When polled, most managers feel part of their responsibilities is to catch employees either doing something wrong or contributing less than they should.Reprimands and warnings (corrective) are the most common type of performance feedback.
Let’s set the stage to be fair: If you hire just anyone for a job, not someone with the appropriate talents and passions to do the job, then much of your communication with the employee will be corrective. The employee is just not as capable in the job as someone who has the talents, aptitude and interest to do the job. So when employees are improperly hired, management takes the offensive – watching for when employees are not doing what they should. This confirms in managers’ minds that all feedback should be corrective.
Let’s say, instead, you know that we are in an intellectual workplace (where employees are paid to think – and not everyone thinks the same so not everyone is a good fit for every job) and you have the right employees in the right jobs. These employees are naturally good at what they do and for the most part, are more engaged and passionate about doing the work. This dramatically reduces the need for corrective feedback. Employees who are good at what they do and love doing it are not shirkers – they step up and own their work. This doesn’t mean they don’t need feedback. This means they will need a different type of feedback.
Feedback is a recurring dialog between managers and employees about performance – successful and unsuccessful. If you have wisely invested in your employees, but their performance is below standard, you quickly work with the employee to improve it. True, this is corrective feedback but it not adversarial – it is supportive and performance focused. You dialog, assess and build a plan to improve.
If the wisely chosen employee’s performance is outstanding, you must provide the appropriate feedback to applaud the performance to encourage its repetition.Employees respond to the attention and support of their management – particularly for well timed supportive feedback. Whether corrective or supportive, feedback is the right response.
Hire wisely and performance feedback is a motivational dialog between a willing employee and a caring manager to improve performance challenges and applaud performance successes. Hire poorly and you will indeed find your communication with your employees will be almost exclusively corrective and adversarial. Invest wisely in the right people and use feedback for performance improvement discussions.
Need help learning how to provide outstanding employee feedback? Contact me to hear about Performance Feedback and the other powerful tools of the Fire Up! Process, a process that can help you not only attract and hire the best people, but once hired, retain and engage them. More information at WorkFiredUp.com.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 at 5:09 am and is filed under For Managers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
