The Manager's Guide to Employee Feedback: Master this essential skill for new managers and successfully deliver feedback to raise your team's performance with this practical guide book and ebook.

My second management assignment was to lead a team of technical designers who sat at computer terminals for most of the day, designing schematic networks for large complex engineering systems. Unusually, there was an opportunity for this almost "back office" team of technical people to become a leading group in the department, driving forward the technical aspects of the programs that we delivered. I was really looking forward to the move. I had only been in management for six months, but my new bosses wanted me to head up the team and really shake things up. I sat with the outgoing manager to discuss the team's current workload and to understand more about the personalities within the team. Then he delivered a crushing blow: he had agreed to bring Brian into the team.

Brian was a very experienced designer who had worked all over the world for some really large corporations and in some very exotic locations. He had been with this particular organization for some ten years or so...

Fairly quickly, I settled into a routine of setting objectives and discussing how they were progressing with the team. For most of my management career, I managed fairly large, diverse teams with multiple project responsibilities. As a new manager, I soon learned that you need to know what each of your staff is working on and whether they are delivering on their commitments or not. In order to do this, I established a regular pattern of activity with my teams that I used for many years and which I still refer to now when I'm training new managers. This is the structure that I wrapped around my nocturnal nemesis:

If this structure had previously been followed and executed accurately, do you think that Brian's performance and results would have carried on in the pattern that they had done? I would argue not, and there would have been some change in his behavior. Of course, it's not necessary to turn every employee into the next head of department, and sadly there will be times when a capability or performance management approach has to be taken. Now, you might also think that this seems like a large and elaborate structure to solve a specific problem, and I would agree with you. However, the advantage of operating this way is that it gives you a "catch-all" approach to successfully leading a team and delivering on your promises. It also gives you a springboard to deliver at least twelve high-quality feedback discussions every year by using the WIN model once per month. I know people who probably haven't had twelve high-quality feedback discussions in their whole career!

Let's take a look at the WIN model of feedback, which was derived from an Eastern European sports coaching model. It's a structure for emphasizing the positive aspects of someone's performance and also for suggesting areas of improvement. In that sense, it's a "balanced" model. Where some people have come unstuck using an approach like this is in trying to deliver a reprimand with it. If you need to have a purely corrective conversation with someone, use the DESC model in Chapter 4, Delivering a Reprimand. That model doesn't attempt to highlight positives at the same time!

Now you're going to do an exercise to hone your new feedback skills. The WIN model can be applied to both verbal and written feedback, such as when writing an appraisal document.

This is exactly what I did with Brian to begin the long and difficult task of changing his behavior and achievements over the coming months.

Take a sheet of A4 paper and divide the page up horizontally into three sections in which to write. The first one is for "W", the second for "I", and the last one for "N". Your task is to write a piece of feedback that you'd like to deliver to one of your team members using the WIN model. You can write these notes to be used in a face-to-face discussion or as typed notes to go into an end of year review. If you are going to use them...

Appraisals in the workplace are not supposed to be written like school reports to be read by parents!

I physically cringe when I see a professional, grown-up appraisal written in the third person, like this:

The appraisal is meant to stimulate a conversation between you and Dave, not to be read by Dave's Mum or Dad! It's not meant to be written for HR either; performance and results are owned by line management (yes, that's you now!), not anyone else. Please write in the first person!

I used this exact structure to deliver Brian's first piece of formal feedback not long after I took ownership of the team.

The initial result?

Brian went absolutely ballistic and told me that he had never heard such rubbish, and that he didn't know how I had been promoted to manager. He stormed out of the room and went home. He'd been allowed to continue with his patterns of behavior for such a long time that he had accepted them as normal.

However:

Start as you mean to go on in this new phase of your career. If you have any people like Brian in your team, please address them immediately, but remember that feedback can be painful for some. Stand your ground and work as hard as possible to keep to the principles illustrated in Chapter 1, Feedback Fundamentals. Data, facts, and evidence can still be uncomfortable to be presented...

In this chapter, you've learned a valuable new feedback model:

It's one that you can use all year round at regular intervals with your staff to let them know what to continue doing and what to change. I've shared the yearly structure that I have repeatedly used to build better performing teams and you've had the chance to practice your new skills by writing down a piece of feedback. You've also met Brian.

Use the following space to capture any reflections that you had while working through the chapter. As a prompt:

In the next chapter, you'll meet Kate, who gave me a piece of enduring but puzzling feedback. You'll also learn how to use the BAR feedback model in a more specific performance situation, and I'll share some perspectives that will help ease the more delicate feedback conversations...