How to provide effective feedback

Feedback is information about a product or a person's performance which is best used as a basis for improvement. The essence of life is growth and development. It is not possible to grow unless you are given honest and open feedback on your performance. How would you know you are a good writer unless you are critiqued and reviewed? How do you know you are better as a musician unless you receive constant reviews? How would you know you are closer to your goals unless you get feedback on progress and when to improve. The answer is you don't.

We as individuals and teams need feedback to achieve goals, build confidence, pride and lead us to success. There guidelines and steps to provide feedback:

• Set clear and concise objectives: you may struggle to provide feedback if you don't set a clear goal and evaluation criteria to provide feedback against. The most successful performers have clear and concise objectives to work towards.

• Observe performance: based on the objectives that have been set be sure to clearly and honestly observe performance. There can be instances where you miss the finer details of performance due to not paying attention to detail. Have a keen eye when observing performance so you get the entire story. Just because there was only one good or bad stretch of performance, look for what is the most important thing - consistency.

• Provide immediate feedback: what corporations can get wrong is providing employees feedback only twice a year for the bi-annual review process. However, this is not the most effect manner. Real time feedback is most effective to help people succeed - providing feedback when it is too late to correct behaviour is not the most effective manner of enhancing performance.

• Give constructive feedback: when providing the feedback be specific about what you are referring to. As everything is from a matter of perspective, you can only speak of what you observed and you can't speak for others. We all can detect insincerity and when someone does not really care therefore you need to honestly care about what you are saying. The bigger picture enables us to know that there is more than ourselves that we are affecting and therefore sharing how actions effect the team and wider ecosystem is beneficial. When rounding off the feedback, recognise improvement and end on a positive note.

• Recognise positive performance: we have a tendency to focus on what went wrong than the positives. More often than not, the person who is getting feedback know what they did wrong and don't need to be pulled down further. By recognising the good elements of performance you provide encouragement that the person is on a good path. Be specific about what is going right; be appreciative of the positive behaviour and encourage more of the same. We are more prone to repeat what is being positively reinforced.

Meaningful feedback reinforces great performance and provides incentive for improvement. What makes us come alive is the sense of progress towards a goal - effective feedback is an enabler for this.