Your team is everything.
You would not be where you are without your team.
You’re the one that gets all the credit when things go right.
They’re the ones that get all the blame when things go wrong.
This creates an environment where your team doesn’t feel like their success is tied to your success.
And that’s because you don’t give enough positive feedback.
If you don’t give them positive feedback, this is what’s going to happen: They’re all going to start looking for jobs.
Everyone wants to work for a leader that values them.
Everyone wants to work for a leader that gives feedback to help them improve and be more successful at work.
If you’re not giving any feedback, that’s a problem.
But if you’re never giving positive feedback and only negative feedback, that will be devastating to your organizational culture.
You’ve got to learn how to give positive feedback.
Positive feedback helps people improve, become more productive and be more deeply engaged at work.
Three Keys For Sharing Positive Feedback With Your Team.
1. Do it every day.
Feedback should happen more than once a quarter or every time you do an employee evaluation.
That’s where most leaders fail.
They wait until evaluation time to give their team feedback.
It doesn’t make any sense to tell someone six months later that they’ve done a good job or bad job.
Give your team evaluations in real-time so they can make corrections immediately.
Feedback is a daily process.
Every day you should be engaging with your team to know what they’re doing well and what they’re not doing well.
If you don’t engage with your team every day, you need to change your connecting structure.
Are you hosting a weekly staff meeting?
Do you do one-on-ones with your team?
As a leader, you should be comfortable with doing at least three 30-minute one-on-ones every week.
This is a time for you to hear what’s going on with your team members.
Assess what they’re having challenges with and what feedback you can give them to improve.
No matter what, feedback should be given every day.
2. Evaluate every project.
Evaluate every project that your team is working on by the lens of three things: what went well, what you would like to change and what you want to share.
The share piece is the most important because you should be sharing what went well.
Tell people what they did well on a project because it reinforces that they actually know how to do their job.
If you have a team member that’s never heard from you that they know how to do their job, they’re going to think the exact opposite.
If they’re thinking that, do you know what else they’re thinking?
They’re thinking they’ll be fired soon or something else bad is going to happen to them.
That puts an untenable amount of stress on your team members.
This is why it is important to give positive feedback focusing on what went well, what you would like to change and what you want to share.
Never frame it as a negative, but focus on what you want to see differently.
The worst thing you can do is tell people what you don’t like, and just repeat over and over again.
That is not helpful.
Being helpful mean saying what you want to see differently.
“Instead of putting the staple on this side, I want it on the other side.” Or, “Instead of checking in at 11:00 AM. I want you to check in at 9:00 AM.”
3. Know how to do evaluations.
If I had a dime for every leader that was never trained on success factors and has no idea of how to actually do an employee evaluation, I would be a rich man.
I know you don’t know how to do formal evaluations.
You need to get professional training on how to do these evaluations.
Your HR team should be teaching you how to do evaluations.
If they’re not teaching you how to do evaluations, maybe they don’t know how to do them either.
If you’re in this circumstance, here’s what I invite you to do; connect with me on LinkedIn.
Drop me a message and tell me that you don’t know how to do evaluations, and I will give you free tools that will help you.
