in this day and age, we could all use a little more positive!
