Do you struggle to give negative feedback? We tend to call it constructive feedback at work now, and yet many of you still describe it as negative feedback when you are having to give it to someone.
Here are some possible reasons why you might struggle:
- You worry about hurting or upsetting the other person
- You worry about their reaction (fearing an emotional outburst)
- You fear they won’t like you anymore
- You think they will stop being collaborative
Anything else?
Now here’s a challenge to you:
All of the above are all about you.
When you give feedback to someone, it’s not meant to be about you, it’s meant to be about them. Have you heard the saying that feedback is a gift? Well I’d add that feedback has to be a useful gift. If the person you are giving it to can do nothing with it, then it’s not feedback, it’s criticism.
So I’d like you to think about feedback as ‘feedforward’. How can the person you are giving it to use it to help them move forward?
A client of mine came to me with this very question:
Sonia, I have to give a colleague and team member some negative feedback and I just can’t do it. I know it’s going to hurt him and I just can’t bring myself to do it.
After uncovering what it was that was stopping her – it was a combination of all the statements in our list above – I asked her the question:
So what will happen if you don’t give him that feedback? How will it affect your team? What will your boss do?
And it all came flooding in! She suddenly saw that not only would the rest of the team suffer as they were carrying him, but that critically:
Whilst I have my head in the sand, they will come and chop his off!
Those were her exact words.
Giving him the feedback would be the kindest and most productive thing to do for him and everyone else. Working with him to decide what to do next would give him choices that he just didn’t have right now.
So what feedback or feedforward are you avoiding right now? When are you going to commit to giving it? Is there anything else that is stopping you?
Speak soon
Sx
