Human life and human relationships hold meaning only through communication. Your feedback can make or break your team. While in a tête-à-tête you speak hilarious “nothings”, – as a manager you have to speak in a special tone because you need to make things happen.
Why your feedback can make or break your team:
And it’s not enough to tell me that you care
When we both know the words are empty air
You give me nothing
How many a times; as a manager, when your subordinates are leaving for the day you gave a pat on their back? And how many times each month you barked at your colleagues in morning meetings?
As a manager, you need to bark like a Coach in football dugouts. You need to pat like friends and mates when your teams are low on energy. This is the art of feedback every manager should understand, this is how you don’t throw “words” in “empty air”. At a time silence kills, and sometimes silence breaths within walls.
Feedbacks which makes your team:
So I put my faith in something unknown
I’m living on such sweet nothing
Remember Tennyson’s Ulysses when he cheered “And drunk delight of battle with my peers, /Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. /I am a part of all that I have met”. Failures and success are part and parcel of life. Managers are not fair weather friends, but they are to talk and take the burden of failures and success.
According to James Humes, the language of leadership depends on the art of communication. Your tonality, and speech, in together with your body language; ascertains your leadership or managerial traits. A person from your feedback presumes whether you are an Autocratic leader or a charismatic manager.
Assertive communication creates trust among employees. Understanding feedback style is the essential to be a better manager.
In Applied Behaviour Analysis, there are two types of reinforcement and punishment: positive and negative. Reinforcement is used to help increase the probability of a specific behavior that will occur in the future by delivering a stimulus immediately after a response/behavior is exhibited.
Research shows that positive reinforcements are little more powerful and effective than negative consequences for improving behavior.
Thus managers need to analyze and understand their feedback style in light of this applied behavior concepts.
How to master the art of delegating feedback in your team:
According to James Thurber, “Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.”
With too much pressure to meet deadlines, too many stressors, today employees are more impatient than ever. Managers should build the bridge between several tiny isles where many employees have individually cocooned themselves with lots of misunderstandings.
As employee disengagements are growing fast and thick – managers should scientifically understand how to be critical while giving feedbacks. In this era of knowledge workers – managers are “learning officers”.
Two things, first emotional intelligence and then assertiveness – this is must master the art of delegating feedback in your team. If managers can intelligently control their emotions, they become objective in their mission. Thus they understand the emotions better than everyone else. Now next they should be assertive in expressing their thoughts. Being assertive is just balancing the thin line between being diplomatic and being indifferent.
Don’t lose your cool if your employees come complaining about your feedbacks, because:
“The day soldiers stop bring you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.” — General Colin Powel
Sayak takes care of both recruitments and assessment projects of The HR Monks team. He loves helping people finding their dream job.
He started his journey in career leaving the shores of Waiting for Godot and found The HR Monks a better place, where he can change the lives of people by helping them achieve their dreams.
He has been to quite a fewer place across India and loves to travel. He loves two books, in particular, one Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and the other The Shift by Dr. Wayne Dyer.
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