Providing Feedback

Far too many managers fail to provide any meaningful performance feedback until it’s time for a review. It’s no surprise then that many employees are sometimes taken aback by critical reviews, as they never see it coming.

In an ideal world managers would provide continuous feedback and course corrections to their employees. However, most people, managers included, hate giving negative feedback. They worry about a conflict that may arise, where the employee takes the news badly, gets defensive, or becomes argumentative.

Perhaps these people have read Dale Carnegie’s seminal book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. In it he urged readers to never engage in criticism, which some equate with giving negative feedback. They interpret the advice to mean that if a manager has only negative feedback, they shouldn’t provide any sort of feedback at all. i.e., if you can’t say something nice about a person…

However, this is poor advice, or at least a bad interpretation of what Carnegie meant. Most employees in fact would appreciate feedback -- any kind of feedback, even negative -- over getting no feedback at all. At least with negative feedback they know where they stand with their manager.

As an employee, you should welcome feedback of any kind. Good feedback is always nice, of course, but aside from the ego stoking it’s not particularly valuable. More useful is negative feedback, as long as it’s constructive. In other words, what you want is feedback on what you’re doing poorly, and how you can improve your performance.

If you do receive negative feedback, it’s important that you not become defensive. If you do become defensive, your manager may also become defensive, and it can turn into a “He said, she said” type of blame game. Instead, you should take the criticism to heart, even if it seems unwarranted. Even if the criticism seems totally off base, you should take time to think about why your manager sees things in that way. It might just be a matter of perception, for instance, which might be remedied by keeping your manager better informed and engaging in a little proactive PR.