The Metiss Group's Blog

Behaviors are observable actions we all demonstrate.  Some behaviors are more productive than others.  All behaviors leave those observing the behavior with an impression of us.  When providing feedback to your direct reports, site their behavior not your interpretation of the action.

Some examples:

• Instead of “You are rude and inconsiderate,” say “I feel that when you rolled your eyes and interrupted Tim during our meeting, you appear rude and inconsiderate.”
• Instead of “You need to be a better team player,” say “I’m concerned that when you said ‘we worked hard on that report’ though everyone but you stayed late to work on it, you give the impression of not being a team player.”
• Instead of “Your clothes are unprofessional,” say “I’m afraid that when you wore that top that revealed your under garment, you looked unprofessional.”
• Instead of “You don’t care about your job,” say “I’m concerned that when you showed up late for three meetings last week, you gave the impression you don’t care about your job.”
• Instead of “You did a good job yesterday,” say “You did a good job preparing the summary report for our team meeting yesterday.”

Keeping feedback focused on the behavior not interpretations will make your feedback conversations more objective and less argumentative.

This entry was posted on February 24, 2010 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Leadership, Performance Acceleration. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.