As a manager, giving your employees feedback is perhaps your most important task. But are your employees happy about the way you give feedback about them? Does your feedback motivate your employees to give their best or does it make them resentful? Does it boost your employees’ morale? Does it keep them on-track regarding your team’s objectives or do they continue being distracted?

These are some questions that help assess the effectiveness of your feedback. In an ideal corporate setting, your feedback is supposed to help your employees realize the reasons for inconsistencies in their performance and suggest a corrective course of action. Thus, it should facilitate employees’ career growth. However, in most situations, the opposite happens. Why? There are varied reasons. Most of the time, knowingly or unknowingly, managers make certain mistakes while passing on feedback to their employees. These mistakes negate the very purpose of giving feedback and jeopardize the relationship between managers and their subordinates.

Let us discuss a few of them here:

Attempting to sugarcoat negative feedback

Unwilling to hurt their employees, managers often try to lessen the impact of negative feedback by not stating things as-they-are. This only confuses employees because employers don’t come out with what they should and employees end up not understanding their employer.

Thinking that they are right because they are more experienced

Managers often take pride in their experience and ability to make correct judgments. The same reflects in the way they give feedback. They expect their direct reports to completely subscribe to their point of view and don’t factor for the employees’ own unique experience and perspectives.

Focusing on individuals rather than their actions

Managers tend to become judgmental about their employees. They let subjectivity influence their assessment of an employee.

Generalizing feedback

Managers give feedback without specifying the instances that led them to reach such a conclusion. Thus, feedback becomes so vague that subordinates may feel that their boss is unreasonable and attempting to judge everyone along the same lines.

Offering solutions along with negative feedback

Managers come to a quick conclusion that their subordinates cannot solve problems on their own. So, they attempt to offer solutions for performance problems which, they think, their employees face. They do not allow employees the opportunity to come up with their own solutions.

Giving feedback only at the annual appraisal

Managers wait to give feedback only at the annual appraisal. This is not the right performance improvement technique. This will keep your employees wondering what you think about their performance round-the-year. They may feel betrayed and suspicious about your intentions if the feedback is negative. Besides, you will have to draw several instances throughout the year to back your perspective, so it makes better sense to give feedback at regular intervals.

Using provocative language

While trying to prove their point, managers tend to use provocative words. Provocative language makes employees emotional. They may take an acrimonious course of action against their managers.

These are some mistakes you need to avoid to make your feedback effective and serve your organization’s needs.

Related posts:

1. The Essential Skills and Attitude Of A Manager
2. The Best Way To Give An Employee A Performance Review
3. Building a Happy and Productive Workplace

Usually, training needs are identified during an annual performance appraisal done by HRD. These needs are handed over to corporate training to initiate involvement to address them. The needs are classified and collated; training calendars drawn; training budgets projected and so on.

That’s fine but when the demand arise from the line managers for training other than those that fall in the above category, how do we react? Do we go by the book and start from the beginning? Sounds logical, especially knowing the fact that a majority of performance gaps do not fall under the purview of training.

Most line managers want the training to be delivered yesterday! There is always a dearth of time, resources and money, which makes us think twice before we jump into a full-fledged analysis.

So, the question is when can we skip and when can we not?

We tend to skip a formal analysis process when we use rapid prototyping where Instructional Designers (IDs) and Subject matter Experts (SMEs) work in a continual loop to produce a prototype. The prototype becomes the first step in the cycle and front-end analysis gets integrated into an ongoing, iterative process between subject matter, objectives and courseware.

According to Mager & Pipe, we should explore fast fixes before spending time and resources on further analysis. All that is required is a quick-and-easy remedy such as:

• Uncovering invisible expectations
• Providing proper resources
• Supplying feedback

Related posts:

1. A summary of 90 responses to “Training Needs Analysis: To Skip or Not to Skip?”