Thursday, July 03, 2014
Everything You Need to Know About Giving Negative Feedback
Sarah Green - Harvard Business Review: There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there on giving corrective feedback. If you really need to criticize someone’s work, how should you do it? I dug into our archives for our best, research- and experience-based advice on what to do, and what to avoid.
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2 comments:
It is really nice to see some guidelines laid out for giving helpful constructive criticism. Most of the advice fits with what I already knew, but I’ve been taught to give criticism in sandwich form before. Then again, that was always in the context of peer feedback situations where we respond to classmate’s work out loud during class. I’m wondering if the sandwich does make sense in those situations, as opposed to situations where someone needs to give a specific piece of criticism to an employee, or if teachers just do that to prevent students from ruthlessly tearing apart each other’s work.
Separately, the task based mindset makes a lot of sense, both in terms of praise and criticism. I’ve heard that it is better compliment actions not traits before, but the way Green explains it is much clearer than it was explained to me in the past. In terms of giving the suggestion of what to do, I guess as a rule of thumb it would make sense to just imagine you are other person and think about what you would need to know in order to improve. I will make sure to keep all these tips in mind for future reference.
"Don’t bookend your critique with compliments"- how refreshing. Many times, I've seen people dole out halfhearted praise in order to justify the harsh comments they're about to give. Not that there's anything wrong with giving out harsh comments, but often the compliments are selfish in intent.
I find that the trouble with giving criticism (and with most other things) is the shift in focus from the object to oneself. Many approach criticism from a self-central perspective: "Someone messed up, which inconvenienced me , so I need to to let them know how awful that was." However, this article does a good job with shifting the focus to the object of the criticism. By encouraging the reader to ask "What are your goals?" and to be specific about the behavior they'd like to see, Green serves a reminder to open up the dialogue to not only what you, the critic, didn't like, but how things can be adjusted to move more smoothly in the future.
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