Description: The practice of Feedback is key to leadership and communication and plays a crucial part in learning by helping adopt new knowledge sooner and avoid repetitive mistakes.

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Are you getting ready to give some feedback? Learning these five tips will help you give feedback to your colleagues, managers or students… Let’s create a good and effective feedback session in 3, 2, 1...

1. Be regular

Nobody enjoys difficult conversations which is why creating a space for giving feedback regularly is a good way to go. It helps normalise the practice, strengthens communication skills of the members and makes tough conversations less tough.

2. Consider your intention

Feedback should never make a person feel bad or lower their self-esteem. Effective feedback generally comes from a genuine desire to help someone improve, not to settle some kind of personal vengeance.

3. Balance critical and positive feedback

The best kind of feedback has a balance of positive reinforcement and criticism. This is important to avoid the person feeling overwhelmed which sometimes leads to getting defensive and shutting down rather than engaging and solving the problem.

4. Be specific and clear

The key is to give actionable examples of positive and negative tasks the team member has been involved in. Giving feedback such as “your work needs improvement” or “take it to the next level” is extremely vague and will not have as much impact and the next steps are unclear. Endnote: Avoid ambiguous observations and give specific suggestions.

5. Make it two sided

To be effective you should always make room for discussion and dialogue that will also help you to get feedback from your peers. This might foster a more open and honest environment at work that will enable you to discover new ways to improve your practice and improve your performance.

Make some changes and see if you level up your feedback-game!

In summary