Our passion is helping executives increase their leadership effectiveness to achieve their goals in less time, with greater satisfaction and a positive impact on the bottom line.
  
     
 

 
 

October, 2004
U.S. Library of Congress ISSN 1549-893X

Welcome to Leadership Hand™, a monthly e-newsletter
to increase your leadership effectiveness more quickly and
enjoyably with bottom-line results.

To ensure receipt, please add our e-mail address "Info@" plus our domain name to your e-mail address book.

1. Effective Feedback: Part II

In the September issue, A Leader's Auto-Pilot: Effective Feedback, I wrote that effective feedback is like a leader's auto-pilot, ensuring the boat is on-course providing moment-to-moment affirmations and course corrections to her employees. If you are not giving feedback regularly, it is likely your team is not operating at maximum efficiency.

If you engaged in last month's suggested exercise--giving feedback daily, and giving more appreciative than corrective feedback--how did you do? And what was the feedback you got? Did your feedback encourage the behavior you intended?

Recently, a manager told me he rarely gave appreciative feedback and his 360 degree assessment from peers and subordinates reflected it. "I never get it from anyone around here," he said, as if to justify his behavior. The more he justified his style, the more an image of a jackhammer came to mind--continuously pounding his employees and higher ups--a career-limiting behavior. Don't make that mistake.

Guidelines for Effective Feedback

You have heard the acronym SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) applied to goal setting. With a couple of modifications you have an easy guideline for giving effective feedback:

  • Specific: Be specific in your description of the behaviors that are working or not working. If this is course-correcting feedback, you must also be specific about the behaviors you would like to see the person exhibit. Talk about what you want to see or hear versus what you do not want to see or hear.

  • Measurable: Make sure the behavior you describe was or is something that can be observed or measured. It is not enough to say, "I need you to take more initiative." That has a different meaning for each person who hears it. Describe what the person would be saying or doing if he were taking more initiative.

  • Accurate: Be accurate. If you want to build trust, get your facts straight and be willing to consider new information.

  • Relevant: Make your feedback relevant and appropriate to the context. Again, this goes to building trust and credibility.

  • Timely: Be timely! Tell them when you catch them doing great--and catch them often. Do the same with corrective feedback so they get it all along, not after you have lost your patience! Withholding either type of feedback is a performance-inhibiting habit for the team you lead.

Take the next step in developing your feedback skills by practicing the SMART guidelines and watch your team's efficiency increase.

Here's to Team Efficiency,

Beth Hand

© Copyright 2007, Beth Hand. Beth Hand, MBA helps leaders increase their effectiveness and satisfaction, now and for the future. She can be reached at (+1) 703.820.8074 or via her website www.leadershiphand.com.

2. Executives in Career Transition

If you are an executive in career transition or considering one, come meet other executives from diverse industries, share tips and contacts to speed the transition process and increase your job search effectiveness.

Hand Associates is the host for Execunet executive networking meetings in alliance with DBM (formerly Drake Beam Morin), a global provider of strategic HR solutions. If you are living in or traveling to Richmond, Virginia, check our web site for details www.leadershiphand.com/resources.


 

 

3. Reprint Permission

This is a copyrighted publication. You are welcome to reprint an issue on a non-exclusive basis provided you:

4. Subscribe • Privacy

Click here to subscribe. To unsubscribe click on the link below. We value your privacy. We never redistribute, rent or sell your information to anyone or any entity.

We invite you to forward this issue to your colleagues!

  
 

© Copyright 2004, Hand Associates and Beth Hand • All Rights Reserved

Hand Associates, LLC
P.O. Box 16376
Alexandria, Va. 22302 USA
703.820.8074 | Tel Eastern
703.820.8018 | Fax

Leadership Coaching & Development
www.leadershiphand.com