Optimizing the Feedback Process: Align Your Team’s Goals
Get an understanding of the changes in your feedback loops and address them.
One of the most critical parts of managing a remote team is giving honest feedback with best intentions and understanding. How do you best give constructive criticism to a distributed workforce?
Our Tip Sheet
Pick your battles
We can only absorb so much feedback at once. Isolate the most important piece of feedback you have and lead with that! Too much feedback can flood the other person or feel like a character attack.
Always look at an employee’s intention, before looking at the execution of tasks.
Think through what may be driving the behavior that the other person is exhibiting. Is it driven by a lack of knowledge, malice, laziness, carelessness? Each has its own potential path forward.
Find patterns
Look for recurring patterns of behavior that separately may seem unrelated, but are merely parts of the same intention. Identifying patterns will help with picking your battles as you consolidate moments of feedback for any single employee.
Find a receptive moment
We all desire feedback because we want to know how others see us and perceive our abilities. However, it’s difficult to hear the not-so-positive feedback, especially when you’re in the wrong headspace. Before launching into employee feedback, take a moment to check-in to see how they’re doing mentally. If they’re having a difficult day, find another day for the conversation.
The goal is progress
Remember the goal of feedback is to improve your team and your organization! For employee feedback to work, it needs to come from a human place — though not necessarily a personal one.
How We Can Help: Workshops
We offer two workshops that are designed to facilitate the metacognitive processes of feedback.
The Jewelry Heist Workshop is centered around awareness of presentation, establishing trust and cultivating honesty. In this workshop, participants take roles of witnesses and jury members in a jewelry heist. In these roles, participants explore new ways of presenting information, gathering information and confronting uncomfortable facts — parallel processes to what we may experience in a workplace while giving or receiving feedback.
The Stained Glass Workshop is centered around vetting informational validity, aligning contradictory pieces of information and establishing rapport. In this workshop, participants take roles of restoration experts interviewing witnesses about the design of a piece of stained glass. In these roles, participants explore new ways of organizing information, determining what information is valid or critical, and deciding which information to act on — another parallel to the process we may experience in a workplace while giving or receiving feedback.
For more information, explore our workshop options or reach out to us.
