Feedback - positive practice

I'm going to guess you don't like giving feedback. It isn't your favorite thing. And you know what? You're probably not doing it. Well, how can I say that or how do I know that? Well, Gallup showed in their data, they showed that 80% of employees who say they have received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged, which is what we want in the workplaces engaged employees. So 80%, if they've received meaningful feedback in the past week, are fully engaged. But Gallup also discovered that only 21% of U.S. employees strongly agree they have received meaningful feedback in the last week. So 80% are engaged if they received meaningful feedback. But only 21% received actually received meaningful feedback. So the result is only 31% of our employees are engaged, which means there's an opportunity. So if you want to improve at something and get better at delivering meaningful feedback, if you want to get comfortable with a new skill, you need to practice now. When talking about giving feedback, what most managers think of is feedback to improve performance or stop a bad behavior. And hopefully they're not doing that too much, so they're not getting a lot of opportunities to practice. Well, I'm going to give you an easy shift that you can make today so you get tons of opportunities to practice. And I'm going to tell you about an all purpose model that you can use in a variety of situations. So how can you practice and enjoy giving feedback? Well, the simple shift is to give positive feedback on a daily basis. That's it. That's all you need to do is daily give positive feedback to your employees. A good rule of thumb is that you should at a minimum be giving positive feedback, 3 to 1 to negative feedback, and really better if you could be at 5 to 1 or more. So when we think about giving positive feedback, it actually opens up an entire new range of possibilities because you are going to start looking for positive acts, you're going to start looking for behavior you want to see continue. You're going to start noticing all the good things that happen each and every day. And if you make that shift alone, that's going to improve your work life, it's going to improve your culture. But like coaches say, when we're talking about practicing feedback, it's not just the practice, it's how you practice. So I want to encourage you to also adopt a framework for giving feedback. Now, there's lots of different ones and as you evolve or mature in this, you're going to realize that you need a few different models for different situations. But if you're just starting to practice giving regular feedback, I've got a simple model you can use that is general purpose and can be applied to a variety of situations. You may have heard of it. It's the SBI model, Situation Behavior Impact. It's a model that comes from the center for Creative Leadership and you're going to use it when you deliver positive feedback. It's going to be what you're going to practice with and you can also use it to deliver negative feedback. It's simply the situation which is when and where the event took place. So for instance, this morning when we were in the break room, then the behavior is what the person did. State it objectively. So this morning when we were in the bathroom, Situation behavior is. I noticed that you washed all the dishes that were in the sink and then the I as impacts. What was the effect that it had? Thank you. That sets a great examples for others. When you start looking for positive things, you're going to notice them all over and you're going to think about how you can structure the feedback or the things you see in the Situation Behavior Impact model. And I'd encourage you, as you start noticing these things, to keep a log, write them down because it's going to be easy to forget them and it's also going to be easy to delete, delay it. And feedback is best delivered as close as possible to the event. So write it down and then as soon as you can, as soon as appropriate, pull the employee aside and deliver it to them. Hey, during the team meeting today, you summarize that project status really clearly and that helped keep the team on track and made it for easy for others to contribute in the meeting or hey, when the client sat sent that last minute request yesterday, I noticed you jumped right on it without even waiting to be asked. That's initiative that kept the project moving and I got good feedback from the client or situation. When our new employee was struggling yesterday. Behavior, you took the time to explain the tools that they were using and give them some more context that made them feel welcome and modeled the culture that we're trying to build here. Situation, Behavior Impact. Now these don't need to be complicated or lengthy or even really super majestic or high impact. They can be really short, sweet, small things that happened when we were together. I noticed this and it had this positive effect. Your main goal is just to do it often because you're building a muscle of delivering feedback and you're learning that model. A very simple model. Situation, Behavior, Impact and how you can use that to deliver positive feedback so it's enjoyable to you. You're doing it often. And then when you do have to deliver negative feedback, you're more likely to do it quickly because you have a framework to deliver it. You're gonna be more confident about delivering that feedback in a way that makes the employee less defensive and feel like they can actually take action. And you're gonna address behavior quickly so it doesn't escalate or get worse. So do it often. Do it with positive events. And then when you need to use it for a negative event, you'll have that muscled memory built in and you'll be more likely to do it. That's how we get better at feedback. That's how we improve the percentage of meaningful feedback that our employees are receiving and increases engagement across the workforce. If you want more info on feedback and other models, you can use, I actually have an article that I'd be happy to send you. And if you want to talk about how you can build leadership capacity at your organization, you can Simply go to shiftfocus.com strategycall and you can book a call directly with me there or just send me a message and I'd be happy to talk to you more. My name is Brian Walsh. I'm with Shift Focus Coaching Consulting, and I will talk to you very soon. Thanks.