by Michael Holland
The art of delivering relevant performance feedback hinges upon your ability as a manager to recognize a teachable/coachable moment, capture a mental video clip of the behavior exhibited and then create and deliver the insight. These skills aren’t natural for most managers and therefore need to be built and refined over time.
Practice like you play. Build up and practice your feedback delivery skills every day to create the mental muscles and courage needed to maximize teachable moments. Twitter’s 140 character restriction provides a great practice platform for developing/enhancing your capability to deliver concise feedback. Thinking in Twitteresque 140 characters or less sounds bites will force you to focus upon the key behavior you’d liked repeated or eliminated. Here are two examples.
Max, I liked your manufacturing update this morning; your format of 2 positives/2 challenges helped us visualize the situation
Max, your manufacturing update this morning was a bit long/confusing; is it possible for you to deliver just the key items in half the time
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you actually post your feedback on Twitter via employee hashtags. Either draft the updates in Twitter or simply use features in Word, or your favorite tool, to count the number of characters in your draft.
Seasoned Leader Translations – For those of you who may be a bit lost regarding Twitter, here are a few links to help you get up to speed.
Coaching Thoughts – For You and Your Peers
- Have you ever had a boss give you feedback in a way that stuck in your memory (either for a good or bad reason)? How might this “Twitterize” advice have affected that situation?
- How does this “Twitter strategy” make it easier to take advantage of teachable moments?
