If youâve ever been tasked with training a puppy, one of the most common pieces of advice is to correct bad behavior and reward good behavior in the moment. If, for instance, your puppy chews your slippers on Tuesday, correcting him on Wednesday just confuses himâheâs most concerned with his current activity, and he hardly remembers what happened the day before.
While humans obviously have a more nuanced understanding of time, the approach to feedback is remarkably similar: Instant feedback is much more effective than delayed feedback.Â
In fact, some of the most prominent organizations in the world incorporate the use of consistent, timely feedback into their culture, and train new employees how to both give and receive feedback as part of their onboarding. This technique encourages a culture of transparency, fast failure, and quick improvement.
This article will teach you how to harness simple but impactful techniques to improve your own culture through productive feedback and develop stronger interpersonal relationships along the way.
The importance of instant feedback
Think back to a time when youâve been blindsided by feedback in your personal life. More than likely, this feedback was delivered with no small amount of anger, and it was probably apparent that the person providing the feedback had been letting small issues simmer for months or even years without addressing them directly.
The problem with this methodâthe âdelayed feedbackâ methodâis that it is one-sided and unfair. You have no way to respond or correct behavior because you had no idea what you were doing was wrongâand you have no context or time to prepare for when the feedback did come, likely leaving you flustered, confused, and embarrassed.Â
In business environments, this can transform a collaborative environment into a toxic one. Hereâs an example: Your work hires a new project manager who uses a specific task management tool. The project manager assigns you a task within the tool, you complete the task, and you mark the task complete.
However, this throws the project managerâs workflow off, as she must then reopen the task to route it through approvals. But instead of telling you to not mark tasks complete, she continues to reopen them. Her resentment builds and interactions between you two are growing increasingly tense. But you have no idea whatâs going wrong, which means you arenât given the chance to correct the issue.
Why is instant feedback a better method, and why does it work?
Instant feedback works because the issue can either be corrected in the moment or can be prevented from reoccurring. In the example above, you could easily have left tasks uncompleted had you been informed of the correct process. But the longer your project manager waited to give you feedback, the more the mistake was repeated.Â
Instant feedback allows someone to be made aware of their mistake (or victory) so they can learn quickly and not repeat the mistake in the future, and replicate the best practices and processes you want them to learn.Â
Tips for giving immediate feedback
One of the most important and yet most overlooked steps to giving instant feedback is to ask permission. Before you give feedback, ask the receiver if theyâre open to feedback and if now is the right time for them to receive feedback. If the person youâre giving feedback to is in a heightened emotional state, theyâll be further upset by the feedback and less likely to act upon it.
Here are some additional tips to improve how you give feedback:
- Remove your ego: When providing feedback, itâs tempting to become defensive or angry. Approaching feedback from a place of humility allows for a collaborative approach to a problem that often yields a better outcome. Seek opportunities to gain context as to why a teammate is behaving in a certain way, as your original assumptions about their motives or attitude may not be correct.
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- Be concrete: Stick with one or two instances that demonstrate the need for feedback, then give suggestions on how to improve. Use examples of discrete things that were said and done, not ambiguous examples or personal attacks.
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- Be positive: Everyone makes mistakes. Feedback is a critical part of life, not an indication that someone isnât cut out for the job. When giving feedback, start with something positive youâve noticed about the other personâs performance. Then give feedback and encouragement.
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- Follow through with support: Feedback isnât just telling someone theyâre doing something incorrectly. Constructive feedback involves coming to agreement on action items and supporting them through the process of improvement.
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- Make it actionable: If youâre giving feedback over Zoom, or hosting a retrospective where teammates are giving each other feedback live, using a collaborative workspace like Lucid can help you keep a record of what was discussed so thereâs no confusion or lost context later on. This also helps individuals make personal action plans to tackle the feedback.
Hereâs what all of the above could look like if you were approaching a junior member on your team about something that happened during a client call. This interaction would ideally occur right after the meeting:
âHey Neil, just wanted to say the suggestion you had for improving our organic social style guide was fantastic. I canât wait to work with you on that project. If you have a second, I wanted to give you a bit of feedback on something else. Is now a good time?â
If Neil answers yes, say this:
âAwesome. I noticed you werenât taking notes during the meeting, and that can lead to issues down the road when it comes to referencing specific client feedback. Would you mind starting a document dedicated to notes in this recurring meeting? Iâll send over some examples of my notes that could help you organize them.â
Neil then apologized and mentioned that he didnât even think to take notes because at a prior company, doing anything other than participating in conversation during meetings was considered a distraction, and his teams typically recorded meetings instead of scribing them.
By giving immediate feedback, you were able to communicate and reach understanding together, correcting something before it even became an issue; you were direct, fair, and kind.
Had you not done this, you could have festered for weeks or months under the incorrect assumption that Neil was simply inattentive or a poor employee.
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