Coaching For Managers: Employee Feedback
Coaching for Managers: Employee Feedback
A critical coaching for managers skill is the ability to give employee feedback. Managers who struggle to give feedback struggle with communication issues on their teams.
Few of us were ever taught in our personal lives how to give or receive feedback. We usually learn this from our family of origin. This true of the employees that you interact with and people on your teams. What do you do as a Manager, to give employee feedback, if your employees struggle to give it themselves and tell you how they’re really feeling, or they struggle to receive feedback?
1.) Normalize giving and receiving feedback. When this is done during every single team meeting, then people aren’t bracing to receive feedback only when they’ve done something wrong. Give positive feedback as well as performance enhancing feedback, and by giving it often—and receiving it yourself—you’ll normalize giving and receiving feedback among your team.
2.) Train your teams in how to give feedback. Again, since many people learned how to give and receive feedback from their family of origin, this could mean that some people on your team only ever learned how to give feedback that “tears down” rather than feedback that is supportive and builds people up. Giving appropriate feedback involves making neutral observations (“I noticed that…” instead of “You DID THIS…”) and coming from a solution-seeking place that focuses on solving a problem, not a person’s character.
3.) Normalize feelings. Before anyone is upset, speak into the fact that giving and receiving feedback can be an awkward, challenging, or frustrating experience for just about everyone. Feelings are normal! Being reactive when we feel something is not helpful, so give people time and space to slowly digest their feedback or to think through the feedback they want to give, so that they can do so from a non-reactive place.
4.) Check-in to Ensure Understanding. One of the coaching skills that you can use most as a manager is that of mirroring—paraphrasing, loosely, the most important points a person was making—and checking to ensure understanding. This is important when feedback is given to make sure everyone understands what the feedback is and next action steps. Otherwise, you could give feedback and then have someone walk away from the conversation not realizing what the most important points were that you were trying to make.
When Managers feel frustrated by their role or by dynamics on their team, the issue is doubly compounded if managers aren’t sure how to give employee feedback. It’s important to know how to communicate feedback well among your team, and equally as important to manage the high emotion that can come with giving and receiving feedback. Learn coaching skills that benefit you as a Manager to make your experiences leading teams feel more easeful.