Due to the hierarchical nature of corporate structures, employees and managers are expected to provide feedback, whether critical or otherwise. However, in an ideal scenario, you might find yourself working in an organization with a traditional corporate structure that is flatter and less hierarchical. In such environments, honest sharing between managers and subordinates is not just encouraged but valued.
At Peaceful Leaders Academy, we offer an extensive course on giving feedback that can help you learn how to provide difficult feedback in a peaceful, constructive way. Many of our training workshops are asynchronous, and our experts utilize industry-leading methods.
These workshops have been taught to and applied by participants from over 60 industries in North America. Our courses are suitable for businesses ranging from small firms to Fortune 100 companies.
Let’s explore the challenges associated with giving constructive feedback to managers from an employee’s perspective and how to overcome such challenges.
The Significance of Constructive Feedback in Leadership Development
Leadership development is an intricate process that aims to enhance the leadership abilities of every member of an organization. Constructive feedback is the compass that guides the leadership development process.
Here’s a list of reasons why you should embrace positive feedback as a leader.
Constructive Feedback Is a Tool for Continuous Improvement
Leadership in an ever-changing world requires constant feedback. Specifically, positive feedback serves as a tool that leaders can use for iterative development. A leader poised to succeed can put in place measures that enable their subordinates to provide regular feedback.
Such leaders can stay in tune with the needs of their teams and use manager feedback to make adjustments that help them remain relevant and effective in their roles.
Feedback Is the Tool for Building Trust
Every successful leader has team members who completely trust their leadership abilities. However, trust doesn’t spring up from nothing but, rather, through deliberate actions from the leader. It’s not enough for a leader to give constructive feedback to their subordinates. Honest feedback can allow trust to develop even more strongly between a leader and their subordinates in the same way as positive and negative feedback.
These employees can also be more receptive to manager feedback and remain open to change because they know their leader has their best interests at heart.
Constructive Feedback Sets Clear Expectations
Positive and negative feedback establishes a strong relationship between leaders and their subordinates. When upward feedback is given, a leader can understand what their team members expect from their leadership. In the same way, a leader uses constructive feedback to communicate their standards and expectations to their team members.
Constructive Feedback Promotes a Growth Mindset
Providing and receiving honest feedback eventually promotes a growth mindset within an organization. A growth mindset defines the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed and enhanced through perseverance and effort.
A leader who accepts negative and positive feedback from their team members can become better over time, and upward feedback can act as an opportunity for growth. Gradually, the leader’s mindset shifts to accept more corrections from all levels, which improves the working relationships within the organization.
Understanding the Challenges Faced by Managers in Receiving Feedback
It’s hard to provide or receive feedback, especially because humans tend to prefer the culture of being nice, and they often infinitely extend grace. However, receiving feedback is inevitable while working in an organization.
Let’s explore some of the challenges managers face when receiving feedback.
Fear
Like their subordinates, managers receive direct reports periodically. The feedback managers receive should be purposeful in nature. For instance, higher-level executives should provide their managers with direct reports showing their performance and any possible prospects for promotion.
Unfortunately, very few higher-level executives are courageous enough to provide that manager feedback. In addition, some managers would also rather not receive any feedback or direct reports at all.
Fear is the biggest obstacle managers face when receiving feedback. Managers try to avoid any form of feedback, especially when it involves some level of criticism.
Denial
It’s human nature to live in denial. Many people would rather remain in the dark and are unwilling to acknowledge or face reality. Denial is the worst obstacle, barring managers from receiving feedback from their senior managers or subordinates, especially because it is an unconscious response.
Sometimes, feedback is more beneficial for an individual than they realize. For example, feedback might involve information that reveals the reality of why one isn’t getting promoted even when they are fully qualified. Remaining in denial means not paying attention to the feedback given by not acknowledging reality.
Brooding
Brooding is yet another major challenge for managers receiving feedback. Like denial, brooding is a powerful emotional response. It manifests as a sense of foreboding, and a brooder can easily lapse into paralysis, passivity, and isolation.
If a manager receives feedback and relapses into passivity, they can miss their work goals. This mental state can also result in negative perceptions of the goals, portraying them as unachievable. Brooding prevents one from focusing on assigned tasks, which puts work in jeopardy.
Doubting the Credibility of the Feedback Provider
Managers can hesitate to receive feedback because they are unsure about the person giving that feedback. These reservations can stem from questions a manager might have about the expertise, experience, or knowledge of the feedback giver.
Reservations toward the feedback giver can also stem from a history of rivalry. It’s natural for anyone to question feedback provided by a rival or a jealous person.
Effective Techniques for Delivering Constructive Feedback to Managers
At first glance, constructive feedback is often assumed to be a euphemism for negative feedback. However, constructive feedback is not synonymous with negative feedback. At its core, constructive feedback is provided to an individual with the sole intention of creating a positive outcome.
In order to ensure that you don’t jeopardize an opportunity for growth, it’s important to use effective techniques to deliver constructive feedback to managers.
Here’s a list of effective techniques that can help you, as an employee, deliver constructive feedback to your managers.
Ensure That Your Constructive Feedback Is Actually Constructive
There is power in paying attention to the term “constructive.” Whenever you want to give constructive feedback to your manager, make sure that your intention is to motivate, help build, and construct a positive outcome or behavior change.
Constructive feedback can also entail giving criticism to your manager. However, it becomes constructive when you focus on the solutions instead of just complaining.
Use Questions to Get a Sense of a Situation
Questions can act as the most effective technique for delivering feedback to your manager. Asking questions provides a means to create a non-confrontational and cooperative environment with your manager, especially because it gives them an opportunity to explain situations or issues that motivate the feedback in the first place.
Asking questions is akin to seeking your manager’s perspective and giving them a chance to share their thoughts. Eventually, your manager can see your feedback as a problem-solving session rather than criticism.
For example, you could start a conversation regarding the rise in last-minute requests from clients that keep disrupting workflows. You could ask your manager how the organization can better anticipate these client requests and manage your workload. However, you should be careful when asking your questions to avoid appearing patronizing or ambiguous.
Get Straight to the Point
Your manager is obviously busy. If you must deliver feedback to them, it matters to pay attention to their time by getting straight to the point. Getting straight to the point entails avoiding too much context or beating around the bush. You can also demonstrate significant confidence when you get straight to the point while guaranteeing that your message is clear.
For example, if you want to discuss any recent changes made to a project timeline, you can tell your manager why the shortened timeline is not realistic. By discussing the negative effects of the reduced timeline and your suggested solution, you are providing feedback to your manager by getting straight to the point.
Be Honest With How You Feel
Being honest when sharing feedback with your manager is the best technique to ensure that your feedback remains constructive. Honesty means expressing your feelings and thoughts as genuinely as possible. You must exercise caution when providing feedback to your manager to ensure that you remain professional and respectful.
However, don’t downplay the importance of your feedback by watering it down because your manager cannot understand the issue and take proper action. For example, you can tell your manager that you appreciate the trust they have in you by giving you the responsibility to handle complex projects.
One of the constructive feedback examples is to then highlight how overwhelming the project is to you because of the tight deadlines. You can then suggest that your manager find a way to delegate some of the tasks or provide you with additional support.
Find a Balance Between Positive and Negative Feedback
Undeniably, any feedback can have both positive and negative aspects. When sharing feedback with your manager, especially about an issue you are complaining about, start with the positive feedback first before getting to the negative part of your feedback. By using positive feedback as the foundation, you are creating a balanced and supportive environment to facilitate a desired response from your manager.
For example, you can start your feedback by appreciating the manager’s thoroughness and attention to detail when reviewing your team’s work. Then, you can introduce the negative message by expressing your ideas on how it would be beneficial for your manager to enhance collaboration and prevent duplication of roles.
The Role of Active Listening and Empathy in Providing Feedback
Giving and receiving feedback is a sensitive undertaking. For that reason, active listening and empathy are the two most essential employee conflict resolution skills you can need when providing feedback to your manager or your colleague.
Active listening involves paying attention to what the other person is saying without interrupting, judging, or dismissing their points of view on a subject.
On the other hand, empathy involves putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, trying as much as possible to feel as they do, and not imposing your solutions or opinions on them.
Let’s explore the role of active listening and empathy in feedback.
Helps Overcome Emotional Barriers to Feedback Provision
Feedback is a form of communication that intends to provide information, evaluation, or guidance on a person’s behavior, performance, or attitude. Correcting a person’s behavior or attitude can become really uncomfortable. If you don’t deliver the feedback properly, you risk causing negative reactions such as resentment, anger, or defensiveness in the recipient.
Active listening and empathy are key to overcoming these emotional barriers. Actively listening to the person means not judging them, not interrupting, and making them feel heard. Empathy lets the listener know that you care and that your feedback is important. You can also get a better understanding of their expectations, clarify any gaps in information, learn from their suggestions, and negotiate actions and solutions.
Active Listening and Empathy Enhances Personal Relationships
Active listening and empathy can enhance your relationship with the feedback recipient. Active listening means listening closely to the other person’s concerns, paraphrasing their comments, and ensuring that you address their concerns properly.
Helps You Give Full Attention to the Feedback Recipient
Providing feedback to someone about their behavior or performance requires giving them your full attention. The best way to do this is to set aside any distractions and focus on the conversation.
Active listening is a constructive feedback skill that can help you pay attention to the other person without multitasking or thinking about how to respond to them. Active listening also means making eye contact with the person, which demonstrates significant respect for their ideas. Empathy creates a conducive environment for open dialogue.
Creating a Safe and Supportive Environment for Feedback Conversations
Feedback conversations are among the most difficult. The only way to ensure that they are less uncomfortable is to have them occur in a safe and supportive environment. The big question is how a leader can create such an environment.
Here’s a list of key tips for ensuring that your work environment is safe and supportive of feedback conversations.
Start by Setting Clear Expectations
Manager feedback and employee feedback are necessary parts of an organizational growth process. However, this critical resource can be lost if your organization is unsafe for employees to provide constructive criticism to their managers.
The first step in making the employee feedback process less awkward is to set clear expectations. Before giving feedback or receiving the same, you should ensure that everyone in the organization has clear and shared expectations about the feedback process, its purpose, and the possible outcomes of any feedback.
For example, you can hold a meeting with all employees and agree on the standards and criteria that can guide feedback sessions, including the roles and responsibilities of givers and receivers of that feedback.
When you have clear expectations guiding the giving and reception of employee feedback, you can prevent conflicts, misunderstandings, and frustrations in the workplace while guaranteeing that every piece of feedback is relevant, constructive, and meets the organization’s objectives.
Build and Maintain Trust and Respect
Giving feedback is an art that requires careful consideration, as does receiving feedback. The primary goal of a feedback process is to either facilitate behavior change or influence performance improvement. Consequently, such feedback must occur in an environment with trust and respect that goes both ways.
You can build trust and respect in the work environment by ensuring that everyone values honest, open, and empathetic communication. As a manager, you should set an example by acknowledging and appreciating the efforts and contributions of your team members.
An environment where everyone is willing to learn and improve themselves can lead to high levels of trust and respect, meaning that the feedback process cannot create blame, criticism, or judgment because people respect other people’s opinions.
Ensure That Feedback Is Specific and Actionable
A safe and supportive environment for feedback conversations provides specific and actionable feedback. As a manager, you cannot give your employees feedback that leaves them confused, and your feedback on performance evaluation should not overwhelm your team members, either.
In a safe and supportive environment, any feedback given is specific and actionable. Such feedback focuses on the concrete behavior that should be changed and the intended outcomes of that change. You should also ensure that the feedback is accompanied by clear and feasible suggestions that can help employees make improvements.
Instead of telling an employee, “Your decision was bad,” you would be better off telling them, “Your decision did not meet X, Y, or Z criteria, and you can improve your decision by doing A, B, and C.”
This feedback is not only actionable and clear but also specific to the decision made by the employee at the time.
Encourage Reflection and Dialogue
Employee feedback is critical to continuous learning and improvement in every organization. An effective leader should create a safe and supportive environment for feedback conversations to ensure continuous learning and development. By encouraging reflection and dialogue, a leader can ensure that the feedback process doesn’t remain a one-way process.
The most effective way to ensure reflection and dialogue in the organization is to encourage open-ended questions, active listening, and clarification during the feedback process. You can even take the lead by sharing your own feedback experiences, challenges, and how feedback is meant for good.
By encouraging employees to reflect and dialogue on the feedback they receive, you are asking them to view feedback as important information that they should use in their work roles.
Celebrate Feedback and Learning
An environment where feedback is celebrated is surely safe and supportive of the feedback process. When you create an environment where everyone celebrates achievements and success, you are creating room for more feedback.
Employees can understand the critical value of giving and receiving feedback and feel safe whenever they receive constructive criticism from their managers or colleagues. The feedback process can take place in a setting filled with fun, socialization, and recognition. Feedback can also occur during parties, awards, or games.
Addressing Common Misconceptions and Fears About Giving Feedback
As a manager, it is part of your responsibility to help your team continue learning and improving in their roles. One of the surest ways to ensure that they grow is by creating a safe environment for giving and receiving constructive criticism.
However, you must first address the common misconceptions and fears about giving feedback.
Giving Feedback Can Ruin Your Reputation
People often choose not to give feedback to their colleagues or managers because they fear that their feedback can ruin their reputation. However, this is a misconception.
Giving honest feedback should not ruin your reputation—it should instead yield positive outcomes for both the giver and the receiver. A feedback environment that is not safe and supportive may result in ruined reputations, but that doesn’t mean that you should be afraid to give and receive feedback. Understand the value of constructive criticism and ensure that you do so with all honesty and good intentions.
You Must Include Details to Back Up Your Feedback
Many people are afraid of giving feedback because they believe that they should include a lot of details. In reality, feedback is not a major or detailed event. It can occur in the midst of a normal conversation. This misconception results from people associating feedback with negativity.
You should always find a balance between positive and negative feedback to avoid this misconception and get straight to the point when giving your feedback. The only time you need to document anything is when the person receiving feedback doesn’t act on the feedback and is not trying to change their behavior.
The Fear of Bad Timing
It’s natural for human beings to experience good and bad timing in all their endeavors. Given that feedback is a sensitive undertaking, you need to choose the right time for giving feedback. If you give critical feedback at the wrong time, you are likely to get a negative outcome.
You Can Ruin Friendships
Giving constructive feedback is usually considered a great thing in an organization because it can correct a person’s behavior or improve their performance. However, some people don’t take corrections positively, and the fear of ruining friendships is real.
However, you should not put personal relationships before constructive feedback. Don’t let the fear of ruining friendships stand in the way of organizational growth. All you need to do is always give constructive feedback using proper techniques, and your friendships can remain intact.
Promoting a Culture of Continuous Feedback Within Organizations
If your employees were to give their honest perspective, they would tell you that they would rather receive regular feedback instead of annual reviews. However, if you want to give regular feedback, you must first promote a culture of continuous feedback within your organization.
Here’s a guide on how to promote a culture of continuous feedback in your organization:
Set Up Open Communication Channels
Remove any hierarchical barriers in the organization to ensure that your employees can give and receive feedback. Upward feedback should be treated in the same way as manager feedback, and your employees should feel comfortable contacting their supervisor when they need to propose something.
Train Your Teams on Constructive Feedback
If your team understands the meaning of constructive feedback, you can foster a culture of continuous feedback in your organization. Constructive feedback is beneficial in nature and should be given regularly instead of waiting until the end of the year.
Lead by Example
The feedback process can be complex and even scary for your subordinates. However, leading by example means giving your team members an opportunity to give and receive feedback regularly. When you lead, others can follow.
Appreciate Feedback Success
By appreciating the changes brought about by previous feedback, you are assuring your employees that their feedback is needed and that it is important for the organization. You can always ensure that you mention the employee who provided the feedback by name and show how that feedback led to an increase in profits or client retention, for example.
Establish Clear Guidelines
A culture of continuous feedback cannot thrive if previous feedback conversations create conflict, confusion, or anger. You can avoid all that by defining clear expectations and guidelines for giving and receiving feedback in your organization.
The Long-Term Benefits of Nurturing Constructive Feedback Practices for Managers and Their Teams
Nurturing positive feedback in your organization can result in long-term benefits. The greatest benefit revolves around improving feedback practices for your managers and their teams.
Here’s a list of long-term benefits of nurturing constructive feedback:
Growth Catalyst
Constructive feedback can become the major catalyst for growth in your organization. Your managers and their teams can understand their strengths and weaknesses based on the feedback provided. Constructive feedback becomes the opportunity for personal and professional development.
Feedback Fortunes
Many organizations can tell you that a culture of continuous feedback can become similar to a fortune teller’s crystal ball. Managers and their teams can gain useful insights that can prevent pitfalls and enhance organizational success.
Morale Booster
Constructive feedback can always help managers and their teams gain and maintain high morale in the workplace. It can act as a whimsical dose of positivity, converting a mundane work environment into a place full of positivity and enthusiasm.
Collaboration Benefits
Constructive feedback is associated with employee collaboration. By giving upward feedback, teams are telling their managers that they are comfortable collaborating with them on work projects.
In the same way, a manager cannot be afraid to give direct reports to team members. Eventually, constructive feedback becomes a multifaceted tool promoting collaboration, boosting morale, and sparking organizational growth.
Improve Your Constructive Feedback Skills With Peaceful Leaders Academy
In today’s ever-changing landscape, constructive feedback can become the link between your long-term survival and eventual demise. Constructive feedback aims to achieve a positive outcome by providing advice and suggestions that can make work easier now and in the future.
At Peaceful Leaders Academy, we offer tailored courses designed to equip managers and teams with the tools they need to create and maintain a culture of positive feedback. We invite you to explore our online training workshops and take advantage of our personalized consultation.
