Friday Feedback Fact #14

By Manny Straehle, PhD, GISF – The Feedback Guy

Optimizing Feedback for Early Career Professionals

A recent article published by Mattick, Brennan, Briscoe, Papoutsi, and Pearson (2019), describe how to optimize feedback for early career professionals. They conducted a literature review on feedback interventions in busy workplaces using scholarly articles from the 1990s to present day. Consequently, they used these articles to build a framework on using feedback for early career professionals. Although, it is specific to early career professionals, I believe the model is very simple, effective, and practice. Below, is a summary of their feedback framework.

1. Audit

During the audit phase, information is gathered about the behavior or task of the feedback recipient. In other words, the behavior of the feedback recipient is observed. For instance, supervisors and friends always tell me to speak up in groups. They record instances when this occur and provide this feedback. More often, they tell me to speak up in real-time, which is more effective.

The authors identified six categories of the audit phase.

1. Complexity of task chosen
   • Less complex task are easier to change through feedback
2. Type of task chosen
3. Nature of data collected
4. Metric importance
   • Aligning the feedback with the recipient’s or organization’s goals often leads to effective feedback
5. Data credibility
6. Baseline performance
   • Feedback is most effective when baseline performance is low

2. Feedback Intervention

In this phase, an intervention is provided to the feedback recipient based on the information gathered during the audit phase. There are seven categories.

1. Feedback format (e.g., written versus verbal versus graphic)
   • Written was considered most effective
2. Comparison to other data (e.g., based on past performance, peer comparisons, public feedback)
   • Comparison to past performance was considered most effective
3. Judgement made on the data
4. Content of the feedback
5. Likelihood of the feedback being perceived as a threat
6. Correct solution information
   1. Helps focus on target or desired behavior
7. Timing and Frequency of the Feedback
   • Providing feedback more than once and immediately after the incorrect behavior/low task performance was considered most effective

3. Goal Setting

In this phase, the feedback recipient is considering change based on the information they received from the previous phases. There are nine categories.

1. Presence or absence of goal setting
2. Presence of reviewer to support goal setting
3. Relationship to reviewer
4. Nature of goal
5. Tailoring of goal-setting conversation
6. Nature of conversation
7. Recipient ownership of goal setting
8. Acceptance of goals suggested
9. Successful completion of goals

Takeaways

The authors provide a very practical model of delivering feedback. They consider the importance of gathering the data of the behavior, intervention process considerations, and goal setting considerations. I believe managers can apply their feedback model to achieve greater success to change low performing behaviors among their employees.

Find Out How Effective Your Feedback Is

Go to http://www.learnfeedback.com and find out by taking the Straehle Feedback Inventory (SFI)