Effectively giving feedback is one of the best skills you can build at work but it’s also one of the trickiest to master.

Far too often our people-pleasing tendencies get in the way of giving honest, constructive feedback, and we find ourselves chickening out of what we really need to say in favour of not upsetting someone. But as the saying goes, whatever you allow will continue. So how do you tell an employee that they need to pull their socks up in a respectful, diplomatic way?

We spoke with seasoned people managers and leadership experts about how they have difficult conversations that result in improved performance, not resignation letters. Here are their most effective tips that you can bring to your own team.

If you need to have a discussion with someone where they might feel a little put-out, wait until the working hours are coming to a close so that you have the time and space to have a proper chat, without you each feeling like you have tasks to see to. Shelby Fryer, former Head Host at Soho House, says: “My best piece of advice is to never have that chat during work. Keep it to the end – it’s so hard to continue working if you’re feeling self conscious.

“This is especially important in hospitality because, ultimately, people really don’t want to be there and [in the UK] it’s largely not what people want to be doing for the rest of their life, so it’s easy for people to want to cry.

This can apply to office environments, too. If towards the end of the day doesn’t work, then aim for before lunch time so your team member has time to think and reflect and come back with any questions, rather than get caught up in emails and perhaps start feeling muddled.

The best leadership advice I’ve ever personally received is: “A good boss never surprises their team.” Whether it’s company cuts, underperformance, or menu changes, constant communication prevents bombshells. If something big is going down at the company, your team won’t be shocked because they knew this might be coming thanks to you. If someone’s not performing well and it needs to be made into a bigger issue, this won’t come out of nowhere as you’ll have had many conversations about it before it got to this stage.

A key tactic to help the ‘no surprises’ approach is to give any feedback – excellent or constructive – as soon as the interaction, submission, task or situation has taken place, rather than waiting a while and sitting on it.

“Being timely is one of the greatest things about well-executed feedback,” says career mentor Laurie Macpherson. “The other thing is about more generally having a feedback culture where you also feedback on the good stuff, too, and people in your team feed back to you as a manager. Make feedback regular, not just something negative, and not something that only happens once a year at a performance review.”

Fryer agrees: “The continuous loop of positive and negative feedback really needs to be established at the start of someone joining your team. You need to always be building up your team for all the great things they do, so that when you are addressing something that needs to be fixed they are aware that you’re doing it not to be nasty but because you really care about the work, you care about them, and you want them to put their best self forward.

“It needs to be clear how it will benefit them, the team, and everyone. That’s always been the key for me. I usually end with, ‘It’s going to be much easier in the long run for you, for me, for everyone.’ They need to know there’s a payoff: their life will be easier if they do it this way.”

Laurie Macpherson worked in retail management for seven years, and found that asking staff how they think they’re performing really helped to have a discussion about room for improvement.

“I would use coaching questions like ‘how do you think that went’ or ‘how do you think that interaction was’, and quite often found that people would be tripping over themselves to tell me ‘oh, my God, I can’t believe I did that so wrong. I got that really wrong. Here’s all the things that are wrong. I’ll never do that again. I’m so embarrassed. I feel awful…’ So you don’t have to be the bad guy, if you ask them the questions first.

But what about if there are employees who aren’t so receptive to the questions, and genuinely think they’re doing a great job when in fact they’re nowhere near the level that their role requires?

“In that case it’s about being really, really specific,” says Macpherson. “It’s telling them what you’ve heard rather than attaching any meaning to it. ‘The customer said this, and you did this. The customer has now gone away and not had the help. This is a lost sale. It’s potentially a customer that won’t come back. What I saw was that the customer asked for help and you didn’t provide it.’

If you’re the kind of person who responds well to frameworks, then Macpherson recommends using the SIFT methodology:

S-I-F-T stands for:

• What you saw and heard
• What the impact of that was
• How do you think the client went away feeling
• What’s the take away that you could do differently next time

Sticking to facts of what happened can make things more neutral and less emotionally loaded. ‘This happened, so then this happened’ rather than ‘You didn’t do enough of this’ or ‘I felt this should have been better’.

“You can’t just give someone a dressing-down,” says Shelby Fryer. “You need to provide ways of fixing something. Bring examples of solutions and where possible, a concrete plan of how you’ll both approach similar situations going forwards.”

Giving feedback that isn’t 100% positive is never going to be enjoyable, but it can get easier if you practise giving continuous feedback that includes the small but important wins, if you create an open forum for discussion and development, and think about how neutrally you’re going to bring the information to your team member. Encourage your team to give you feedback, too, so it’s not totally one-sided, and communication should start to feel smoother and easier as the loop goes on.

Images: Adobe