If you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you will never survive.
– Tim Cook, Apple CEO.
Sometimes in the discussions with your mates in the office or even in your own clique, you need to voice out your dissimilarity, your feedback to the topic discussed though not that pleasant you still need to air it out. Feedback is very important in a discussion and it is one of the 7 major elements of communication.
In the corporate world, there will be times that you need to provide feedback, either negative or positive and the most challenging one is giving the negative feedback.
How to give constructive feedback
- Have a warm and positive conversation, let the other person talk confidently. Make sure to have a friendly body language, relaxed tone and let the discussion progress on the right track.
- Make a good introduction and specify the business reason for your discussion invite.
- Give examples, experiences, observations to the person and explain why it is important to prevent the issue from happening again and the reason why it’s considered a problem, mentor the person.
- Suggest solutions
- Keep the person involved in the conversation, let the other person provide his or her thought or plan in solving the issue.
- Make sure that you are with the person in the plan for change.
Steps to follow when communicating feedback
| Step number | Steps | Details |
| 1 | Invite | Invite the other person for a discussion |
| 2 | Relate | Introduce the conversation to a specific business reason. |
| 3 | Explain | Explain, provide examples and emotional intelligence, experiences, observations in the other person and why that is problematic or prevents successful business results. |
| 4 | Suggest | Suggest a solution. |
| 5 | Check in | Check in with the other person for his or her understanding and agreement (or disagreement). |
| 6 | Plan | create a plan for the change and make sure you are with the other person. |
How emotions can affect your communications
Now, this is the hardest part, providing feedback without affecting the other person’s emotion. This is impossible unless the other person or the recipient does not care about it and has a different focus but usually, emotions are involved in the feedback process and it takes an emotionally intelligent individual to surpass. However, you don’t need to boost first your Emotional Quotient for you to say you’re ready in providing feedback.
Always remember this: Provide feedback with respect to the recipient and always with sensitivity, your comments will more likely be appreciated, even though the recipient may still become emotional. Show empathy and acknowledge the emotion, but don’t fall into the trap of taking back the feedback. Stay true to your intention.