How to give effective feedback?- Jayakumar Balasubramanian

How to give effective Feedback? - Jayakumar Balasubramanian

[b.jayakumar@gmail.com]

The context

Providing feeback – The best way to help others Especially during appraisal period When feedbacks are effectively given, it would help the opposite person to work on it and grow Overall the organization performance improves when objective feedbacks are given

Effectiveness defined

Efficiency: Doing things in the most economical way (good output to input ratio)Effectiveness: Doing "right" things, i.e. setting right targets to achieve an overall goal (the effect)

Five things to do...

1. Devil is in the details2. Examples, examples and examples3. Negative feedbacks are not bad4. Subjective vs Objective5. Give recommentations

#1 Devil is in the details

1. At first sight, everything looks 'good'2. Differentiation happens with details 3. The 'How' factor4. More important for self appraisal

One liners doesn't help!

Goal: Zero customer defectsDetail: No customer defects found

Goal: Follow all quality processes/guidelinesDetails: Followed all quality processes/guidelines

Goal: Contribute to team competency improvementDetails: Taken a training on OS basics

Goal: Complete PMP certificationDetails: Passed PMP certification with Good grade

Some examples – Feeback for others

"Rajesh is Technically a excellent person" "Rohit has helped me a lot""Priya's problem solving ability is average""Blank fields"“Zubair's contribution to v1.0 release was bad""Arun need to take initiative""Madan should be more responsible"

Points to ponder

Keywords to note: Good, Lot, Average, All,None, Bad What can we derive out of it, objectively? What improvement/development activities can be planned? How differentiation can be applied in its true spirit?

#2 Give examples

"Rajesh is Technically a excellent person"

"Rajesh has in-depth technical knowledge in application space debugging. For example, when we were working on a urgent release to customer X,I was stuck with a crash defect (Defect number: 435001) for 3 days, with only 2 more days left for the release. When I explained to Rajesh, he quickly jumped into the issue. With his in-depth ability to analyse crash dump, the issue got narrowed down in 2 hours. This has resulted in we giving a demo release to customer ahead of time”.

Expand the one liners as follows...

Another example...

"Cleared PMP certification with good marks"

"Cleared PMP certification during April 2011. This has helped me to understand mainly the estimation aspects in project management, which resulted in 0% effort varience for v2.0 release. This new competency & knowledge also helped to scope the project better by closely understnading customer needs”

#3 Negative feedbacks are not bad

Manier times negative/improvement area field is left blank Providing negative feedback is not bad In fact, thats the best way to help the other person Being 'Good' is not actually 'Good'.

#4 Subjective Vs Objective

Most of our work depends on how an individual handles a situation While individuals are very easily influenced for being

subjective, it is important to map it to objectivity of the team/organization Especially, while giving negative feedback it needs to be

all the more important Don't get too personal

Providing negative feedback...

“Zubair's contribution to v1.0 was bad"

"Zubair need to improve on taking complete ownership ownership. For example, while working on defect 435002 in v1.0, his understanding should have been deeper before sending the observations to customer,saying it was a setup problem. Eventually the issue was traced into MMU option not turned ON in the Makefile"

Avoiding personal attacks..

"I don't like Rajan's face. I don't want to interact or work with him anymore. In future I would like to either avoid or make person Arun to interact with Rajan"

"While working with Rajan, I found he is lacking listening skills. Rajan made lot of assumptions about the work because of which I had difficulty working on requirement 23457, where I spent 3 days explaining the same to him. This is not a productive as far the team is concerned"

#5 Give recommendations

1. Applies to both positive and negative feedback2. Really helps to provide focussed feedback and

re-direction3. Not only part of the problem, but focus on

solution4. The person taking the feedback also would feel

positive and contribute more

Recommendation (Positive feedback)

"Rajesh has in-depth technical knowledge in application space debugging. For example, when we were working on a urgent release to customer X,I was stuck with a crash defect (Defect number: 435001) for 3 days, with only 2 more days left for the release. When I explained to Rajesh, he quickly jumped into the issue. With his in-depth ability to analyse crash dump, the issue got narrowed down in 2 hours. This has resulted in we giving a demo release to customer ahead of time.I would recommend Rajesh to create a small write-up about application dump analysis and share it with broader community, so that is can be leveraged across teams/members"

Recommendation (Negative Feedback)

"Zubair need to improve on his and work on his ownership. For example, while working on defect 435002, his understanding should have been deeper before sending the observations to customer, saying it was a setup problem. Eventually the issue was traced into MMU option not turned ON in the Makefile. I would recommend Zubair to go thro' the Makefile advanced documentation v2.0, so that he can gather deeper understanding about how Makefiles are built in our system. This would help him to troubleshoot issues better in future"

"While working with Rajan, I found he is lacking listening skills. He made lot of assumptions about the work because of which I had difficulty working on requirement 23457, where I spent 3 days explaining the same to him. This is not a productive environment as a far the team is concerned. I would recommend Rajan to focus on listening skills by attending the listening skills training organized by HR team. Also Rajan can read Seven Habits books by Dr.Stephen Covey”

Recommendation (Negative Feedback)

Best practices

1. Keep a log of your work2. Spend time for writing feedback (self & others)3. Keep your own format4. Archive feedback5. Develop genuine interest for others

12. April 2023 20

Thank you!

Got comments/inputs about this presentation? Please send them to

b.jayakumar@gmail.com