Giving and receiving feedback: What is effective feedback?

  Feedback is an important tool for developing great employees, says Minu Ipe, clinical professor of management and faculty director of the W. P. Carey MBA Evening Program. She explains the characteristics of effective feedback, using the acronym S-T-A-A-M. “S” is for specific, “T” for timely, “A” for accurate, another “A”, for actionable, and “M” for meaningful. 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.
   

Feedback is an important tool for developing great employees, says Minu Ipe, clinical professor of management and faculty director of the W. P. Carey MBA Evening program. She explains the characteristics of effective feedback, using the acronym S-T-A-A-M. “S” is for specific, “T” for timely, “A” for accurate, another “A”, for actionable, and “M” for meaningful. 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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Giving and Receiving Feedback: Seize the Moment!

Transcript:

This isBusiness to Go, knowledge and skills you can put to work today in your business and career, brought to you by the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. Feedback is an important tool for developing great employees says Minu Ipe, Clinical Associate Professor of Management and Faculty Director of the W. P. Carey MBA evening program. She explains the characteristics of effective feedback using the acronym STAAM, STAAM is for specific, T is for timely, A for accurate, another A for actionable and M for meaningful.

Minu Ipe:
Everybody needs feedback, and one of the myths about feedback that exists in a lot of organizations is that only poor performers need feedback. That is absolutely not true, so feedback needs to be given on a continuous basis; both formal and informal. But there are a couple of things to think about in order for that feedback to be really effective. Feedback needs to be specific, timely accurate, actionable and meaningful. So specific, really then, refers to focusing on observable behaviors or data. You’re not sharing information with the other person that is a general impression you have of them of what they did.

For example, if you have a situation where somebody needed to work on their customer service skills, you wouldn’t want to say you need to improve your customer service skills. That is too broad. So you might want to say you need to improve the response time to customers, and then cite some examples that just last week there were three situations where there was a delay in the way you responded to customers that is unacceptable because that’s not how we do things as a company. It needs to be data that the other person can understand where you’re coming from.

It needs to be timely, so it needs to be as close to the event as possible so that it is meaningful to the other person. If it is with this customer service situation, you can’t say well three months ago there were some delays in the way you dealt with customers because that’s too far away. It needs to be specific, it needs to be timely, it also needs to be accurate because you need to know that the information that you are providing and, also, reacting to is true. So if you are talking about three situations where the response to customers was not timely, there needs to be really three situations. It can’t be that there was one situation and then you heard about two other things because that takes away from your own credibility and the value of that feedback process is lost.

Feedback also needs to be actionable. So what can I do with this information? Often times, the first step in making that feedback actionable is to listen to what the other person has to say. So if you bring up this situation of having three customer response delays, it might be that the other person gives you some information on why there were those delays. Perhaps there were some issues with technology. Perhaps that person was so focused on getting it perfect that they actually waited for an additional day to get that information on to the customers. Using the opportunity to listen to what the other person is saying often is a way to come up with some action plans that are meaningful. It also gets the other person’s buy in when you take it to that level.

Finally, it needs to be meaningful. It has to be something that’s important to the job, important to other person, perhaps important to the team. Giving feedback for the sake of giving feedback takes away from the value of what this process can be like. Positive feedback also needs to be specific and timely. Just telling somebody you did a great job is nice, but it is not really motivational. Why was it such a great job, so that the other person truly appreciates what it is that made it valid.

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