Tag: Feedback
Should you give unsuccessful job candidates feedback on what they did or didn’t get right? Managers need to understand the difference between praise and positive feedback. Feedback is one of the most important tools in your management toolbox, and an absolute must for any manager who wants to be effective. Praise is a useful tool, but it doesn’t directly drive performance improvement the way feedback does. If you’re accidentally giving praise when you think you’re giving positive feedback, you won’t see the results you expect. Addressing behavior through mass emails or new policy rollout is a mistake. Here’s why. Here are three models that I like for delivering feedback. Each is valuable on its own and would make a great starting point for anyone who wants to build their feedback muscle. Together, they highlight some common factors in effective feedback models and show off a couple of “special features” that can help your feedback be particularly effective. I had a call a few weeks ago with a friend and fellow engineering manager, and we spent most of it talking about someone on her team who wasn’t responding well to feedback. He was performing several parts of his job pretty poorly, but when each time she told him that his work wasn’t acceptable, he pushed back. He argued, sometimes loudly, and refused to make the changes that she was asking for. My friend came to me pretty frustrated, not entirely sure how to respond to this guy.
Most managers know this feeling: they’re doing their job as a manager, giving clear, specific, professional feedback but it’s going poorly. What should you do in a situation like this?