How Do You Know When You’re Giving Too Much Feedback?

Giving employees corrective feedback is an important part of a manager’s job and a vital tool in helping direct reports in their growth and development. Corrective feedback urges the recipient to change course or adjust practices that aren’t working. It’s crucial to make sure you’re not overwhelming the individual, though. Asking them to change more than one or two behaviors at a time can make them feel they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

Before giving feedback, consider the following:

• Will this cause more embarrassment than benefit?
• Have I built enough trust with them?
• Is the negative behavior a reaction to me as their manager?
• Can I fix this with reinforcing feedback?
• Is their behavior actually wrong, or is it simply different from how I’d do it?

Going through this checklist of questions before embarking on the mission of giving feedback can be a helpful tool if you’re unsure whether it’s necessary.

Giving Feedback

If you’ve determined the correct course of action is to give feedback, you’ll want to keep these four things in mind as you prepare for the conversation.

1. Seek an objective understanding of the situation you want to address by examining your own biases and assumptions. Focus on hard data and use behavioral examples to back up your ratings of the individual.
2. Plan what you want to say in advance and if possible, rehearse the conversation with a colleague.
3. During the meeting, talk about behaviors, rather than motivations. You need to stay objective here.
4. Elicit your employee’s perspective on the issue and, in the event you feel challenged, resist the urge to escalate the interaction.

Coaching

If you’re working with an individual as a coach and you’ve already referred to the cues given at the top of this article and determined feedback is right for the current situation, keep these three things in mind.

1. As you prepare for the coaching session, consider your own goals for the coaching relationship.
2. Open the meeting by inviting your employee to take the lead — listen to what’s currently on their mind and look for links between their goals and yours. Use that common ground to define a shared goal for your partnership.
3. Ask open-ended questions. This helps build a shared understanding of the issue you’re working on. Resist the urge to correct or override the employee’s perspective.

Performance Review

A performance review is a critical opportunity to give direct reports feedback. It can be tempting to glide through these assessments, but it won’t do you, your employee, or your organization any good. Here are six ways to maximize your next one-on-one.

1. Have your employee conduct a self-appraisal. Use this, along with other performance records, to create your own comprehensive review of their work.
2. Open the meeting by asking them to share their self-appraisal — this helps the encounter feel like a partnership. Maintain a friendly but professional tone throughout.
3. Now it’s your turn to go over your assessment of their performance. Balance positive and constructive feedback in straightforward language. Now is not the time for fluff or filler words.
4. Probe the root cause of their performance gap by asking for their perspective on the problem. Try not to steer them in a specific direction but let them come to their own conclusion.
5. Aim to have your employee take the lead by inviting them to create a new performance plan with specific goals and a timeline. Record the plans for accountability and distribute appropriately.
6. Identify your own follow-up items — including regular check-ins, coaching sessions, or other support as needed.

If you’re in a management position of any kind, you’ll need to get comfortable giving feedback. Remember to prioritize the most important change to be made, keep personal bias out of it, and approach it with a collaborative mindset. Effectively giving feedback will help your employees, as well as your organization, continue to grow and thrive.

Interested in learning about first line managers? Curious about how leadership development can help your organization reach its full potential? Get in touch now.

Vayability is a leadership development platform built from the ground up to accelerate the development and business impact of emerging talent. Combining more than 20 years of executive learning, Vayability focuses on impactful leadership skills, personalized learning, live coaching, and measurable growth. Find out how top companies embrace success at vayability.net.

Written by Rachel Strysik