4 principles of great staff feedback

Bud Brown Sept. 22, 2019

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Leaders, do you know about the “Gotcha!” trap when it comes to leading performance discussions with your staff? Yes, you can step in this trap without even realizing it until it bites you. Consider the following facts:

• Sixty-five percent of employees say they’d like more feedback.[1]
• Even positive performance reviews with little if any criticism are difficult for staff members and their employees. Feedback caused performance to decline in 38 percent of cases “when the feedback threatened how people saw themselves.”[2]

The feedback dilemma

Here’s the conundrum: your staff needs regular feedback to thrive in their ministry, but it could lead to decreased morale and productivity if you don’t deliver it with great skill and personal insight. A skillful leader will improve staff morale and productivity by delivering good feedback. The leader who doesn’t deliver reviews and critiques with sensitivity and skill will hurt the team.

How do you accomplish two objectives that seem to stand in opposition? What’s the best way for me to give the feedback my staff wants and needs without threatening their self-image, which leads to decreased performance?

By polishing your emotional intelligence skills and learning how to use a personality assessment tool (not a typing tool!). We prefer to use The Birkman Method™ because it tells us how to frame our conversation to fit each person we assess. With the skills and assessment at your disposal, you’ll get the results everyone’s looking for by following four simple principles.

1. Adapt to staff communication style

This is the first rule of staff assessment, review, and critique. You need to know what motivates your staff, the needs they must satisfy, and their level of comfort in direct vs. indirect communication. This is a fundamental self- and relationship management skill. You must know the other well enough to discern how they will react and then adapt your style to fit their receptivity.

Some of your staff are about the job and others about the relationship. You must approach each differently. When you give a less than sterling review to a staff member, you must know which is more important to that person—the relationship or the job.

Put yourself in that situation. How would you begin the conversation with the person who was about getting things done? In what way would that differ from the same conversation but with a person who flourished through relationships?

2. Know how they like to receive feedback

This angles into the next principle of feedback. The Birkman is especially helpful because the “Emotional Energy” component reveals how people like to balance facts and feelings in conversation. People with a low score regulate their emotions more easily. People with high scores are more expressive of positive and negative emotions.

The first group is frank. They like you to be straight and to the point. Praise will sound phony to them. The second group will need bad news or criticism wrapped up in lots of praise and affirmation. If they don’t get it, they’ll miss the criticism and suggestions for improvement. They’ll simply feel defeated and lose motivation.

3. Discuss their needs

The quickest way to foster productivity and improve performance is to ensure that they meet the underlying personal needs. Understanding their strengths and interests are important, but if needs go unmet, they will begin to wither on the job. “Needs” refer to what people expect from the job and from co-workers. When these needs are met, people will flourish. Typical needs might include:

• A balance of process and variety
• Clear direction
• Knowing who is in charge
• Opportunities to be creative
• Meaningful relationships with one or two co-workers
• Feeling like others recognize their contributions

4. The overly sensitive staff member

What about staff members who are more difficult to coach? How do you avoid creating an even more unproductive behavior when you give an unfavorable assessment?

In these situations, you balance the negatives by focusing on what’s going well. Don’t hide the bad news, but don’t dwell on it. If you draw attention to where they’re succeeding, you’ll help them develop the personal resilience needed to accept the unfavorable review and act on it. Engaging your sensitive employees in positive, non-judgmental ways produces trust. Trust is a major ingredient in ministry success. So strive for a healthy balance of positive and negative feedback when delivering that assessment.

1. Victor Lipman, “65% of Employees Want More Feedback (So Why Don’t They Get It?), Forbes August 8, 2016.  ↩
2. Martin Kovacs, “When Providing Feedback Hurts Employee Performance” SmartCompany, January 30, 2018.

Photo source: istock 

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Bud Brown is an experienced ministry leader, writer and educator. He is co-founder of Turnaround Pastors and co-author of the ground-breaking Pastor Unique: Becoming A Turnaround Leader. He brings special expertise to change leadership in the local church, mentoring pastors to become revitalization leaders, training churches how to find and recruit the best talent, and training leadership teams how to achieve their shared goals. Learn More »

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