Performance Feedback: Tools & Strategies for Developing Your People

Few things motivate and engage employees as effectively as honest and frequent feedback about their performance. When workers are crystal clear about expectations and understand where they're succeeding and where they're failing, they get more of the right things done.

Problem is, far too many managers don't give the kind of performance feedback employees are looking for. Why? They're either afraid to confront workers about substandard results or they just don't understand how critically important it is.

The kit contains 3 complete training modules

1. Performance Feedback: The Seek-First-to-Understand Approach
2. How to Give Negative Feedback: The C.H.A.N.G.E. Model
3. Why Praise Can Backfire and How to Do it Right

Why "Quick Take" modules?

Short-form: Just six to 10 minutes long. Today's adult learners can't sit for extended periods of time absorbing training material.

Single-Concept: Teaching people just one concept at a time vastly increases the likelihood that learning will be retained and deployed successfully. Each program delivers a single "aha moment".

Research-based: Learners that perceive their training as credible drives a higher level of behavior change.

The research says you’ll get high engagement and high knowledge retention if you structure training events in short segments that focus on one, research-based concept, not three, or four or five.

Here’s a summary of what you’ll learn in each of the modules:

Performance Feedback: The Seek-First-to-Understand Approach (13:43)

Few employees like getting performance evaluations. The process often feels rigid, judgmental and de-humanizing. Most managers, of course, are obligated to give annual performance evaluations, and many would tell you it’s the thing they hate most about their job. Fortunately, there’s a better way that eases the pain for both managers and employees. In this Quick Take you will learn the Seek-First-to-Understand method for providing performance feedback, the #1 goal of performance feedback, and the most frequently overlooked stage in traditional performance appraisal processes.

How to Give Negative Feedback: The C.H.A.N.G.E. Model (10:30)

It’s great to give positive feedback to employees. In fact, managers don’t give enough of it. But in some instances, what employees need most is not praise but a very candid description of a deficit that’s hurting both the company and the employee. In this Quick Take you will learn: The C.H.A.N.G.E. Model for giving negative feedback, the importance of emotion, as well as logic, when giving negative feedback, and an approach for delivering feedback in a way that keeps the discussion focused and under your control.

Why Praise Can Backfire and How to Do it Right (8:37)

Experts tell us that we should deliver praise to our employees as often as possible. Recognition is one of the most powerful tools available to improve productivity, moral and loyalty. But giving praise isn’t as simple as it seems. Delivering it the wrong way at the wrong time can actually serve to de-motivate workers. In this Quick Take you will learn: Examples of situations where “praise” isn’t about praising at all, an especially dangerous misuse of praise that could erode your credibility as a manager and, the secret to ensuring that praise delivers the motivational message you intend it to.