8 Reasons Why the Feedback You Are Giving is NOT Helping

“Why should I keep wasting my time providing feedback to my team when they don’t listen? It’s definitely not helping!!” These words were coming at me from a coaching client who was pretty much fed up with the whole idea of providing regular, constructive feedback to the people he was working with daily.

8 Reasons Why Your Feedback May Not Be Working

As I thought about his situation and spoke with some people on his team, I discovered the following ways that you may be undermining your feedback process. Are any of these true about you?

1.      Are you leaning on your authority or your influence? Have you earned the right to be heard by others, or do you depend on your title as the boss (or parent) to make the message stick?

2.      Are you dictating the feedback or using a combination of great questions and inviting a conversation?

3.      Are you listening to the person to whom you are providing feedback?

4.      Are you delivering a monologue, or is your feedback session a dialogue?

5.      What is the outcome you are hoping for after delivering feedback to someone on your team? Are you trying to be right or manipulate better performance for your purposes? Or, are you genuinely exhibiting that you care about this person and their growth and development?

6.      Are you waiting too long after an event to provide the feedback, or are you offering feedback in real-time?

7.      Is your feedback “future-focused”, or are you simply complaining about something that happened in the past that we can no longer do anything about?

8.      Are you communicating in such a way that what they interpret is nothing close to what you intended?

There are probably more, but these are the eight that were immediately brought to my attention when I investigated why feedback may not be working as intended. In a previous article, I wrote about ways you can improve the results you get from providing feedback to your team.