Giving and receiving feedback: Seize the moment!

If you think that the only opportunity to give or get feedback on job performance is the annual review session, you are missing many chances to improve your employees and your business throughout the year, clinical associate professor of management and faculty director of the W. P. Carey MBA Evening Program, explains why. This podcast is brought to you by Business to Go from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University -- knowledge and skills you can put to work today in your business and career.

If you think that the only opportunity to give or get feedback on job performance is the annual review session, you are missing many chances to improve your employees and your business throughout the year. Minu Ipe, clinical associate professor of management and faculty director of the W. P. Carey MBA Evening Program, explains why. This podcast is brought to you by Business to Go from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University -- knowledge and skills you can put to work today in your business and career.

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Performance Management: Feedback Is a Two-Way Street

Transcript

This is Business to Go from the W.P. Carey School of Business, bringing you knowledge and skills that you can put to work today in your business and career. If you think that the only opportunity to give or get feedback on job performance is the annual review session, you’re missing out on many chances to improve your employees and your business throughout the year. Minu Ipe, clinical associate professor of management and faculty director of the W.P. Carey Evening MBA, explains why.

Minu Ipe: When we think about opportunities to give feedback, I think we need to back up and think about the functions of feedback. Primarily there are two functions of feedback: It can be instructional and it can be motivational. Instructional feedback is feedback that you give to somebody when you want them to change the way they do something or correct what they’re doing. Motivational feedback is given when you want to acknowledge and reward somebody for having done something well and hopefully have them do more of that in the future.

Opportunities to give feedback exist throughout the year in organizations. One of the challenges or myths that we’ve come to understand about giving feedback is that it needs to be given at the end of the year through the appraisal cycle. Somebody once said that giving feedback once a year and expecting behavior change is like dieting on your birthday and then expecting to lose weight throughout the year. Opportunities to give feedback are everywhere, it’s every day, and it can be both formal and informal. Often times the informal feedback tends to be more effective because it’s timelier and people get it as soon as the situation is completed.

One example of timely feedback would be after a meeting: you provide feedback to somebody on how they ran the meeting or something that they contributed at the meeting. Or it could be when somebody submits a report to you and you provide some feedback on the quality of that report. It could be at selected intervals during a project. It could be after action reviews. A lot of the informal feedback can also be just spontaneous. When you see somebody doing a good job, you let them know that it was a good job and hopefully you tell them why you think that was a good job. Or when you see somebody, say handling a difficult customer situation well; or having dealt with a conflict well; or having done something that was extraordinarily good. Timely feedback happens when you seize the moment and provide that feedback.

The key is to get to know people around you, because often times people expect feedback to be given differently. For some people, too much feedback can be seen as micromanaging. So it’s just understanding what people need from you and understanding what works.

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