https://hbr.

org/2014/06/how-to-give-your-team-feedback

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/
feedback-improves-performance

How to Give Your Team Feedback

how to give feedback to individuals, but how do you do the same for your entire team?
What type of constructive criticism is appropriate in a group setting? How much is too
much? And how should your colleagues help?

What the Experts Say

Providing feedback isn’t solely the team leader’s responsibility, according to Mary
Shapiro who teaches organizational behavior at Simmons College and is the author of
the HBR Guide to Leading Teams. For starters, that would be impractical. “You can’t be
the only one holding everyone accountable because you can’t possibly observe
everything that’s going on,” she says. Second, if you’re the only one praising or
critiquing, group dynamics suffer. “You want to give everyone the opportunity to say his
piece,” she says. Your job as manager is to ensure that team members are “providing
regular constructive feedback,” says Roger Schwarz, an organizational psychologist and
the author of Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams. “There needs to be an expectation within
the team this is a shared leadership responsibility,” he says. Here are some principles to
help you lay the groundwork for ensuring and enhancing this effective team practice.

Set expectations early

“When a team works well together, it’s because its members are operating from the
same mindset and are clear about their goals and their norms,” says Schwarz. At the
start of a new project, help your direct reports “decide how they’re going to work
together” — and importantly, how they will “hold each other accountable,” says Shapiro.
She recommends coming up with an “explicit agreement” about how the team will
handle issues like the division of labor and deadlines. Stipulate, for example, that if a
colleague knows he is going to miss an important deadline for his portion of a project, he
must email the team at least 24 hours in advance. “If someone doesn’t follow through on
the expectations the team created, he’ll get feedback from the group about what
happened because he fell short.”

Create opportunities for regular check-ins

There’s no hard-and-fast rule about how often your team should meet to review how
things are going, but in general, “it’s better to start out with more structure and relax it
over time, than to start out with too little structure and have to impose it later,” Shapiro
says. When you’re in the early stages of creating a project plan, schedule regular check-
ins as part of the timeline. “If the team is running smoothly you can always cancel the
meeting.”

Ask general questions

Giving and receiving feedback is a skill and most people are not naturally good at it, says
Shapiro. “One of your goals is to develop your team’s capacity to give feedback and help
people get used to articulating how they feel the team is doing.” Take baby steps. At the
second or third check-in, ask the group general questions such as, “On a scale of one to
five, how well is the team sharing the workload? What needs to change?” As the leader,
you’re the moderator of this conversation. Once team members have spoken, offer your
two cents about “where the team excels and where it faces challenges,” Schwarz adds.

Work your way up to structured reviews

As your team gets accustomed to working together and sharing feedback, “you need to
do a deeper dive into how team members are doing at the individual level,” says
Shapiro. Ask each person to prepare specific reviews of colleagues to be read aloud at
the next meeting. “Every team member should say one thing they appreciate about the
other members and one thing that would be helpful if they did differently.” The aim is to
help “people understand how their behavior is impacting others,” she says. “If they hear
the same kind of feedback from multiple people, that is powerful.” When it’s your turn,
Schwarz recommends validating your observations with others. “Ask: ‘Are you seeing
things the same way?’ Get other people’s reactions.”

Keep performance issues out in the open

The management mantra for giving individuals feedback is: “Praise in public, criticize in
private.” But in team settings, this goes out the window, according to Schwarz. “In the
traditional view, it’s inappropriate to raise issues in a meeting that would make people
uncomfortable or put people on the spot.” But your job as a leader is not always to make
people feel comfortable. When teams have problems, “it should all be out in the open,”
he says. “You alone can’t help people improve; there needs to be a group plan.” After
you’ve “harnessed the power of the group” to prompt change, one-on-one conversations
with struggling colleagues are then in order, says Shapiro. “Say to them: ‘What did you
hear from the team? How are you going to do things differently? And how can I help?'”

Foster team relationships

Conflicts between coworkers are inevitable. But “you can’t just say, ‘I’ll handle it,’
because [as the manager] you can’t solve a problem to which you’re not a primary
stakeholder,” Schwarz says. “You can coach people on how to have difficult
conversations, and you can help facilitate those conversations, but team members need
to address issues where the interdependencies lie.” Help colleagues build trust before
problems arise by encouraging open conversation. And, when there is conflict, make
sure they understand, they need to “give feedback directly to each other.” says
Schwarz. Adds Shapiro: “The only way good work gets done is through good
relationships — the better the relationship, the better the work.”

Debrief every project

At the end of a project or when your team is disbanding, schedule a final check-in to
discuss “what worked and what didn’t, what should we bring forward and what should
we do differently next time,” says Schwarz. Take careful notes: the information gleaned
in this session should not only be part of the organization’s final project review, but also
part of each team member’s annual performance appraisal, says Shapiro. The objective
is to “provide closure on the team and also determine what each member needs to do to
further develop,” she says.

Principles to Remember

Do:

 Make sure your team understands that feedback is a shared leadership

responsibility
 Schedule routine check-in meetings
 Keep the tone positive by encouraging team members to say what they
appreciate about others’ contributions

Don’t:

 Start meetings with your own feedback for the team — allow everyone
else to first express how they think they’re doing
 Shy away from performance issues — address them openly with the
group
 Get in the middle of personality conflicts — help facilitate difficult
conversations

Case study #1: Create opportunities for team and individual reflection
Once every quarter, Laree Daniel — chief administrative officer of Aflac, the insurance
company — assembles an ad hoc team around a particular customer incident for an in-
depth feedback session. “I take a customer case study in which we either did very well or
very poorly, and I gather everyone that touched the customer in some form,” she says.

First, Laree makes sure everyone is up to speed. Team members are given a packet of
information that includes a write-up of the incident, transcripts of phone calls, copies of
customer letters, and copies of the company’s responses. Next, she poses a series of
questions to the team: What worked well? Where were the gaps? What can we do better?

The goal, she says, is to get the team to reflect on the company’s behavior from both the
customer’s perspective and shareholder’s. “This isn’t about blame and I’m not scolding
anyone,” she says. “I am the facilitator and I make it a neutral environment.”

During these feedback meetings, colleagues often have epiphanies. “They realize: ‘I
didn’t know [my behavior] would have that impact,” she says. “It becomes a dynamic
learning experience.”
The feedback and information she picks up from those meetings are used to make
process improvements. “Often the best ideas come from those people who were closest
to the work.”

Case study #2: Focus on empowering your team

David S. Rose, the angel investor and CEO of Gust — a platform for the sourcing and
management of early-stage investments — has a simple approach when it comes to
giving group feedback. “The goal is not to depress the team,” he says. “I try to keep
everything upbeat and lay out our strengths and our challenges.

A few years ago, for instance, he was involved in leading a 15-person technical team at a
software company. The group’s biggest issue was its disappointing B2B product suite.
“Customers were unhappy and the front-end salespeople were being yelled at,” he says.
“As a team, we had some good individual contributors but we needed to get better at
working together. I couldn’t just walk in and give feedback along the lines of: ‘These
products are terrible; you’re all fired.’ We needed to identify the organizational
problems and come up with a prescription for a path forward.”

He broke the team into subgroups of two or three people, and he tasked each with
brainstorming how to manage a particular inter-team challenge. The subgroups then
provided feedback to everyone else; based on that, the team developed a strategy to
improve workflow and communication. “We came up with a plan and the whole team
felt empowered,” he says. “We knew what the problems were and we figured out how to
solve them.”

Within nine months, he says, the products were in far better shape.
4 Ways Feedback Improves Performance
in The Workplace
Indeed Editorial Team

Updated June 24, 2022

Team feedback is crucial in business to identify company goals and manage

progress. To be effective, feedback should be intentional, constructive and
engaging. By understanding the importance of team feedback and learning the
most effective techniques, you can improve the feedback process within your
team. In this article, we discuss the importance of giving feedback and tips to
improve your feedback process.

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What is feedback?

Feedback is the process of evaluating, discussing and organizing an employee’s

performance. It is an action used to offer constructive information to a team
member. The process of giving feedback creates an open working relationship
among the team leader and member, allowing each to understand their progress
toward a pre-set goal.
Feedback is a means of improvement. It helps individuals shape their actions to
better meet the needs of an employer or team leader. Feedback is just one of the
required tasks of a supervisor or manager and is meant to encourage their team
to meet goals and follow company guidelines.

Here are some common elements of effective feedback:

 Timeliness: The most effective feedback is timely. Offer feedback

when the team member can take action to improve, either
immediately or shortly after the event in question.
 Communicative: Communicative feedback creates a collaborative
environment. In comparison to written feedback, communicative
feedback allows team members to ask questions or gain more
clarity.
 Constructive: Effective feedback is constructive, offering positive
solutions. Only offer feedback on actions or tasks that can be
improved.
 Specific: Specificity in feedback is important so that team members
understand their areas of strength and weakness. This allows them
to improve specific skills.
 Detailed: Providing details with feedback can help team members
develop a clearer understanding of the areas in which they can
improve. Offer specific details about events and tasks.

Related: SMART Goals: Definition and Examples

How feedback improves performance

Feedback is a crucial part of improving a team’s performance. Feedback can

achieve the following purposes in a team setting:

Provides direction

Feedback provides direction by identifying performance indicators and allowing

team members to understand their progress toward a goal.
Motivates members

A motivated team is often a productive one. Feedback can encourage team

members to complete goals and objectives. Feedback can also help you better
understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team, allowing you to build on
them and further motivate team members.

Improves individual performance

Team feedback can also improve the performance of each team member. When
each team member understands their role on the team and the tasks they are
expected to complete, the team can complete more goals.

Encourages engagement

Effective feedback is two-sided. When team members have the chance to provide
feedback, they are more likely to be engaged. Engaged team members will often
have better performance.

Types of team feedback

The type of feedback that you choose when working with your team will vary
depending on the goal of the feedback. Here are a few of the most popular types
of feedback in a business setting:

1. 360-degree feedback
2. Constructive criticism
3. Coaching
4. Evaluation

1. 360-degree feedback

360-degree feedback allows all team members and leaders to be involved in the
feedback process. This form of feedback is confidential and comes from the entire
work team, not just management or team leaders. Feedback might include
coworkers, direct reports and managers. A rating scale method is used and covers
pre-designed questions. Individuals are then allowed to leave written comments.
The person being rated will also fill out the same form, rating themselves.

360-degree feedback offers the following advantages:

  Offers insight into specific skills that team members can work to
improve
 Gives team members a better understanding of feedback from the
entire team
 Allows team members to build on current strengths
 Encourages team members to better understand their role and
team expectations

Related: The Importance of Positive Feedback and How to Deliver It to

Others

2. Constructive criticism

Constructive criticism is a type of feedback that includes both positive and negative
statements. Team members who receive constant negative feedback may
eventually feel like they are not capable. By offering feedback that highlights both
the positive and the negative, you can motivate and encourage at the same time.

Constructive feedback offers the following advantages:

 Gives team members a new perspective on both achievements and

areas of improvement
 Creates a trusting relationship between you and the team member
 Gives team members specific and measurable areas in which they
can improve
 Identifies actual solutions to problems

Related: Best Practices for Giving Constructive Feedback

3. Coaching

Another common feedback method is the coaching feedback model. In this model,
you first encourage your team members to offer themselves feedback. From there,
you and the team member consider the self-rated feedback as you offer your
input, acting in the role of a coach.

Coaching feedback offers the following advantages:

  Encourages team members to develop feedback skills
 Helps you understand each team member’s concerns
 Creates a collaborative relationship

4. Evaluation

An evaluation type of feedback requests both you and your team members use a
scoring tool to rate performance. The scores are then compared and discussed
together. This feedback method is useful in a work setting in which performance
can be numerically evaluated.

Evaluation feedback offers the following advantages:

 Creates an environment in which you can openly discuss

performance
 Encourages team members to consider performance based on a
measurable number
 Gives a measurable method of improvement

Related: Ways to Conduct Employee Performance Appraisals

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How to provide effective feedback

Feedback is an important leadership quality, regardless of your leadership style.

Try these steps to strengthen your existing feedback skills and develop
your leadership skills:

1. Understand your goal for giving feedback.

2. Put the feedback in writing first.
3. Create a schedule.
4. Accept feedback.
1. Understand your goal for giving feedback

Consider your purpose for providing feedback. It might be to improve the

strengths and correct the weaknesses of your team members or to encourage
your team to move quickly toward a common goal. Understanding your goals for
giving feedback can assist you when determining the best approach to take.

Related: Setting Goals to Improve Your Career

2. Put the feedback in writing first

By putting your intended feedback in writing first, it can help you ensure that you
are being specific, honest and timely. Feedback should be intentional, and writing
it down first encourages you to understand your intention. It also allows you to
evaluate your feedback for clarity, ensure that it is constructive and have a clear
plan for your conversation.

3. Create a schedule

Regular feedback is important. Busy days or frequent work tasks can make it
challenging to maintain routine feedback. Creating a schedule of weekly or
monthly reviews can help you to keep up with this important task while ensuring
your team members know when to expect feedback. A schedule also allows you to
be timely by giving feedback as soon as possible after an important event.

4. Accept feedback

Learning to welcome feedback can help you improve your skills not only for giving
effective feedback but also as a team leader. You can create a more trusting
relationship with your team members when you are open to their feedback. Try
implementing another schedule or plan for accepting feedback from your team
members, such as the 360-degree method.