Speaker 1: This is Coaching Club TV. I'm Executive Coach Tremaine and today we are giving you the lowdown on leadership, starting with feedback. Now I know the best day of your corporate year is the day that you have your annual performance review, or maybe even your biannual performance review. No, I'm just kidding. Nobody likes getting feedback. You either get it or give it or both. We don't like getting it. We don't like giving it. Yet it's incredibly important for our personal development as well as the development of the company that we're working for. So what do we do about feedback? Well, there are two things. Firstly, we know that if we give both positive and negative feedback, the effect of the negative feedback will always outweigh the positive feedback, and we will leave that performance review feeling down. No matter what was said to us, we will put more importance on the negative than the positive. Now a lot of managers, and this has been taught in managerial school over time, they use the famous feedback sandwich, where you sandwich negative feedback between two positive statements. You're really good at something, but you're not so good at this, but hey, you're good at that. Well, you know what? Don't insult your employees. Please stop using the feedback sandwich. They're smarter than that, and they can see right through you. What you can do instead is get to know your employees a little bit. Find out what drives them. What are their motivators? What are their passions? Where do they want to go with their corporate career? If you know that Susie wants to be a team leader eventually one day, then you can sit her down and say, Susie, if we send you on a presentation skills course, it's going to help you when you're in a position of leadership one day. It's going to help you lead a team better, being able to communicate with your team better. And what about Michael? Maybe Michael wants to move departments from sales to mergers and acquisitions. And you know, because you know Michael, you know that this is his long-term ambition. Well, maybe Michael needs to work on his problem-solving skills. So when it comes to Michael's feedback, you can relate how improving his decision-making and problem-solving can eventually help him fulfill his dream. Eventually, if you do this often enough, you will find that people start to value the feedback that you give them because they can see how it benefits them personally. It's not simply a slap on the wrist, which nobody likes getting. And don't think for a minute that people can always decide for themselves how the feedback is going to help them. Sometimes it's just such a sucker punch that we can't figure out what to do with it. The other thing to do is to change the way your organization deals with feedback. Instead of doing an annual or a biannual feedback session, how about making every day Feedback Day? Now that sounds horrendous, but bear with me. If every assignment, every presentation, every interaction with a client results in a debrief session with your team where you give each other feedback, asking permission, of course, Jason, can I give you feedback on that particular point? Adam, there was a bit of a sticky point over there. Can we talk about it and can I tell you what I thought of it, what you could possibly do better? What will happen is that over time, initially you'll get some resistance, but over time you'll create a feedback culture where people expect to be debriefed, expect to get feedback, and honestly you can do away with the feedback sandwich because we give positive feedback in little increments all the time, every day, because that's easy. But when people start expecting the negative feedback and knowing that it's going to benefit them, knowing that it's coming, then the organization changes how it views feedback and it becomes little taps instead of big blows to help somebody move forward in their career. So I hope this has been helpful. If you need a bit more help with creating a feedback organization, giving better feedback or dealing with feedback yourself, contact us at The Coaching Club. We're a team of professional, qualifying coaches. Subscribe down below to our YouTube channel for more tips on being a better leader. Susie, if we help you... What else does Susie need?

Speaker 2: What about Ben? He's so very English. Ajax. Zara. John. Johnny. Jason. Jacob. What about

Speaker 1: Michael? Are you sure? The Coaching Staff at The Coaching Club