Hi it's Danni here and welcome to Friday Feedback.
I've preached.
And I have failed.
If you know me or have followed Friday Feedback, you'll know that I'm a huge advocate of making feedback a part of our everyday lives.
We shouldn't overwhelm ourselves with feedback. It has never been our intention to give feedback all the time. (Wednesday feedback after Wednesday...? ;-) )
But feedback is a very concrete way to better relationships, to more efficiency, to develop ourselves continuously instead of that one day a year we go on a course and forget it all again.
Feedback is the way to well-being, to job satisfaction, to feeling like you're getting better as time goes on, to feeling like you can trust your employees or colleagues.
And you feel that if there's something you're doing that's not working, they'll be honest and tell you. So that you can continue to have a good time together.
That's what feedback can do.
Every summer, I spend a few weeks on a course where I teach a lot of people and I'm a leader for about 20 people.
I did the same this summer. Three times during the summer, in fact.
So that's three times where I have pretty high ambitions to create a feedback culture on this team I manage.
The first week (this year) it just didn't work out.
I asked myself at the end of the week:
"What was missing this time?"
Because there was something that made me not take enough notes.
Maybe you know the feeling. You're in the situation and want to give feedback, but you've forgotten the specifics.
There was a situation where someone did something (good or not so good), but you simply forgot to write something down.
I made a small change that made a huge difference for me.
Before I tell you what it was, I want you to think first.
What's something you always have with you when you work? Is it your computer? Is it your phone? It probably is. Is it a notebook that you carry with you all the time?
Or maybe it's the agenda you always print out?
I'm going to give you a tip that's a bit like self-nudging.
Self-nudging, in the sense that you can ask yourself: "What is one small thing I can do to make it easy for me to know where to write down feedback?
I've done two things.
Over the past week, I made a small change to the notebook I always carry with me.
It's very simple.
Because what I did was:
I put a sticker on a specific page in my notebook.
I just knew that if I saw something that was good.
Or I saw something that we could tweak a bit, so I flipped to this page and started typing:
Name, what did I see? And what could it give us?
Name, what did I see? What could it give us?
This book was suddenly filled with feedback. Pages and pages of feedback that I could, at the right time, walk up to the person and say: "Hey, can I give you some feedback? I observed something before and I think we can get even more out of this situation."
Or: "Can I give you some feedback? I saw something you did really well!"
That little post-it changed the fact that every time I wanted to give feedback, I wrote it down. Because I knew where to write it down.
Another thing I did when I was working as an engineer was that on the meeting invitation, I would often draw a line at the bottom with a pen. And then I knew that everything I wrote under that line was: observations for my team, or for my own manager or something that we could do even better or should keep doing because it was effective.
What can you do to nudge yourself to know where to write down observations?
That's the tip of the week.
And I can't wait to hear what you do.
Leavea comment on LinkedIn so we can inspire each other.
Thank you for listening and have a great Friday.
Every Friday a new short episode of #Fridayfeedback is published. Short videos with tips for better performance and well-being through feedback.
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