5 Great Tips: The Pros and Cons of Feedback

To improve your performance you need to know when you are performing well and when your work is substandard. Besides self-assessment of your performance, how can you know if you are meeting the grade?

Through feedback…from your manager and from your co-workers. But not all feedback is helpful. It takes skill to deliver feedback in a way that promotes, not discourages, extra effort in the right direction.

For feedback to serve the purpose of motivating employees to improve their behavior on the job, transfer of training experts maintain that it should be:
  1. Frequent: Delivered on a regular basis, in small bits, not just at the end of an annual performance review.
  2. Timely: Offered in timely fashion…on the heels of the observed behavior.
  3. Balanced: Both positive and negative…but not delivered at the same time or the positive feedback will be diminished.
  4. Relevant:  Used as a tool both to maintain current performance and to improve it.
  5. Productive: Suggestive rather than directive so the receiver has some options going forward.