3 Best Ways to Give Your Team Negative Feedback in a Positive Way

As a leader, it's never easy to give negative feedback, but that doesn't mean it should be avoided. While it may be challenging to criticize your team's work or behavior, it's important to remember that providing honest feedback is crucial for their growth and success.

By offering genuine guidance and empowering them to improve, you are enabling your team to reach their full potential and achieve outstanding results. As crippling as negative feedback may appear to many, it is the best way to get team members to grow, improve and get better at doing their jobs.

Here are a few ways that you can give negative feedback in a positive way:

• Be Direct

The best way to give negative feedback is not to beat around the bush, but to be direct. The team member is more likely to listen to your comments if you are clear about what you want them to learn and understand. 

Avoid surrounding your feedback or criticisms with compliments. Although it’s nice to give some positive feedback to soften the direct and negative feedback, but you want them to walk away with a clear vision of what they have done wrong and what they need to work on.  

So, be very specific about what the issue is and what you want them to change or work on.  Remember, it is also a two-way meeting or discussion, so ask the employee if they have any questions to help ensure their understanding.  

• Encourage Self-Reflection
  

Your feedback will likely be more effective if it doesn’t feel like an attack.  Rather than telling someone how disappointed you are in them, ask them to consider their own work and whether they would be happy looking at it from another perspective. Encouraging self-reflection pushes your team members to think more carefully about their behavior.

In some cases, the employee might even be aware of the issue and can give you some ideas on how they can improve. Employees will generally be more invested in their growth if they feel like they have an input and is being listened to and not being judged. So, it’s important to listen to their ideas before you speak.

• Explain the Implications

It is all about perspective, not because you can see how serious a problem is, means that your team members can see it in the same way. That’s why it’s so important to explain the implications of the issue and why your staff needs to make a change.

Here is an example, some clients have been complaining about the typographical errors in messages coming from the company and are concerned these emails are not sending the right message about the company. By explaining the implications, it helps for team members to see how their actions are affecting the business as a whole and even the other people in their team. So, always focus on evidence and how it could make a difference to the company. 

Keep these strategies in mind for the next time you need to deliver some negative feedback to your team. Putting it into a positive light, while still getting your point across, will help keep your team loyal and motivated to produce outstanding results.

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