How big should your goals be for employees? How can you effectively communicate feedback?
Being a manager involves giving employees feedback about their performance so far and setting up goals for them to aim for. Both feedback and goals are potent antecedents—they help employees understand whether they need to speed up, slow down, or be more careful in their work.
Continue reading to learn how to write goals for a performance review and communicate feedback to employees.
How to Deliver Feedback
Before getting into how to write goals for a performance review, Aubrey C. Daniels emphasizes the importance of delivering feedback. Daniels explains that the way you deliver feedback has a significant impact on its effectiveness. When providing feedback, focus only on aspects that are within the employee’s control. This ensures that the feedback is actionable and doesn’t lead to frustration over outcomes that are beyond their influence. Additionally, Daniels recommends that you give individual feedback privately; public recognition can be uncomfortable or demoralizing for those who are underperforming. In contrast, you should give group feedback publicly—this can encourage mutual support among your employees.
How to Set Goals for Your Employees
Daniels suggests setting easily achievable, bite-sized goals for your employees and taking things one goal at a time. Easy goals are those that are just beyond an employee’s current reach. The employee is more likely to succeed at these than they are at challenging goals, which increases the likelihood of positive reinforcement and boosts their motivation to keep doing their best. This means that, somewhat counterintuitively, easy goals can be more effective at improving performance than challenging ones. It’s also important to set fair goals—instead of giving everyone on your team the same goal, tailor individual goals to suit each person’s current performance level.
| How to Help Your Employees Grow In Coaching for Performance, Sir John Whitmore suggests that you approach management like coaching—your aim is to help maximize employees’ potential and improve their performance. When you coach employees, you don’t just point out their flaws and tell them what to do to improve. Instead, you communicate the information they need to develop self-confidence, autonomy, and ownership of their work—qualities that can motivate employees to demonstrate the kind of discretionary effort Daniels promotes. Here’s how to integrate Whitmore’s advice on coaching as you implement Step 3 of Daniels’s approach to management: Set up regular coaching sessions. Daniels assumes that you’ll only give your employees feedback and goals once per behavioral intervention, but Whitmore suggests that coaching is more effective when it’s ongoing. Build an authentic, trusting connection. Whitmore says that to accomplish this, you should practice active listening and let go of any negative assumptions or judgments you have about the employee you’re coaching. Use the GROW model. This model has four stages: goal setting, reality (assessing whether the goal is realistic), options (exploring ways the employee could achieve their goal), and will (motivating the employee to achieve the goal). Like Daniels, Whitmore recommends setting small, achievable goals; as the employee accomplishes these goals, they’ll naturally build the self-confidence they need to succeed over the long term. However, unlike Daniels, Whitmore recommends that you pinpoint a larger, more difficult goal for the employee to work up to. Each small goal you set can serve as a stepping stone on the path to this goal. Offer feedback often. Once your coachee has a plan for achieving their goals, check in with them regularly to discuss their progress and give feedback. Whitmore says you should deliver feedback in positive, non-confrontational terms, as this encourages employees to keep growing. You should also have a final coaching session after the employee achieves their goal, so you can discuss the process, what they’ve learned, and how they’ll move forward. Although Whitmore’s coaching advice is optimized for one-on-one coaching relationships, he notes that you can also use it in a team setting. If you opt to coach groups of employees instead of individuals, take Daniels’s advice: Give individual feedback privately and group feedback publicly. Experts say this helps you balance the need for personalized attention with the need for team cohesion. |
