MBA1298 Guest Teacher: Sarah Wirth- How to Use Feedback to Drive Improvement

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Hi everyone, My name is Sarah Worth and I'm co author of the new book the Coaching what Great Leaders do to Increase Sales, Enhance Performance and Sustain Growth. I'm here to talk with you today about how to give better performance feedback to your team members and I'm really excited to share some data on why most managers struggle with giving feedback and most importantly, what specifically you can do to improve how you give feedback. Recently I was speaking with a leader who told me how he was struggling to give constructive feedback to one of the people he managed. The leader was particularly close to his team member as they had been friends for years and even spent some time together on the weekends with their families. Unfortunately, his team member was having some significant performance issues and the leader was having a hard time finding the courage to address it. He didn't want to hurt his team members feelings and dreaded the potentially awkward conversation. And he especially didn't want to do anything that could damage his friendship with the person. Like many of us, this leader wasn't looking at feedback the right way. He was focused on how he would feel delivering it, rather than how his team member may feel receiving it. When I am teaching leaders how to deliver constructive feedback, I often liken it to telling somebody they have a piece of spinach stuck in their teeth. If you had a piece of spinach stuck in your teeth, wouldn't you want to know? Aren't you usually appreciative of the friend that mentions it to you, instead of letting you walk around smiling at people all day long with agreeing globs stuck between your teeth? Well, good feedback works the same way. Good feedback helps people improve their skills, overcome challenges, and achieve their performance goals. And yes, it can even help them avoid the embarrassment of making a mistake that everyone can see except for them. When we look at the different coaching activities executed by managers of our client organizations, we see that delivering consistent and effective feedback is one of the biggest factors in driving team performance. In a recent client study, the leaders of the best performing teams, as measured by percent to sales goal, completed over double the amount of feedback conversations as the leaders of lower performing teams. Now, the impact of feedback on performance is really not that surprising. As a leader, when you help your team members understand what they're doing well and what they are doing poorly and what they can do to improve, they have the information they need to get better. Sounds simple, right? Well then why aren't more managers giving consistent, effective feedback to improve their team's performance? Why doesn't everyone make this a key priority on their to do list? Unfortunately, many managers simply don't know how to give good feedback, so that's what we're going to focus on today. The first thing you can do to improve your feedback is to put it in writing. Taking the time to document feedback and then reviewing that documentation with your team member is helpful for several reasons. First of all, it reduces ambiguity as both you and your team member are seeing the same written information. Second, it improves learning as written feedback can be referred to in the days and weeks to come. Third, it encourages specific improvement ideas as having to write something down pushes us to be more clear in our recommendations. Fourth, it shows progress over time as team members can look back at older written feedback to see how they've improved. Fifth, it gives added weight to the feedback as people are more likely to pay attention to something that someone took the time to write down. Simply put, they take written feedback more seriously. Unfortunately, we've learned that through our surveys that half of team members receive written feedback on their skills only once per year, despite the importance of this feedback. Worse yet 20% of team members report they have never received any kind of documented feedback at all from their manager. It's no wonder that many team members find feedback to be insufficient in providing them with ideas of what they can do to improve. So if you want to give your feedback added impact, give written feedback at least once per quarter. The second thing you can do to improve your feedback is to get comfortable giving constructive feedback and doing so in an empathetic way. One of the best ways to do this is to talk about the problem without judging your team member or their work. If you tell your team member they did something wrong or that they're bad at something, they're likely going to think of ways to defend their actions. Rather than listening to your feedback, instead stick to describing what you saw them do in a fact based way. For example, rather than saying, you, strategy doesn't seem well thought out, instead say, as I read your strategy, I noticed it didn't contain certain elements. If you are just describing what you saw or heard, it's harder for your team member to take issue with your feedback. Once you are both on the same page about their actions and behaviors, then you can work together to try to figure out a different approach they can take the next time. This allows the feedback conversation to feel much more collaborative and it will also help you get more comfortable with giving constructive feedback as you are not criticizing the person but rather attacking the problem with them to find a better solution. The third thing you can do to improve your feedback is to be more specific. When we ask team members how feedback from their manager could be improved, the most common response is that they'd like their manager to be more clear. Too often a manager's comments are general and team members don't walk away with a real sense of what exactly they need to do differently. Indeed, our surveys indicate that only about 25% of team members strongly agree that their manager's feedback provides them with the help and knowledge they need to improve their performance. Imagine if a golf instructor were to simply tell their student they needed to hit the ball further. That would add zero value. Yet sometimes when we give feedback, we use the same kind of generic language. We tell people to be more assertive or more strategic, or without discussing any of the ideas on exactly what they can do to change their behavior. For example, rather than telling your team member that they need to get to know their client better, you should share with them some specific questions they could ask to deepen the client relationship. And rather than just suggesting they improve their time management, you should Review with them their current priorities and help them plan how to spend their time differently. As a general rule of thumb, your team members should be able to clearly visualize how they could change their approach in order to achieve the desired result. If they can't get a picture in their mind of how their actions should look different, the feedback conversation probably hasn't led to suggestions that are specific enough. The final and most important way for you to improve your feedback is to ask more questions. If I could offer only one piece of advice to managers who want to improve how they coach their teams, it would be to ask more questions. This can be a lot harder than it sounds. Like most managers, you are likely promoted to your role because you are successful in the role that you are now coaching others to do. And when you are good at something, it can be difficult to sit back and listen. You have valuable experiences, insights and ideas. And most of all, you have solutions that could help your team members achieve their goal if they just listen to you. But it's more important to realize that you can probably help them the most by first listening to them. Unfortunately, the greatest manager's thoughts often get lost in all the talking that they do. Because when managers talk and talk and talk, it is harder for their team members to take in their ideas. This is because most team members and most people are not passive learners, so they can rarely just listen to advice and apply it effectively. People tend to take in information and apply it better when they're engaging in a conversation. And so there's no better way to help someone engage in a conversation than to ask them questions. We have an exercise we like to do in our seminars. We have the managers simulate a feedback conversation with a partner, with one person playing the role of the manager and the other person playing the role of a team team member receiving feedback. We only give one ground rule for this feedback conversation. The manager cannot give any suggestions or advice until they've asked at least seven questions. When we debrief the exercise, the managers all admit how hard it is to ask so many questions before giving feedback. Many of them want to jump in with their ideas immediately after asking their first questions, and others are more comfortable getting out a few questions before they get the itch to talk. But either way, they're wanting to speak fairly soon into the conversation. In spite of their discomfort with this new approach, the managers always recognize that the simulated feedback conversation was much better than their typical feedback. They like how their mock team members shared more insights, and they feel like their mock team members actually self identified problems and strategies for addressing them a fair amount of the time. And the people playing the team member always remark how the conversation feels more collaborative. They even say that they didn't feel like they were being managed, but rather that they were just talking with somebody about ways to get to a better result One of the major benefits of questions is that they promote self discovery. By asking your team members questions, you're helping them learn how to evaluate their own performance. This allows them to self identify the areas where they feel they can improve and ultimately this will help them make the necessary changes. Because when people recognize themselves that they need to get better, they are much more likely to be open to your suggestions. Now keep in mind that using questions to coach can be problematic when you do it the wrong way. So when you're asking questions, be sure to watch your tone of voice. If you tend to be a very direct or matter of fact communicator, your questions could be perceived as aggressive and you don't want to put people on the defensive. So make sure that your questions don't feel like a cross examination in which you're trying to get the other person to slip up. One of the best ways to do this is to ask more what questions and fewer why questions. Asking someone why they did something can often make them feel like you disagree with their judgment and again, put them on the defensive instead. Ask your team members what they want to accomplish with their approach. Ask them what they learned from completing a task. Ask them what they'd like to try to do differently next time. Above all, use questions as a way to learn about your team members, how they think, how they want to improve, and how you can help them. The more questions you ask when giving feedback, the more likely you are to learn what you can do to better coach them. Learning to give great feedback is a lifelong experience for most managers, and it's one of the most challenging coaching skills to master. Not only do you have to be able to clearly articulate the points you want to make, but you also have to ensure that you create an effective back and forth with the person to whom you are giving feedback. Most importantly, you have to really understand your team members so you know when to be more direct, when to be positive, and when to challenge them. I hope these feedback tips that I shared today will help you continue to refine your approach so your team members can experience the gift of effective feedback.

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What a fantastic lesson by Sarah Worth if you're interested in this topic, then you really should check out Sarah's website or over excel institute.com that's eccellinstitute.com I love the fact that she's highlighted some simple things you can do to change your delivery. Asking what instead of why, keeping it objective, and saying how you interpreted their work rather than criticizing them as a worker. The reason why I love it so much is because it makes it clear to the team member that hey, we need to get a job done. The whole team is working towards one goal. These are the things we need to do to get the job done. Here are the things we need you to do to get the job done and allows it to be very objective. Hey, we gotta get these things done. How can we make it happen? How can we improve? How can we get there? Some of us really cringe when we have to evaluate our employees, but I really like the idea of keeping things in writing and I actually like sending the writing portion first before having the discussion to kind of frame the argument. Also just to prepare them so they can actually think about their performance. We do this at our company and it really helps. It allows people to self evaluate because we do have a portion where they actually answer the questions on the points where they're being evaluated on depending on their position and allows them to reflect and think about hey, how can I improve so I could do better the next time around. I also like the point that she makes that you need to give feedback just in time and frequently you want to course correct it as much as you can because bad habits are hard to break once they're really established and people can be going down a path for too long and it's hard to course correct once they've been down that path for so long. So make it a point, put it in your calendar, make sure you're touching base or somebody in your team is touching base. A leadership member is touching base with everybody on your team as frequently as possible. I say minimum every three months, but if they're just getting started, they're in their first year, you want to touch base even more frequently to make sure that everybody is aligned. Love this lesson. I Sarah Worth thank you so much Sarah for that lesson that wraps up today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you love what you hear, drop us an iTunes rating and review. We'd love to hear what you love about the show. Your favorite episode, your favorite takeaway. We read every single review. And don't forget to hit subscribe so you can get access to all our archive episodes. Over 1200 episodes and counting. And the way to get access to hit subscribe so you have access to the feedback. We're on every app. Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcasts, Himalaya Tunein. We're on them all. Hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this if you are particularly apprehensive about having these feedback conversations, get started now. It doesn't get easier when you don't do anything. If you don't have these conversations, it's good to get the reps in. It's good to be in the practice of giving feedback and implementing the tips that Sarah has outlined in today's lesson. I'm not going to say it's ever going to be a joyful experience to do this, but it's going to be more tolerable. You're going to get used to it. You're going to be prepared and more confident the more you do it. So put it in your calendar and have the notes from today's lesson handy when you do your first feedback session. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care of.

At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the courseroom to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.