As a manager, how can you help your team become more comfortable giving and receiving feedback? It’s all about making the process less formal and intimidating and the feedback more frequent and actionable. To embed feedback into your team’s culture, start by creating a shared understanding of what feedback really is. Host an open discussion where you ask questions like: What does feedback mean to you? When feedback is effective, how does it feel? When does feedback feel forced or scary? The answers will help your team come up with a definition that works for everyone. Next, develop a new process that makes it faster and easier for everyone to give useful insights to each other. This might mean dedicating time in meetings or creating space on virtual channels for people to request feedback, deliver specific praise, and raise ideas for improvement. Finally, in your one-on-one meetings with direct reports, you can take the fear out of feedback by starting the conversation with thoughtful questions rather than your observations. This approach gives your employees more agency in the feedback process and allows the conversation to happen on their terms, rather than yours.
This tip is adapted from “How Managers Can Make Feedback a Team Habit,”by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis
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