Leadership involves many factors, including the need to consider others’ feelings, which can be overwhelming. While some leaders ignore this aspect, others struggle with the anxiety it brings. It’s essential to recognize how your interactions with your team impact their feelings, self-view, and work perception. In most organizations, feedback is a core part of these interactions, often shaping the foundation of relationships between leaders and employees.
How do you ensure you are having the right impact on someone? Surely, you can’t spend too much time or effort worrying about the feelings of your team when you have plenty of other things on your plate. One thing remains true, you will have to give your team feedback at some point, in some way, and as long as you have the right approach your relationship can grow positively simply through those interactions.
Think of it like this: giving feedback to someone is like building a brick house with them. You need two simple things to do this, bricks and the cement that holds the bricks together. Now imagine that the coaching or constructive feedback you give represents the bricks. This kind of feedback is meant to build that person up and improve their understanding and skills. It can also serve to correct certain behaviors and enhance the quality of their work. Positive feedback or positive reinforcement of good behaviors or work serves as the cement that holds those bricks together. This feedback generally consists of compliments and tells the employee where they are excelling. If you’re missing one of these two ingredients, your house will be unstable, weak, and likely won’t take the right shape. It’s crucial that you provide those you lead with both bricks and cement—constructive and positive feedback. When you’re preparing to give someone feedback, take a moment to reflect on which pieces of feedback will serve as your bricks and which as the cement. You don’t necessarily need to provide both kinds of feedback in one session, but you will want to ensure you’re incorporating both throughout your relationship with your team.
Example of “brick” feedback:
“It looks like your metrics are coming in under the goal. Let’s work on getting those up. I have a few ideas on what might help you improve in that space, let’s run through them.”
Example of “cement” feedback:
“You’re really good at managing your time, and that’s helping you alot in some of your metrics. I think you may be able to leverage that and apply it to other parts of your work to get yourself ahead. Keep up that pace and you’ll do great!”
I once had a leader who gave me plenty of bricks, but not very much cement. I was working for an investment firm as an analyst where most of my job duties revolved around responding to and sending emails. My leadership at this job was what I would describe as “removed.” They only came around when they absolutely had to and didn’t interact with me or the team very much. I even remember my very first day on the job, my manager showed me to my grey cubical, left over from the early 90s, said “Here’s your desk and computer. Let me know if you need something,” and walked away. From that first day on, it was clear that I was going to be on my own while learning the ins and outs of this new company.
About a week into my new job, I received an email from my manager outlining some feedback she had for me regarding an email I had sent to my stakeholders and how she felt it could have been better. Then later that day I received another email with some more feedback on something else. Later that week I got another, and a few more the following week, and the trend continued. Future months with this company looked very similar to the first, where I would receive plenty of “constructive feedback” on things I didn’t do or could be doing better, but not much of any feedback on where I was doing well.
Eventually, I started to feel like I couldn’t do anything right. It truly felt like the only times I would hear from her was when she didn’t like something. Our relationship began to grow negatively. I began to dread receiving any kind of communication from her. I would have spikes in anxiety whenever her name appeared in my inbox. All the while, I was beginning to feel as if I was a bad employee. I thought I was providing good work, and my personal metrics were aligned with expectations, I still felt like I was steadily losing confidence in myself. Eventually, I truly did think that I was a bad employee and was never going to find success in this company. I began to withdraw from my interactions with my coworkers and stakeholders and stopped trying to go above and beyond. I stopped making suggestions for improvement, primarily because I wasn’t confident in what I had to say, and eventually resorted to doing the bare minimum amount of work needed to get by.
At the end of the year, I decided to hand in my two-week notice and resign. When I left that job my self-confidence was at almost zero.
There was one crucial thing missing from our relationship development that I didn’t fully realize until after I had left that job. Positive reinforcement! I wasn’t receiving any feedback on the things that I was doing well! I was suffering from a weird kind of good-job-anemia to the point where I felt like I wasn’t a good employee and began to question my skills and judgment. I lost so much self-confidence during my time working under that manager simply from not knowing where I was doing well. This is where I learned just how important it is to give people positive reinforcement. Of course, I already knew that positive reinforcement was important before this job, but this example opened my eyes to what withholding that reinforcement does to someone’s confidence and work. At that job, I felt like I was a bad employee, even though I wasn’t.
The interactions I had with my leadership directly impacted how I felt about my job and my capabilities. Reflecting on this experience brought to mind an interesting video I watched years ago by a leadership trainer named Chris Croft. In his video, Chris spoke about what he called the “Management Potato,” where he outlines the importance of bolstering your employees’ strengths by discussing them and giving praise. He mentions that without positive reinforcement and with too much focus on areas for improvement, employees can lose confidence in their work as a whole and begin to withdraw. This withdrawal often affects all aspects of their work, from the parts they may need to improve to the areas where they typically excel. This can lead to significant losses in confidence and decrease the motivation to seek out and work on improving their skills or understanding. As a leader, the success of those who follow you is directly related to your success. Sometimes, it may seem obvious where someone excels, and you may not see a need to discuss it, but providing positive reinforcement can be reassuring to your team that they are moving in the right direction and help keep them motivated to continue to do well.
Being able to call out good work shows that you are paying attention and have a vested interest in someone. Calling out areas of improvement is important when growing and working with a team, but too much coaching and not enough positive reinforcement can have negative effects on how employees view their work and can stifle their creativity and productivity. As I experienced, having very little to no positive reinforcement destroyed my confidence and led me to believe that I had no future with that company. Remember, you don’t have to have both positive and negative feedback every time you speak with someone but it’s important to reflect on the conversations you’ve had with them in the past and be able to determine if you may need to throw in some words of encouragement in your next meeting with them. Keep a pulse on how they feel while you’re having those conversations. You can even ask them outright how they feel and adjust your words accordingly to help with how your feedback lands.
Featured image by Christina Wocintechchat on Unsplash
References:
Croft, Chris. “The Management Potato.” YouTube, YouTube, 9 Apr. 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foroXR7KFa8.
Leader's Manual 
Leave a comment