Guttman Development Strategies, led by Howard M. Guttman, is a partner of CCY and focused on helping clients become high performance organizations. One of the key strategies to accomplishing this is providing good performance feedback.
Whether it’s a team member providing feedback to a supervisor, or the more traditional top-down performance review, Gutman recommends the same approach:
- Start with a qualifying conversation.
- “There are issues I’ve been noticing”
- “Are you open to discussing them”? Supervisors may be able to say when the conversation is over and that a recommendation is not debatable in ways that employees can’t, but everyone should still lead with the same qualifying questions.
- Be constructive
- Outline the issues being noticed
- Discuss a game plan for moving forward
- Put it in writing
- Follow-up with an email to help ensure everyone’s on the same page
- Include in annual written review as necessary
It’s important that the process goes in this order. Face-to-face feedback should be the norm and ongoing. Written feedback like an annual review should never be a surprise. And of course, feedback in any direction should never start with an email.
To learn more about Guttman’s approach to giving good feedback, see this video on their site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT-B0ncpiq8
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