Giving Helpful Feedback

The goal of this course is to give you the confidence to deliver both negative and positive feedback successfully and to leave the person receiving feedback with their dignity. To boost your motivation, in the first week we outline specific benefits of mastering feedback skills and provide examples of people whose careers changed because of timely feedback. We also discuss positive feedback and expectations, powerful tools to help people learn at work. You will be able to define both and know how they improve employee performance. You will learn how positive feedback can be delivered in many situations and appreciate the power of positive feedback to enhance employee creativity and teaming skills. We hope that you’ll be able to use this new knowledge immediately.

Negative Feedback is a specialized learning tool. We all know that negative feedback feels punishing. Our goal this week is for you to understand why it is punishing, why we hesitate to use it, and when it can be used effectively without negative consequences. You will be able to identify specific situations where negative feedback is given more weight than positive feedback and learn a technique that can overcome some of negative feedback’s harmful side effects. Armed with a clearer concept of the pluses and minuses of negative feedback, you can be more confident that you are using it appropriately at work.

Based on your work in the first two weeks, you can now describe negative and positive feedback and appreciate the power of these tools to change behavior. In the next two weeks, we take the next step towards building your feedback skills by teaching you seven specific skills to use when delivering professional feedback. At the end these two weeks you will know how to deliver work-related feedback that is effective at changing an employee’s behavior while still preserving their dignity.

This week we continue building on your knowledge of the seven essential feedback skills.

You now know the fundamentals of positive and negative feedback and the skills necessary to deliver both. In this module we begin by describing situations where no matter how talented you are, your feedback will not “get through” to your employee. These situations can be discouraging and we point them out so you can diagnose why your feedback may not have worked. We then describe a process to enable you to continue practicing and improving your new skills. True change takes time, but the journey is worth it.