Leveraging Effective Feedback to Enhance Team Performance

Written by Elaine Fitzgerald McBarron, Effective Business Communication subject matter expert at UCD Professional Academy

“Feedback is the fuel gauge of performance”.

Before any journey we check if we’ve enough fuel to reach our destination. This information gives us the confidence to start out on the road. We also keep an eye on that gauge during long journeys, to confirm it’s safe to continue. 

Work performance is a kind of long journey, with twists and turns, motorways and byways. On this career-spanning trip, we need various methods to confirm we’re on the right road and we’re roadworthy! Okay, no more car analogies!

The point is that without feedback we can be lost, isolated and directionless. Feedback at work is an essential management and personal leadership skill. In our complex, ambiguous, ever-changing, and volatile work settings, we need techniques to sustain ourselves, maintain resilience and perform.

Performance = Learning + Change

So, feedback is an essential tool, but also a challenging task too. Here are some of the reasons:

1. When strong emotions are involved, we often avoid any potential for conflict. Instead, we release tension by complaining. This is not done to the relevant party, but to a safe person (our partner, fellow colleague etc.). Therefore we don’t handle the conversation or issue directly or benefit from any positive resolution. In this scenario, managers can be the last ones to know of an issue.

2. It’s difficult not to take feedback personally – it is personal, after all. This results in conflict debt. Conflict debt is the sum of all the contentious issues that need to be addressed to be able to move forward but instead remain undiscussed and unresolved.

3. We often lack the clarity on the performance standard for our teams; this causes confusion and chaos. We then engage in defensive routines to justify our actions: “well, they would say that wouldn’t they?”, “he/she/they are impossible to please”, etc.  

4. We can underestimate the time and energy required to build trust and a feedback culture in our organisations. In a feedback vacuum, other unhelpful behaviour can flourish. This can include lack of transparency, holding back, hiding information/mistakes, or an unchecked competitive environment.

Do these sound familiar?

The good news is that there are techniques and feedback habits that can transform your team and performance. Here are the headlines: 

• Commit to building a feedback culture.

• Choose a structure, time, processes and common language that works for you and your organisation. These should be grounded in values of professionalism, respect, integrity and responsibility.  

• Get better with asking questions and listening. View all interactions as learning conversations. For instance, check understanding with open-ended questions such as: “How do you see the situation?”; “How might you do things differently next time?”; “What do you think?”

Let’s dive into more detail.

Psychology of Feedback

One key insight is from Psychology. Feedback cannot and will not be processed without trust. You may have some helpful comments to share with a colleague, manager, customer, or friend, but if they don’t trust you – forget it, they have!

Recent research shows that most employees equate feedback with criticism. Why? We’re biologically and socially programmed to constantly (often unconsciously) scan the environment for threats, difference, or change.

Remember, the largest threat to humans is safety. As social beings we’ve evolved to gather in tribes for protection and survival. On a physiological basis, our top priority is always acceptance and inclusion in a community (i.e. your work team). Exclusion from the tribe is the harshest punishment. This triggers our flight, fright, freeze response. Therefore, we’re hardwired to experience feedback as a source of ‘social evaluative’ threat i.e. will I be accepted? Any efforts you make to build trust will increase openness to feedback. 

Another powerful lesson from Psychology is that we remember criticism strongly but inaccurately. When under pressure and at times of high emotion, our brain gets foggy. All our valuable oxygen gets diverted from our brain to a heart, lungs and limbs (to prioritise fight or flight). Therefore, as Maya Angelou said: “people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”. Take some time to ‘read the room’, never give feedback in the ‘heat of the moment’ and judge whether this is the right time or place. 

Common Language – A Feedback Culture 

Axios HQ Statistics discovered some powerful performance feedback evidence: 

• 66% of leaders think they’re aligned with employees. 44% of employees agree.

• 77% of leaders think the communications they share include the context employees need to do their jobs well. 46% of employees agree.

• 77% of leaders believe their critical updates are helpful and relevant. Only 46% of employees agree.

Do you see a clear pattern here? Leaders and employees are not aligned in terms of critical feedback. Shockingly, employees say that the two topics that they receive updates for most frequently are the same two that are least likely to be critical or essential. It seems that increasingly, people are feeling overwhelmed by information, but starving for the context they need to understand it. Effective feedback is the pathway to this understanding and should be an integral part of your feedback culture. 

Establishing a feedback culture has many benefits; psychological safety for staff, professional development, diversity and inclusion, true collaboration and high performing teams. Here are just three suggestions to move the dial in your organisation:

1. Invest in a comprehensive recruitment/onboarding/induction process. Ensure the HR department is aligned to your vision of a feedback culture. Educate all new candidates on what this means in the day-to-day reality of work. 

2. Manage the probation period. The probation period is the second interview. Undermanage this stage at your peril. Issues mishandled and avoided in probation will come back to bite, taking up valuable time and effort, and heartache. 

3. Remember that overcommunication is required to shift culture and normalise feedback. Set expectations on practical steps i.e. Who gives feedback? Who receives it? How often does it occur? How do we do it? What is the goal of feedback?

Here are some feedback methodologies to support your feedback transformation. 

Informal Techniques:

• The Point and Run Technique: If you are getting accolades for a job well done, point out those who support you. If you see excellent role models, run toward them, soak up their knowledge and inspiration!

• Take 10-15 mins daily to huddle (if not, certainly a weekly huddle): This is a platform to ensure timely answers to pressing questions, and enforce team accountability because everyone knows what everyone else is up to. 

• Include a standard Feedback Agenda item: Victories from Yesterday/Priorities for Today/Anything that has you Stuck?

• Monthly Feedback: As a manager, invite monthly feedback and take the time to share this feedback to others in a meeting blog/vlog. 

• Get better with questions and listening

Automattic Inc Formal Technique:

I discovered this method from Automattic Inc. 3:2:1:oh technique

• What are 3 things you’ve done well?

• What are 2 areas or skills you’d like to develop?

• What’s 1 way your team lead or organisation itself can support you?

• And, oh, can you write a sentence or two about what you're most excited/grateful for in the organisation and how you’d like to develop your career?

The questions and their responses form the basis of a quarterly, one hour meeting. The team member completes their own 3-2-1-Oh self-evaluation and sends it to the team leader/manager a week in advance. The Team Lead/Manager reads through responses, make notes, and sends their thoughts in return. In the meeting, both read over each other’s responses to have a better framework for the discussion. The goal is for these sessions to be iterative. They should build upon one another. 

During these feedback conversations, sometimes the mind goes blank. Having questions to hand will help prompt powerful reflection and discussion. Here are some to keep to hand:

• What specifically was most valuable to you in this month?

• What are you excited about? 

• What are you worried about? 

• What should I do more/less of?

• How can we improve our feedback?

• What two things do we need to pay more attention to?

• What should I do differently next month to help us?

• 1 thing I can do better to help you with your job.

• 1 thing you can do better to improve at your job.

Alternative Feedback Technique (adapted from Liane Davey, The Good Fight):

Orient: Give the context and occasion. Keep this short. For example: in this morning’s call / when we were working on this project / when I heard you talking to Chris.

Describe: The perceived behaviour that caused you to have an insight or a reaction. Focus on just one recent behaviour you have witnessed. Include a great description of behaviour using nouns and verbs, e.g. ‘I’ statement, be descriptive not evaluative. 

Express: Now you can shift to the new information. Give the person some new insight about the impact of their behaviour on you (or the team, customers, clients etc.). You can be subjective and use adjectives here. What you would like them to do differently (or more of). Be absolutely clear with the individual.

Specify: In this final step, you pass the accountability to the other person. The best way to do that is to ask a question that causes them to own it. Use an open-ended question, not one that starts with ‘why’, because ‘why’ is accusatory and will tend to get people defensive. Leave room for somebody to react to that feedback e.g. “I was wondering how you felt”, “What are your thoughts?”

To summarise, if handled with respect, care and consideration, feedback is a gift to give and receive. Performance is after all about learning and change. We can all be role models on how to accept feedback with grace. This mindset is one of openness and curiosity, as it’s impossible to be curious and defensive at the same time. By acknowledging that we all have only one piece of the overall jigsaw, we can have the maturity required to handle feedback and sustain performance in these challenging times.

Want to learn more about providing effective feedback? Watch our recent webinar with Elaine here.