Top Tips for Giving Effective Feedback

In my post The Power of Feedback I talked about why feedback is so important to enhance performance and confidence. In this post I would like to provide some top tips for giving effective feedback. If you’re part of a team that wants to perform optimally, it’s imperative that you deliver feedback in the most constructive and motivating way possible. Dealing with issues in a frank and courageous way shows that you’re passionate about performance.

Here are some of my top tips for giving effective feedback based on my experience of great coaches.

I encourage my clients to use the AID model as a guide for giving effective feedback:

AID

1. Action – describe the action or behaviour e.g. ‘what I noticed was…’ or ‘when you did…’. Keep it objective by providing facts and evidence, this is much harder to argue with and is less emotive. Avoid getting personal or commenting on personality.

2. Impact – describe the impact of the action or behaviour e.g. ‘It had the effect of…’ or ‘It caused…’. By highlighting the effect that the action had on the task/individual/procedure you increase the motivation to change.

3. Do/Desired Outcome – start to feed-forward and identify what could be done more or what could be done differently. E.g. ‘a suggestion for the future might be…’ or ‘I would encourage you to do/say…… more often’.

Finally be cautious of your body language and tone – the words are only half of the picture, the language and how you express it can dramatically affect the impact made on the recipient. Most importantly, keep giving feedback because without this, it’s impossible for an individual or team to improve performance!

For more information on our training programmes that include workshops on giving and receiving effective feedback please visit our section on high performance and leadership or get in touch.