Hate delivering negative feedback at work? 19 phrases to help make giving difficult feedback easier
“I love giving negative feedback at work,” said no one ever. Unless you enjoy causing people to be angry, upset or hurt — chances are you don’t like giving difficult feedback. We squirm, postpone, or avoid having to relay hard truths, all together. No one is proud to tell an employee else that their work is subpar. No one looks forward to sharing that they’re making the team look bad in front of the client. No one likes to be made out to be the bad guy or gal.
“I’ve always struggled with giving critical feedback during one-on-ones,” admitted one of our Watercooler members, from our online community of 1,000+ leaders in Know Your Team. “I have been delaying giving critical feedback for a long time, and it is causing team chemistry problems. I need to right the ship.”
How do you right the ship? Especially, if you’re known as the positive nice guy or gal in your company (which this manager acknowledged he was), how do you make the shift to start giving constructive feedback more regularly?
I’ve written extensively on this topic before, spoken on the subject, and given workshops on it — but I thought I’d extract from it all what I see as the most useful phrases for giving negative feedback for folks to use in their day-to-day, perhaps during a one-on-one meeting.
Hopefully, armed with these phrases, you can ease yourself into giving negative feedback more frequently and more naturally…
Ask permission to give feedback
When you have difficult feedback to give, ask if now (or another time) is good to give it. No one likes to be bombarded in the middle of their workday or blasted on the spot without just a small heads up that a critique is coming. Here are a few phrases you can use to “ask permission”…
“Would you be open to hearing some quick feedback around a few things I noticed?”
“I heard a few things on a call the other day that I thought we could talk through together — would you be open to that?”
“Happen to have time later today to chat around a few things I saw?”
“Would you want to sit down and talk about different ways we can both improve?
Regarding this last phrase, only use it if you genuinely want to talk about how you yourself can also improve.Only say the last two phrases if you indeed believe you’ve made the same mistake before, or if you think you’re partially at fault for not supporting this employee as well as you could have. No progress is made if you say these phrases and do not mean them 🙂
Come from a place of Care
Make it clear the intention behind your feedback. This isn’t about tearing the other person down. You want the person to succeed. For example, you could say something like:Come from a place of Observation
Focus on the observable behaviors of what happened, not the personal characteristics of the person. This helps make the other person not as defensive in their reception of your comments and also helps make it clear what you’d actually like to see changed.
0 Comments