Giving and receiving feedback: Conducting a productive formal review

When it’s time for that periodic formal review, do you know how to make the session effective? Minu Ipe, clinical associate professor of management and faculty director of the W. P. Carey MBA Evening Program, explains that there are four steps to success: identify your objective, prepare, deliver and follow up. (7:06)

When it’s time for that periodic formal review, do you know how to make the session effective? Minu Ipe, clinical associate professor of management and faculty director of the W. P. Carey MBA Evening Program, explains that there are four steps to success: identify your objective, prepare, deliver and follow up. (7:06)

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Giving and Receiving Feedback: Seize the Moment!

Transcript

This is Business 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.

When it’s time for that periodic formal review, do you know how to make the session effective? Minu Ipe, Clinical Associate Professor of Management and Faculty Director of the W.P. Carey MBA evening program, explains that there are four steps to success.

Minu Ipe: The four steps are identifying your objective, preparing for the session, delivering the feedback and then the fourth step is follow up.

The first step would be identifying your objective. It’s very critical in giving feedback to understand why it is that you want to give the feedback. Is it for short-term performance improvement? Is it because you want somebody to change their behavior to make them more effective? Are we looking at long-term issues?

Once you have the objective in place, the next thing to be thinking about is doing I have all the information I need. Feedback needs to be based on observable behavior or good data, and you want to know that you have the information that is accurate before you actually deliver that feedback.

Step two is preparing for the session. What might be some potential barriers to this other person receiving the feedback? What is my relationship with the recipient? Is there a power difference here? Am I the supervisor and this individual is a subordinate? Is this a peer? In some situations perhaps the other person is your supervisor. Do you have a great relationship of trust with this person; or on the other hand is this person somebody that you don’t really know that well. You might also want to think about how you will handle disagreement, especially if it is instructional feedback and there’s negative information. If the other person gets defensive or pushes back, how would you plan to deal with that situation?

Preparing for the session also involves thinking about when to deliver the feedback. Yes, feedback needs to be timely, but you also need to find a time where you think that there is the chance [is the highest] of the other person hearing the feedback. You might want to think about what else is going on in your work team or in the company at that particular point in time. You also want to think about where you can do it. Depending on the type of feedback, you might want to do it in an office. It might be that you want to take it out of an office and get it into a conference room. Or perhaps you want to take it outside.

If it is a complex issue that you’re dealing with in terms of feedback, it may not be a bad idea to prepare a script. A script doesn’t mean writing down what you are going to say and what you think the other person is going to say, but it’s an outline of what it is that you want to communicate. Because very often in a feedback session, when emotions get heightened, people tend to overemphasize the things that are not as important and perhaps ignore or brush aside the things that are truly important.

Now comes delivering the feedback. Delivery feedback has three important components: there is the opening, there’s the body of the feedback, and the closing.

The opening is important because it sets the tone for the rest of that conversation, and you want that to be a constructive tone. So it could be that you spent a little time setting the other person at ease. There may be situations where you do away with all the niceties and say we need to discuss this. This is important and gets into it, but whatever it is, it needs to be constructive.

The body of the feedback involves a couple of things that we need to be thinking about. One, the information needs to be specific; it needs to be accurate, and it needs to be actionable. Again, the important thing is to stay away from general impressions and focus on observable data and observable behavior.

The body of the feedback also involves listening. Oftentimes, feedback is seen as a one-way process. A truly meaningful process of giving feedback is a two-way process where you share with the other person what it is that you want to share with them based on what you know of the situation and then you listen to what they have to say.

In terms of giving feedback, a common mistake is using the sandwich approach; starting off with a lot of positives, sliding in that little piece of information that you really want to share, and then building up a lot of positives on the backend. Unfortunately with the sandwich approach, when it is not used well, the piece of information that you really want to communicate gets lost in all these wonderful positive things that are built before and after it.

So then the other thing to be thinking about is getting buy-in from the recipient. You are having shared the feedback does not mean that the feedback has been accepted or understood. The final step is developing an action plan. So what is it that you are going to be doing with this information? Is there a plan with a timeline as to when some changes will take place? Then you want to close that conversation, and you want to close it on, again, a constructive note, especially if it has been negative information and there are behavior changes that you’ve discussed. You want the other person to feel like you’re going to help them work through this whole process.

And the final step is the follow up. Often times the process of feedback is finished at the end of that feedback conversation, and that leaves the process incomplete. So especially if you are in a supervisory capacity, you do want to follow up on the timelines that were established at the feedback communication. You want to know that this person has actually done things that are different. You also want to know if some coaching is required at that point. You also want to be aware if there are no changes. If there are no changes, you want to know why and you want to then be able to collect information that allows you to make that next decision. The process of giving feedback really doesn’t end with that feedback conversation.

To summarize the four steps involved in giving feedback are: 1) identifying the objective; 2) preparing for the session; 3) delivering the feedback, and 4) following up.

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