Being able to give effective feedback is not just a good skill to possess in business, it is a great life skill to have. Because when you are masterful at giving feedback, not only can you help your employees to sustain continuously improving performance, you can also improve the performance of the baseball team you coach, the cleaning lady at home, or the performance of your own children on completing their chores Being able to give effective feedback is not just a good skill to possess in business, it is a great life skill to have. Because when you are masterful at giving feedback, not only can you help your employees to sustain continuously improving performance, you can also improve the performance of the baseball team you coach, the cleaning lady at home, or the performance of your own children on completing their chores. Any person’s performance in any activity can be positively impacted by effective feedback. Isn’t that a powerful skill to have? Wouldn’t you want to be a master at giving really useful and impactful feedback?

The good news is that it is not difficult to be good at giving feedback. It does take some effort and practice. But it is definitely a skill that can be learned. So, to get you started, here are the Do’s and Don’ts of giving feedback.

Let’s start with the Do’s:

Be Timely: in order for feedback to be effective, you need to act quickly. If months have gone by before you bring up an incident, the person receiving the feedback will interpret your delay to imply that it couldn’t have been that important, and the effect of the feedback is greatly diminished.

Be Specific: talk about your feedback in very direct and specific terms ("I noticed there were several calculation errors in last month’s report"). If you are vague ("your work is unacceptable"), how can you get the message across? Focus on the action and the results. Be very factual in your discussion.

Be Open and Offer Suggestions: if the objective of your feedback discussion is to produce an improvement of performance, then come equipped with suggestions (again be specific) on what the person can do to affect that change. Be open to their perspective and be willing to discuss how they see that situation. Enroll them in coming up with a solution that they can buy into. If you don’t get buy-in, change will not happen.

Create the right environment: feedback is best done in person, and in a private setting. In a business setting, arrange a time and place for your discussion. Don’t just catch people on the fly and throw a few comments their way as they are heading down the hallway and expect your comments to have any impact.

Check for understanding and buy-in: if the feedback discussion is about a performance issue, make sure you check-in on how your comments have landed with the person. Establish some sort of accountability to verify their buy-in. For example, if you have an employee who constantly misses deadlines. During the discussion, ask for a commitment that he will meet all deadlines for the next quarter. Make sure that the commitment is specific, and not something vague like: "I’ll do a better job of meeting deadlines next quarter."

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