How to Give Constructive Feedback Without the Stress | Leadership Training for Engineers
Do you hate giving constructive feedback to people?
Most people do. But if you want to be a great leader, you can't avoid this, which is why I'm gonna teach you a simple framework for motivating people to actually want to improve their performance.
Stay tuned.
Hey everybody, and welcome to my YouTube channel. If you're looking to increase your impact as a leader, you've come to the right place.
Common Pitfalls
Knowing how to effectively give constructive feedback is one of the most important skills for engineering leaders to develop because unlike other professions in engineering, knowing how to effectively give constructive feedback is one of the most important skills for engineering leaders to develop. Because unlike other professions, when you're in engineering, it's critical that each person on the team does their job the right way. There's no room for error. Otherwise you end up picking up their slack all the time, which prevents you from getting any actual work done.
Or you end up creating an environment where you have to micromanage everyone to make sure everything gets done correctly and you don't want that. Most managers avoid giving constructive feedback, or they go about doing it the wrong way.
Not Priming the Other Person
The first mistake is that you don't prime the other person to receive your constructive feedback. If the other person isn't ready to receive your feedback, then there's really no point in giving them that feedback because they won't take it the right way. You know they're gonna misinterpret what you're telling them, which makes it a complete waste of your time.
Now as the person giving the constructive feedback, you are responsible for priming the other person in advance before you give them the feedback. And you're doing this because you want them in the right state of mind. When you give them the feedback, you want them to actually process it, listen to it, take action on it.
Instructing vs Influencing
The next big mistake that managers make when giving constructive feedback is that they tell the other person what to do. Now what you should be doing is you should be influencing them to want to improve. And there's a big difference between those two things.
When you tell someone what to do, you're basically creating the expectation that they need to be told when they are underperforming. You're basically letting them off the hook from self-monitoring their performance and from taking accountability for their personal growth and development.
However, when you use influence to communicate constructive feedback, it has a completely different effect. It actually inspires the person to want to improve, and it motivates them to proactively seek your feedback in the future, which makes it way easier for you to give them constructive feedback. To do this effectively, you need to understand a little bit about human psychology.
How People Are Motivated
All people are motivated by four things.
Number one is they need to feel important. Number two is they need to feel appreciated. Number three is they need to feel heard. And number four is they need to feel understood.
When you make people feel important, appreciated, heard, or understood, it basically warms them up and primes them to receive your constructive feedback. Now the next thing to keep in mind is your ratio of negative feedback to positive feedback. If you're only giving negative feedback to this person, then the other person is gonna become tone deaf to your feedback.
But if you want the other person to openly receive your constructive criticism, you need to give them more positive feedback than negative feedback. The last thing you wanna do before giving constructive feedback is you need to figure out exactly what this person wants right now. You know what I'm talking about in a bigger picture, what do they want in their career?
Because all people are motivated by the things they want. It could be respect, autonomy, more opportunities, higher salary. Knowing what they want is the key to influencing their behavior because you can literally influence anybody to do anything. And the easiest way to figure out what people want is with an exercise that I call Questioning To The Core. I explain how to do this in my episode called How To Quickly Build Relationships With Anyone.
The Right Way to Do It
Now that you have all this background information, let's talk about how to give constructive feedback the right way.
Lead with Appreciation
Step one is you need to lead with genuine appreciation. This has to be relevant, genuine appreciation. You can't just fake this and say, I like your shoes, or something like that. It needs to be something that you truly admire and appreciate about them. And if you're not happy with their performance, maybe consider something you appreciate about the effort they're putting in.
So take a step back and think, what's something that I really appreciate about this person? Have they been putting in extra hours? Have they been asking a lot of questions? Have they been engaging with the team?
To do this the right way, you want to find something that you genuinely appreciate about the other person, but don't just throw a casual, I appreciate this about you, comment and then move on. You really want to emphasize this, so let's just say that you appreciate them putting in extra hours lately.
The wrong way to do this would be to say,
Hey Jim I noticed you were putting in all these extra hours lately. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.
The reason that's the wrong way is because you're not explaining why you appreciate that. Anyone throws out insincere thank yous and compliments all the time and people hate that. People do not like that. So to make this genuine appreciation feel important and significant to the other person, and to make them feel appreciated, you need to explain why you care about this, why this has helped you, why this matters to you.
So if you appreciate them working extra hours, instead you could say it like this,
Hey Jim, I've noticed you've been putting in all the extra hours lately, and I want you to know that I really appreciate it and that it hasn't gone unnoticed. It's helped us keep up with our workload. We've been drowning in all these projects, but with you putting in all the extra hours and keeping up with your workload, it's created more space and capacity for us to land some more new orders and new projects. So I really appreciate you putting in the extra time.
I quantified why I appreciated their work. I was able to quantify it with a real example. It might not sound like a big difference, but it makes a huge difference when you're trying to give sincere appreciation to the other person.
Speak to Their Interests
Step two, is bring up what the other person wants.
Now think of this in the bigger picture. Does this person want a raise? Do they want a promotion? Is there projects they've been wanting to work on? Or, think of it the other way. Maybe there's something they don't want, something they want to avoid. Maybe they're sick of picking up all these red marks from you as you're reviewing their work and giving 'em all these changes to pick up. Figure out what this person wants.
Now let's just say that they want to be working on more challenging projects. They're bored with their work and they feel like they deserve more opportunities to work on more complex and more interesting, more challenging projects. Let's say that's what they want. So if that's the case, after you've given them your sincere appreciation of putting in the extra hours, then what you wanna do is you want to point out that you know what they want.
Hey Jim, I also wanted to let you know that I'm aware you want to be working on more complex projects.
Explain that concept in as much detail as practical, relative to what it is. But you wanna pull that into the equation now, because that's what they're motivated by. It doesn't matter what you want, it matters what they want.
So we're pulling that into the equation to ignite that part of them that's gonna want to do something.
Present it as a Solution
Step three is you need to create a path that gives them what they want. So let's say they want to be working on projects that are more complex and more challenging, and they want to get away from working on these boring cookie cutter projects that don't really stimulate them. Let's also say that the constructive feedback you want to give them is that they're not doing well on their connection design. They're either overdesigning connections or under designing connections, and that's the only thing in the way of them being put on these more complex projects. Then you should deliver your message like this.
Hey Jim, I know you want to be involved in more complex projects and more challenging projects, and I think you have all the skills you need to do that. But one thing that's holding you back is your connection design. On the last few projects you've been working on, you've been under designing your connections, and it's caused project delays with rounds of rework, corrections, and red marks, and we ended up missing a few project deadlines and on the projects that you've been working on, it's not great, but it's not a huge problem either. But if you wanna be working on these bigger projects, these have more eyes on them, they have more critical customers that we're delivering to and they have more critical deadlines. So we can't afford those types of delays on those projects. So if you want to be working on those projects, I'm gonna need you to tighten up your connection design and that's why we're talking cuz I want to help you get there. I want to put you on those projects. But we need to tighten this up before we can get you there.
Do you see the difference between delivering the message that way versus the typical way, which is just telling them what they need to do to improve?
Hey Jim, your connection designs are no good. I need you to do 'em better. Let's talk about it.
Now that's negative. You're starting in a spot where it's a bad thing and there's just a negative energy around the whole conversation. There's a tension But when you do it this way, following these three steps, now you're starting from a positive place.
Now you're working together. Now you and Jim are a team, and you're working together on getting Jim to elevate his performance so that he can get what he wants in his career. This is a totally different thing. It's not even perceived as constructive feedback when you're in his shoes. And the other thing this does is now that you've connected this with what Jim wants, now he's gonna take ownership of it. Now he's gonna want to improve in these areas, and now he's gonna check in with you voluntarily. He's going to, after he does his next project, he's gonna come to you and say, Hey boss, how was my connection design on this project? Did I fix the areas that we talked about?
He's gonna be more open to asking you for help when he sees this scenario instead of being embarrassed that he doesn't know the answer to it.
Now this might sound like a lot of extra work, but once you know how to quickly empathize with people and figure out what they want, this becomes a lot faster, easier, and automatic for you.
If you wanna learn how to do this, check out my episode called, The Most Important Skill You Need For Persuading And Influencing People.
