Negative feedback can be a powerful learning tool at work, helping people understand the reasons for sub-par performance and pointing the way toward future improvements. But negative feedback is tricky to deliver because people often reflexively react to what they perceive as criticism by pushing back against the feedback, or by tuning out the message entirely.
Here are five guidelines to help keep your valuable, but negative, feedback from being unfairly—and unhelpfully—perceived as groundless criticism.
1. Have something worthwhile to say. Decide precisely what you are going to say, and make that message the conversation’s focal point. Your mission when delivering negative feedback is to get your message across with the least amount of fanfare possible. Deliver the feedback without damaging the underlying relationship or sapping the other person’s motivation, and stay focused on your primary task: getting your point across.
2. Let the other person communicate your message. Whenever practical, let the other person give his observations first. Questions like “How do you think the WestCo meeting went?” and “What did you think about our sales presentation?” can often open up the space for a productive self-critique. Most people are aware when something didn’t go well. Ask the other person to talk about what happened first, and don’t be entirely surprised if his analysis is more searching and introspective than yours would be. If the other person covers your message in his critique, mission accomplished. If not, make sure that you are the one to communicate it.
3. Discuss the incident, not the person. Keep your feedback specific, and avoid pervasive (that is, broad and expansive) statements. “Bill, your JonesCo pitch was disorganized” is very different from “Bill, you are just not a good presenter.” Most people can work with specific, incident-related negative feedback, but pervasive feedback demoralizes people and can throttle their internal motivation. After all, Bill can get more organized for his next client pitch, but if Bill’s a terrible presenter, how does he fix that?
4. Don’t dilute your message with a pile of compliments. Have you ever heard that when you give negative feedback you should offer two positive statements for every negative one? That advice comes with a big caveat: An avalanche of positivity will probably dilute your message, and may confuse the other person (Am I in trouble? What’s with all the compliments? What’s this conversation really about?). As long as you are talking about the incident and not the person (from #3 above), you will be doing more to protect the underlying relationship and the internal motivation of the feedback recipient than a dozen positive comments will do.
5. Don’t worry if the conversation is short. After you have crafted a worthwhile message and delivered it clearly, don’t open up the floodgates to hours of meandering conversation. Listen to what the other person has to say, and if your feedback leads to a productive conversation about how to resolve the underlying issue, that’s wonderful. Just be careful to stay on topic. Don’t let your message—the reason for the conversation in the first place—get suffocated as extraneous topics are heaped on top of it.