When supervising colleagues, you often need to guide their behavior and help them to improve their skills. That means noticing the mistakes people are making and giving them good feedback that will influence their behavior in the future.
You might find, though, that your team members don’t improve as much as you’d like after you speak to them. If so, there are a few key things you can do to maximize the effectiveness of your critical feedback. Ultimately, you need to learn to think more like a teacher.
Catch your team members doing good things
The errors that your supervisees make are often the most obvious thing you notice when looking at their performance. The things that go right don’t cause any problems, so they don’t leap to your attention.
You have to start seeing the things your team members do well. They are working hard and improving their performance. You should give regular positive feedback to people. And you need to do it specifically. Just saying “great job” is nice, but calling out a specific thing that a particular person did is much more effective. People want their efforts to be noticed.
This is important, because when people feel like their efforts to improve are rewarded with your attention, they are more receptive to criticism. In addition, it helps your supervisees to recognize that you are not just seeing their flaws but have their development in mind. Your compliments provide more fertile ground for your critical feedback to take root.
Find the right level of abstraction
Just as you want to give specific compliments, you also need to pitch your critical feedback at a level where your employee can do something about it. That is where thinking like a teacher comes in.
Start by breaking down the work your supervisee is doing into its parts. What are the steps required for successful completion of a task. When something hasn’t gone well, you have to start by diagnosing the problem. If you have a lot of expertise training people in their area of work, it may be obvious to you what has gone awry. If not, you may have to ask a lot of questions about what happened to identify the place where something went wrong.
Then, you want to provide feedback that is specific to what your team member can do more effectively in the future. That might involve helping them to note signs of when things are going wrong or suggesting that they take a different approach to the situation in the future. That specific feedback provides an alternative behavior that person can engage in the future.
Separate feedback from consequences
Many of us are conditioned that when someone does something wrong, there must be an immediate consequence to make sure the problem does not arise again. For many leaders, there is an automatic link between error and negative consequences for the person who made the mistake.
That isn’t good teaching practice. When errors are followed by negative consequences, it is hard to create the conditions that promote learning. For one thing, people start to hide their mistakes, because they don’t want to get punished. For another, the stress, guilt, and shame associated with punishment make it difficult for people to use their motivational energy to improve. Learning happens best in an environment of openness and inquiry rather than stress and fear.
If you want your feedback to stick, avoid punishing mistakes. You can punish negligence—when a person repeatedly makes the same mistakes and does not do their work carefully. Use errors as a chance for learning and reward people who improve their performance.
Improving skills requires practice
Just telling people to do better (or even specifically what to do better) does not guarantee your feedback will stick. A lot of what creates good performance at work is the execution of key workplace skills. You can’t make someone a better basketball player just by telling them what to do better. Likewise, you can’t expect a team member’s performance to improve just with a discussion of how to elevate the quality of their work.
Instead, they need practice.
Find opportunities for your team members to practice their skills. You might pair them with a more experienced person in the team and have them work together on a project. You might look for a class or training that will focus on that skill development. You might connect your supervisee with a mentor. Building chances to work on the needed improvement is a critical part of the chain that turns feedback into improvement.
