How to Give Good Feedback

1. Feedback Is Not About Forms

Mention the term "performance review," and the first image that comes to mind is paper: checklists, ratings, all-too-familiar reports that invite all-too-predictable answers. That's a problem. Anyone who equates delivering feedback with filling out forms has lost the battle for smart appraisal before it's begun. "If you use forms as the basis for meetings about performance," argues Allan, "you change only one thing - what might have been a natural, helpful conversation into an awkward, anxious inspection."

Yes, there are reasons to document the appraisal process. But most of them involve administrative neatness or legal nervousness, not sound thinking about feedback. That's why more and more companies that are serious about reviews use forms only to confirm that a review has taken place - not as a tool for the review itself.

Consider the example of Parkview Medical Center in Pueblo, Colorado. For years, the hospital's leaders have been importing new ideas about quality and service into their 286-bed facility. Early on, administrators and executives looked at ways to improve how the hospital evaluated its employees. They began by exploring how best to modify the hospital's existing checklist-based reviews: Which ratings made the most sense? Which scoring systems worked best? But no amount of tinkering satisfied Parkview's leaders.

Dorothy Gill, vice president of human resources, and a team of her colleagues explained their dilemma to the CEO: "He said, 'If there isn't a better way to do reviews, let's just stop doing them.' So we did. We had no idea what we were going to do instead."

Gill and her colleagues eventually came up with an idea. It's called APOP, for Annual Piece of Paper. The most valuable kinds of feedback, they concluded, are the daily interactions between leaders and their people - interactions that can't be captured on paper. The hospital still requires that managers do annual reviews. But instead of being top-down appraisals, the reviews are bottom-up requests for assistance: What can the leader do to make the employee's job easier? What gets in the way of accomplishing the job?

And the medium for those reviews is conversation, not written evaluation. There is a form - the APOP. But its only role is to confirm that the conversations took place. There are no scores, no written goals for the next year. It's literally a piece of paper, signed by the employee and the director, that records the date, place, and agenda of the meeting. The APOP process "takes performance reviews and turns them upside down," Gill says. "Directors don't tell employees how they're doing. They ask open-ended questions to see what will help employees do a better job."

2. Feedback Delayed Is Feedback Denied

You know the old joke about airline food. First passenger: "This food is terrible!" Second passenger: "And the portions are so small!" Most of us feel the same way about performance reviews. The only thing worse than how unsatisfying they are is how seldom they take place.

Bruce Tulgan interviewed hundreds of managers and employees for his book, FAST Feedback (the acronym stands for "frequent, accurate, specific, timely"). One of the most common complaints, he says, is that reviews take place too long after the performance being critiqued has occurred. "We don't work in a year-by-year, pay-your-dues, climb-the-ladder environment anymore," he says. "The once- or twice-a-year evaluation is a creature from the workplace of the past. Today's business leaders expect workers to be project-driven, results-oriented. That doesn't fit with the old model of reviewing performance every 6 or 12 months."

Why do smart companies and leaders stick with such an obsolete practice? Because, Tulgan argues, they have well-established systems for conducting annual or semiannual reviews. "There are no systems for day-to-day engagement with workers," he says.

That's where "FAST feedback" comes in. Tulgan offers lots of techniques for accelerating how people deliver and process feedback. Managers, he says, can build feedback into routine meetings and memos. They can learn to deliver feedback through email and voice mail. They can use short notes. Ideally, they should set aside a designated chunk of time each day, just for giving their people feedback. "If we really want a just-in-time workforce," he argues, "we have to create just-in-time feedback."

One caution: There's a difference between timely feedback and rushed feedback. Rick Maurer, author of Feedback Toolkit (Productivity Press, 1994), argues that a few old-fashioned principles of human behavior still apply, even in fast-paced work environments. If you're providing feedback around an emotionally charged event, wait a day or two (but never more than a week). "Sometimes you're so emotional that it makes sense to wait," he says. "Let your gut be your guide." And if your feedback involves a big issue, something the person you're working with really needs to take seriously, then find an appropriate time and place - even if it delays the session. "Schedule an appointment and have a meeting," Maurer urges. "Don't give important feedback in the hallway."