How Do Your Feedback Skills Stack Up?

Providing feedback to employees is one of the most difficult parts of being a manager.

There are multiple aspects involved in delivering effective feedback:

• The time and place
• The type of feedback
• The techniques used
• The focus of the feedback

Most managers are good with certain aspects of delivering feedback but are lacking in others; some managers even avoid giving feedback altogether. However, feedback is essential for developing employees’ talents and managing their shortcomings.

It is difficult for employees to gauge whether they are doing something well or poorly or right or wrong without them receiving some sort of feedback. This is why it is important, as a manager, to consistently give feedback to your employees.

There are two main types of feedback: corrective and supportive. The primary purpose of supportive feedback is to reinforce a behavior you want repeated. If you see an employee do something right, it is crucial to acknowledge that behavior. This will reinforce that conduct and the employee will be more likely to repeat it in the future.

The purpose of corrective feedback, on the other hand, is to change behavior. The best chance of getting an employee to change a behavior is to provide corrective feedback. This can be very challenging. There are many skills and techniques that improve the quality and effectiveness of corrective feedback.

Would you like to measure your current level of skill with giving feedback to others? The Feedback Assessment Inventory will give you a visual representation of your feedback skills spanning ten dimensions of behavior. These ten dimensions have been chosen because they encompass the broad abilities a person must have in order to give effective supportive and corrective feedback.