How to give GREAT employee feedback

How to give GREAT employee feedback

This was one of the best lessons I ever learned in giving employee feedback - or giving anyone constructive feedback on anything in life.  The lesson was to use the word AND instead of the word BUT.

When you start telling someone, "you are really great at x, but when you do y..." the BUT negates all the goodwill that you are building up with the first part of your sentence.  The BUT gets someone's defenses up, and makes them way less able to hear the important thing you want them to listen to.

Instead, if you learn how to - and it sometimes takes hard work - craft your feedback with an AND, you can be MUCH more successful.  It requires thinking very hard about the goal you are trying to achieve, and how to craft your message in a way that will help the person receiving the feedback see what's in it for them if they achieve that.

Here's a concrete example that I once had. I had a CFO that worked for me who was very smart, but very un-communicative with the rest of the senior team.  He would work and act as a loner, and make plans and take actions without the full buy-in of the team, or of me.  I remember having a really hard time preparing for the difficult conversation I had to have with him. I valued him very much, and I was very nervous that my feedback to him would really hurt our relationship, and hurt his performance - which of course, was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do.

If I acted quickly, my default statement to him in our one-on-one would have been something like:

James (not his name), your ideas are really good, BUT you've got to stop doing things without talking to me or the rest of the team.

That would NOT have been very effective, however.

Instead, I thought about it for a while, and went with:

James, the ideas and strategic thinking you are bringing to our company are so valuable, AND, you would be even more valuable to us if we can integrate your thinking into all the plans of the rest of the senior team. I want to take the things that you are thinking about, which are right on the money, and get them shared with everyone so that we can move together faster. I want to encourage you when you feel like you have a new direction we should take to share it with all of us early, before you put the idea in place, and I think that will make us even more successful.

I cannot overstate how much more successful the use of AND was versus BUT in giving this feedback.  For me this did not come naturally, but I have worked hard to make this more of my general practice in giving feedback, and it has been very successful.

Let me know if you have any other ideas like this that you have tried - I hope to learn more from you!