Creating a Culture of Continuous Feedback

When I say performance review, what goes through your head? Do you cringe? Do you roll your eyes about the wasted time, or groan at the thought of doing all the work? Do you get a rush of fear over what surprising new flaws you will hear about? Or do you get a little bit of nervous excitement to hear what people think about you?

If performance reviews make you shudder, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, the review process is not something that every manager takes seriously or handles in a mature way. Now that you’re managing people, you have a lot of power to shape the experience your direct reports have with reviews. That experience starts long before the reviews are written. It starts with continuous feedback.

Continuous feedback is, more than anything, a commitment to regularly sharing both positive and corrective feedback. Instead of saving these kinds of comments for the review cycle, managers and peers are encouraged to note when things are going well and raise issues as they happen. Some companies have started to adopt software that makes it easy for teams to provide continuous feedback and track that feedback over time, but the most important thing is that the team has adopted a culture of providing feedback frequently. For you, as a new manager, getting into the habit of continuous feedback is training you to pay attention to individuals, which in turn makes it easier to recognize and foster talent. You’re also practicing the art of having small and occasionally tricky conversations with individuals about their performance. Few people are comfortable with providing one-on-one praise or correction, and this helps you get over the feeling of awkwardness.

There are some steps you can take to be great at giving continuous feedback:

1. Know your people. The first required part of successfully giving continuous feedback is a basic understanding of the individuals on your team. What are their goals, if any? What are their strengths and weaknesses? At what level are they currently operating, and where might they need to improve to get to the next level? You can get some of this knowledge by reading their previous performance reviews if you have them, but you’ll also want to sit down with every person on your team and ask for his or her perspective on all of these questions. This understanding gives you a baseline you can use to frame your feedback, and helps you find some things that you might want to focus on.
2. Observe your people. You can’t give feedback if you aren’t paying attention. If anything, I think the best outcome of attempting a continuous feedback cycle is not necessarily the actual feedback generated, but rather that the effort forces you to start paying attention to the individuals on your team. Starting this habit early in your management career, while you still may have only a few people to manage, helps you build up those observational muscles. Practice looking for talents and achievements on your team, first and foremost. Good managers have a knack for identifying talents and helping people draw more out of their strengths. Yes, you’ll also want to look for weaknesses and areas for improvement, but if you spend most of your time trying to get people to correct weaknesses, you’ll end up with a style that feels more like continuous criticism.
   Sometimes it helps to have a goal, so task yourself with regularly identifying people who deserve praise. Adopting a habit of positive recognition forces you to be on the lookout for things to praise, which in turn causes you to pay attention to what individuals are bringing to various projects. You don’t have to do this in public, but every week there should be at least one thing you can recognize about someone on your team. Even better, look for something to recognize weekly for everyone who reports to you.
3. Provide lightweight, regular feedback. Start with positive feedback. It’s both easier and more fun to give positive feedback than it is to give corrective feedback. As a new manager, you don’t have to jump into the deep end of coaching first thing. Many people respond better to praise than they do to corrective feedback, and you can use kudos to guide them to better behavior by emphasizing the things they’ve done well.
   Positive feedback also makes your reports more likely to listen to you when you need to give them critical feedback. When they believe that their manager sees the good things they do, they’ll be more open to hearing about the areas where they might improve. It’s best to give critical feedback quickly in the case of an obvious misstep, but continuous feedback is more than in-the-moment corrections. Use a habit of continuous feedback to talk about things that don’t seem to be going well as you start to notice them, rather than waiting until the review cycle to have uncomfortable conversations.
   Bonus: Provide coaching. Ultimately, continuous feedback works best when you, as a manager, pair that feedback with coaching. As situations arise, use coaching to ask people what they might have done differently. When things are going well, praise them, but also make suggestions as to what could be even better in the future. Coaching-based continuous feedback means going beyond a simple “good job” to really engage with the details and form a partnership with your direct report where the two of you are working together to help her grow.
   Why do I list coaching as a bonus? It’s not always a core need for doing the job well, and there will be many times when you don’t have either the qualifications or the capability to provide the coaching that everyone on your team needs. Coaching is most important for your early-career team members, or those who have the potential or desire for advancement. Many people will be content with doing the job they know how to do well, and as long as they are doing it well enough, it’s not a good use of your time to try to coach them. Save your valuable coaching time for those who are receptive to it.