aggressiveLeaders at all levels struggle with this most important of performance tools: feedback. We delay delivering it, we water it down, we sandwich it in praise and obscure the message or, we avoid it altogether.

Like anything else, practice makes perfect, and a few simple suggestions can help ease your concerns and usher in more “practice time” in your workplace.

Suggestions for Improving Your Comfort and Use of Feedback:

1. Frequency and timeliness count! Your job is to deliver feedback everyday….not just at the performance review.  In fact, that’s a horrible time for it.

2. Always base feedback on observable behaviors.

3. Link the behavior in question to business issues.  Don’t make it personal.

4. Describe the appropriate behavior or in the case of positive feedback, specify the good behavior.  Tell a person, “nice presentation,” and while they feel good, they have no idea what they did right.

5. Keep the discussion simple…focus on one behavior, not everything that you can think of for the past three months.

7. Actions and outcomes count! Create an action plan to change the behavior.  Ideally, the target of the feedback creates the action plan.

8. Observe, coach and provide on-going feedback.

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Bonus Tip 1: Take a few minutes before your feedback discussion to jot down your opening statement and plan your conversation.  Use the above as a check-list to make certain that you’ve incorporated all of the key elements.