Give More Feedback – Overcome The Fears That Stop You Giving Feedback
I want to help you overcome the fears that stop you giving feedback to your team. Or stop you giving feedback as much as you should. I used to be terrified of giving feedback, of potentially offending others. At the same time, I wanted feedback to help me get better and to know where I stood. You might have similar thoughts and feelings right now and so might your team.
Give More Feedback – Overcome The Fears That Stop You Giving Feedback
- 8 common fears that stop you giving feedback
- The feedback employees want – what the surveys tells us
- How to safely start practicing giving feedback right now
- Committing to your next step
Giving feedback to your team is like opening a gateway. This feedback gateway:
- Increases engagement and motivation of everyone in the team
- Improves the psychological safety on offer to the team
- Helps you and every team member improve and deepen relationships with each other
- Helps everyone learn more about each other’s strengths, interests and ambitions, which in turn improves teamwork
- Enables better co-ordination, collaboration and problems solving
- Feedback reinforces the expectations and standards you want the team to meet
- Feedback increases trust and happiness
- Everyone gets development and progress through getting feedback
All of these combined have a very powerful positive effect on team performance. In my experience, I am not talking 5-10% here. I am talking getting a team to be really firing, that could add their combined salaries onto team profit or better when combined with other good management practices.
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Imagine if you will, your team as a group of explorers navigating a large dense forest. It is hard to see 10 feet ahead, let alone the destination. It is difficult to keep everyone in view. You, the manager, are the compass. Without you shouting out directions or giving feedback, everyone would quickly veer off course and get lost. Everyone would do their best but end up going in different directions, at different speeds and wander into pitfalls. With your feedback, they can quickly adjust their path, co-ordinate with each other, avoid dangers on the journey and everyone will reach the team’s destination or the team’s goals.
Giving feedback is a brilliant area to improve at any point in your management career no matter where you are. I am still working on it personally. Start giving good quality feedback and you open the doors to a ton of benefits. It also enables to you employ a number of other important management tools to help your team perform better.
8 common fears that stop you giving feedback
I have experienced all these fears. A few still pop into my head today before giving feedback. You probably have one or more in your head when you think about giving feedback.
- Fear of upsetting the other person
- The desire to avoid confrontation if they disagree with what you say
- Worried about damaging relationships, which would make managing harder
- Unsure about how to deliver feedback – we have more on this later
- Fear of saying the wrong thing
- Fear the feedback is demotivating
- Worried about emotional reactions and defensiveness
- Too busy to give feedback
All these fears are about us. When we are having these thoughts, we are worrying about how our life as a manager might be harder if we mess up giving feedback. Other people are not very forgiving if we are focused on ourselves.
The minute we focus on the other person, and do our best to help them get better, a transformation happens. We stop thinking about our fears which allows us to be more relaxed and confident. The other person knows you are trying to help them, and they become a lot more forgiving of mistakes, of poor delivery etc. This is important when you are starting to build your feedback skills.
Do your absolute best to focus on helping the other person, not on your own fears.
The feedback employees want – what the surveys tells us
Here are some very interesting survey results about giving and getting feedback:
43% of leaders find giving corrective feedback stressful and difficult i.e. they rarely do it.
Less than 30% of employees receive feedback on their work
65% of employees want more feedback
60% of employees want feedback on a daily or weekly basis
Employees who receive regular praise and recognition are 10-20% more productive and are 3.6x more engaged
92% of employees agree corrective feedback, when delivered considerately, is effective at improving performance
The surveys prove that employees really want a lot more feedback, positive and corrective. Those only getting corrective feedback are several times more engaged than those getting no feedback.
The business benefits of their managers giving feedback is very significant in terms of improved team performance and better decision making. Far too many managers are not taught how to give feedback so their companies miss out on significant profit and staff retention advantages.
How to safely start practicing giving feedback right now
In my experience, staff love getting feedback from managers they trust and when the manager cares about their team member’s development and improvement. These staff appreciate corrective feedback and of course enjoy praise and positive reinforcement.
Assuming you have a reasonable level of trust with your team, and you are focused on helping them, you can absolutely give feedback right now to your team members and they will be grateful. You have the communication skills to deliver good feedback because you have been promoted into a manager position.
The first type of feedback to start giving is positive feedback or praise. Start with general feedback like “good job” and “well done”. Everyone likes praise. It is a very low risk way of starting to build your feedback expertise and confidence. When you are giving this type of feedback at least daily, then make some of your feedback more specific. Increase the amount of specific positive feedback you give until at least a third of your positive feedback is specific.
Then you can start with corrective feedback. Do not give general or vague corrective feedback. Make your corrective feedback specific, clear and focused on work, actions, decisions and behaviours and above all about helping the other person get better.
Don’t put off starting to give general praise to your team.
To help you Commit to your next step in giving feedback
Take a moment to picture a staff member’s face when you are giving them praise. See how their eyes light up. Their smile gets larger and brighter. Take in their little nods, and their open and welcoming facial features and stance. Think how pleased they will be at having their work, actions or behaviour recognised and appreciated by you. Think about how much harder they will now work to get the next bit of praise from you. Consider how you have just added to their trust of you and loyalty to you. Think about how this one piece of praise will help the overall team culture and performance increase by just a little bit.
Will you commit to yourself in the next few hours, to look out for real genuine opportunities to praise a team member and actually open you mouth and say “well done for XXXX”. Will you make that commitment to yourself. I know you can do it. Do it for yourself and for your team and then build on giving praise.
In summary
Giving feedback is a daunting prospect when you are not used to giving feedback. I struggled for quite a while before I stopped thinking about my fears and started thinking about helping my team members. Once I had crossed that bridge, the rest became a lot easier. It was obvious my staff appreciated the feedback which gave me confidence to give more feedback. I love giving feedback now. I know how valuable it is to my team members, to team performance and ultimately to my ability to lead and manage teams well.
To become very confident and skilled in giving feedback a lot quicker and to gain the huge benefits a manager gets much earlier by giving a lot of very useful feedback to team members, visit us at enhance.training and go to courses and take a look at How to Give Powerful Feedback.
If you have any questions on “Give More Feedback – Overcome The Fears That Stop You Giving Feedback, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
I used to hate giving feedback. My stomach would drop to the floor, my mouth dry, my hands trembled a bit. I felt a bit of fraud giving praise as a manager.
Then I learnt how to give feedback – the steps involved and what to feedback about. I saw the impact this made on the people I managed. Praise is an amazing management tool and I now love giving praise.
Once you learn how to give corrective feedback it is really not a big deal. Because you are relaxed and confident, the other person receiving the corrective feedback is much more relaxed. Of course you must get your mindset right, and be giving corrective feedback to help the other person. It is now just part of being a manger.
Give more praise today.
