How to Help Your Team Learn from Constructive Feedback

Constructive feedback is something nearly all employees will encounter at some point in their career. It’s an essential component of growth and personal development. Unfortunately, not everyone responds well to constructive feedback, and the initial response of many employees is to become defensive or even angry. Here are some tips to help your team accept and implement constructive feedback.

Focus on the Benefits

Most people have a natural aversion to criticism, and for some it can be quite painful. It can feel as if they’re under personal attack and being critiqued on a granular level. But when people understand how they can benefit from it long term and that criticism can be used as a vessel for growth, it becomes a lot more bearable. Try to get your team to view constructive feedback as a positive thing that enables them to identify their weaknesses and improve upon them.

Try Not to Take It Personally

Everyone has inefficiencies and some aspect of their working habits that could be strengthened. It’s important to remember constructive feedback isn’t an attack on the person; it’s simply addressing the behavior. There’s a great quote from an article on Entreprenuer that sums everything up quite nicely.

“Constructive criticism is not an insult or a reflection on who you are as a person. It’s merely someone’s observations about his or her interactions with you in a business context.” Once your employees can get past this, they’ll be in a position to truly learn from feedback.

Encourage Them to Probe for Details

For genuine improvement to take place, it’s important for employees to understand the details to better understand what sparked the criticism. The best way to grasp this is to encourage employees to delve deeper and ask for specifics. Asking a few open-ended questions should help them connect the dots and walk away with tangible insights they can apply later on.

Look for Practical Ways to Implement Feedback

In order for constructive feedback to have any effect, your employees must be able to implement it. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Try to get your employees to thoroughly examine and analyze the feedback they receive and look for ways to put it to use. For instance, if they failed to meet a deadline and deliver a project on time, they might want to be more cognizant about deadlines, strive to develop a better work ethic and be more disciplined.

Constructive feedback is an integral part of employee improvement and keeping your company moving in the right direction. It’s important your team learns to be accepting of it and view it as good and not evil. Helping them develop the right mindset is the key to accomplishing this and can have a profound impact on your company. Contact the recruiting experts at Encadria Staffing Solutions to learn more today!

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