Assessment · Delivery · Other notes
Giving and receiving feedback helps everyone involved when done right right right
Taken from High output Management (I highly recommend reading this)
This page discusses the bigger feedback sessions (1on1s or Performance Reviews) you would do at least 1-2 times a semester. The other type of Feedback should be quick and frequent; not waiting for the "best" time to tell them. Your member should not be surprised during this feedback session due to constant feedback.
When it comes to pointing out weaknesses and offering corrective action items, some people find it easier with friends, some people find it easier with coworkers. Combine that with how you enjoy working with people, and you have a very complex system. Maybe you like working with friends, but can’t give thorough and honest feedback to them. That is unacceptable. Figure it out, because otherwise the entire organization and your team’s performance suffers.
You have quite literally one or two opportunities to seriously change and improve the trajectory of your teammates growth during a 1 on 1 feedback session, do not ruin that for their sake. On top of that, everything stated during a feedback session is going to validate positive or negative behavior, whether directly or indirectly. Failure to point out the bad and the good means that they are left up in the air to be interpreted however others choose to.
One caveat - feedback is also not the only form of affirming the good and bad in a team. If you need to have a sit down and surprise someone that they have been a bad teammate or underperforming, you should seriously sit down and consider which aspects of your team’s culture and/or processes are allowing the bad behaviors to persist, and how you should remedy them to create better cultural norms.
I have feedback broken down into two parts, the Assessment and the Delivery.
Typically, it’s already pretty difficult to assess someone’s behavior. How do you weigh output vs happiness of the team? Near term outcomes vs long term outcomes? What if someone is an asshole, but gets things done?
Luckily, at Hack4Impact there is no need to attach a dollar figure to the performance of our teammates. What this does mean is that there are a literal infinite number of ways we can interpret and suggest improvements for our teammates.
In my opinion, the fair way of assessing someone’s ability in the context of h4i is to clearly state and set expectations of output, behavior, and logistics at the beginning of a team’s inception. And/or subsequent official “guideline” setting sessions where everyone is crystal clear on what being a good teammate and effective performer looks like. Then, measuring your teammates’ performances against this criteria.
This way, there is a common source of truth and surprises and different interpretations of performance are minimized.