Giving feedback- Part 1

This post was a very long one, so we decided to divide it into two parts. The second part will be posted next week.

One of the most useful and important tools managers can have is the ability to give and receive feedback effectively. We also referred to this post in previous posts because it involves the collision of two important values: being honest and politeness or caring.
After gaining some practice in the process it can become a habit which we will be able to utilize effectively on many different occasions with many different people. For us, the time spent on giving or getting feedback was always most effective and significant in changing the way both us and the other people involved acted in the future.

So, what is the most effective way to do it? How is it done?
Well, I’m sure there are many ways to do it, here’s what works for us:
Whenever it is to your colleagues, your employees or your boss, the ability to give effective feedback may sometimes make the difference between success and failure.

Giving feedback requires you to first understand what message you want to convey to the other party. What do you want the outcome of the process to be?
Like almost anything in life, you should start by asking yourself, what would the end result be like?
Unlike many other issues in life, giving feedback at the wrong timing, without proper preparation and to someone who is not ready or cannot contain the feedback might bring the opposite results. We like to compare the process of giving feedback to playing with fire, done properly it can be beautiful and exciting, one wrong move and you may burn yourself.
We should bear in mind that giving feedback is a very sensitive process that should be handled carefully.

The preparation phase:
There are many reasons to give other people feedback. Doing it for the first time with someone may be very different from the next sessions in the future. We truly believe that the most important part of the process is the preparation phase. This is also the phase where we invest most of our time in the process.
Start thinking about some good, positive things you think or feel about the person getting the feedback from you, and write them down. Those can be things you share in common, personal traits you admire in them or things you trust them to do. Write down how those things make you feel towards the other person, what it makes you think about them, how it makes you act in a different way. Try to think about examples in the past, write those down as well. Starting with this positive feedback will build the other person’s confidence and will make it much easier for them to listen to the negative feedback.

Next week we will continue and finish the post.