Giving feedback from a mindset of positive intent
How to give positive and constructive feedback is one of the management skills that attracts the most interest in our management training. It’s a performance-related skill that people are often uncomfortable about both delivering or receiving.
Basically, when someone gives us feedback, it’s easy to respond with some fairly strong, automatic, emotional fight, flight or freeze-style responses.
What Mike Robbins (2020) advocates, is that giving feedback should be a two-way process between a manager and their direct report. This immediately changes the tone of the relationship from an autocratic (or parent-to-child) one, to one that is more in the nature of a partnership, collaboration, adult-to-adult one.
If a manager models their receptiveness to feedback as an opportunity for their own learning and development, then they will make it easier for their direct reports to do the same.
Another thing that we notice, when delegates ask us for help in developing their feedback skills, is that their focus is often on how to give ‘negative’ feedback. What we also often find, is that they are not used to or comfortable with giving positive feedback.
What Robbins also reminds us is that leaders, managers and high performing teams are skilled in balancing “care and challenge”.
So giving people positive feedback could enhance their sense of being valued and supported (or cared for). Positioning constructive feedback as a sought-after opportunity for learning and development will help to challenge and grow individuals, their managers and their teams.
You can read more about this in Giving feedback from a mindset of positive intent.
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