The Metiss Group's Blog

Leaders should be providing feedback to their direct reports every day.  Often leaders want to save their feedback for the weekly one-on-one meetings or, worse, performance review sessions.

Don’t overlook the importance of positive feedback – leaders should be giving much more positive feedback than course corrections.  Some effective positive feedback examples are:

• “I like the poise you demonstrated on that phone call.”
• “Thanks for coming in early to print the sales reports.”
• “Your contributions and ideas in the meeting were helpful to the team.”
• “Great job assisting Sue with her presentation.”

One way for leaders to remind themselves of the importance of daily feedback is to put some coins (start with 3-5) in their left pocket and whenever they give positive, on-the-spot feedback, move a coin to their right pocket. At the end of the day, add the coins in the right pocket to a fund to use as a reward for being a great leader.

Giving frequent, immediate feedback empowers direct reports to be more productive and teams to be more successful.

It’s an established fact that people who have healthy personal relationships have greater trust and are more willing to extend themselves for each other than those who have lesser relationships.  It then makes sense that leaders who want extra effort from their direct reports should have stronger personal relationships.

How well do leaders know their direct reports? They should be able to answer these four questions about each of their direct reports:

1.  What is the name of their spouse or significant other?
2.  What are their hobbies or interests?
3.  What are the names and ages of their children or grandchildren?
4.  What is the breed and name of their pet?

Leaders don’t need to be overly personal with their direct reports, but they should know a little about them.  A personal relationship can come from casual water cooler type conversations.  Regularly scheduled weekly one-on-one meetings are a great way to develop this relationship.  In our experience, there is no more important leadership technique than one-on-one meetings.

Empowered leaders develop deeper personal relationships with their direct reports that lead to more success.