Set personal goals in public

Set personal goals in public.

New employees long for feedback. Information from their leaders gives the employee confidence in which areas they excel and where effort can make them a more valuable member of their team. The best employees keep seeking feedback even after their contributions are clear and meaningful. Managers also appreciate feedback as a way to improve their teams. Quality feedback contributes to their team’s success on projects and working alongside others in the business. If all parties desire feedback, why is high-quality feedback still so rare?

If a business has the other requirements met for quality feedback: trust, specificity, and timeliness, you might think that quality feedback would flow regularly. What often happens; however, is that team members are unaware of opportunities to offer critical feedback. Unless a team member makes an obvious mistake or asks for direct feedback on a specific topic, team members don’t typically look for ways to offer feedback. Even if a team member did, the number of areas are huge. Do they watch for feedback to give others about their presentation skills? Or perhaps their email communication? Or perhaps the way that their team mates interact with clients?

What team members need from one another to offer quality feedback, all other requirements met, is vulnerability. That is, team mates need to expose the personal goals they are working towards in order to elicit the direct feedback they require to meet those goals.

If an employee sets a personal goal to improve her email communication but share this with no one but her manager, there may be some opportunity for growth. If growth happens, it will be due to the personal focus of the employee and/or the engagement of the manager. When other members of the team are included in this employee’s goal; however, then quality feedback can magnify the opportunity for employee growth.

Our team struggles to give quality feedback. We’ve had training, heard speeches about the importance of feedback, and have a high level of team camaraderie, yet we almost never offer critical feedback. This irks our managers, who long for old days when one member of the team who gave regular critical feedback inspired them about what’s possible. We can practically apply this by actually sharing what our goals are with one another so that we can be aware of opportunities to give feedback.

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