Feedback is an important part of any relationship, whether personal or professional. Feedback loops are the cornerstone of quality improvement in any business, and feedback provides us with key insights that can lead to success. You may be wondering why you should care about feedback yourself, but the benefits of receiving regular feedback are numerous. Here are some reasons why you should trust your people and give feedback.
The importance of feedback
It’s not just a pretty-sounding term. Feedback means being able to provide guidance to someone, in order to assist them in achieving their goals. These goals may include personal improvements such as learning how to communicate better or improving interpersonal relationships. As a leader, it’s important to understand the importance of the feedback cycle, so that you can make informed decisions about your own goals and values.
The importance of being able to give feedback
Feedback is the cornerstone of the continuous improvement process. In fact, continuous improvement can be one of the most vital aspects of improving your business and a key part of most good organizations.
Feedback provides key insights
As stated above, feedback provides insight into your team’s work, behavior, and performance. It provides important insights into team dynamics that can be hard to measure objectively, such as morale, problem-solving, motivation, and motivation to work well together. In a study done by Zeynep Ton of MIT Sloan School of Management, she and her team found that feedback provides the opportunity for employees to clearly identify what is working well for them and what could be improved.
The study states that while organizations are integrating feedback from employees into the work they do, the relationship between managers and employees is still at an early stage.
Feedback is the cornerstone of quality improvement
Your people need to be shown that their work is valued and that their contributions are recognized. People need to feel their work is valued, and you can provide this value through feedback. Feedback gives you an opportunity to reinforce positive behaviors and impact learning. It gives people a chance to adjust their performance to improve, and it gives them the chance to adjust how they’re performing to perform better. It can be difficult to convey to people that they are valuable, so communication is important.
Feedback helps people identify their performance style and discover their hidden strengths. Through feedback, people can understand what their strengths are, and you can help them find the most effective ways to use these strengths to their fullest.
Reinforce a culture of feedback
Feedback not only drives change but also engages employees. Managers and employees are happier, more engaged and their productivity and morale are higher. Being able to provide feedback to others empowers your employees, encourages innovation, and promotes growth. Employees are more likely to find new ideas or take on new challenges when you are willing to give them feedback.
Make better decisions
Feedback has the power to make better decisions by giving employees the opportunity to create a common language to discuss their concerns. Once you provide an environment for continuous communication between managers and employees, you can help your team achieve more than you could alone.
Understand the importance of feedback for individuals
We’ve all been there. We want to be great, and we want to know when we’re failing. This is where feedback is essential to our success. Feedback allows us to pinpoint what’s going wrong with us or our team, in order to fix it and prevent it from repeating.
Forcing ourselves to look at our strengths and weaknesses in a constructive way, instead of merely complaining about them, provides a much-needed outlet for improvement. We often forget how much we are doing right, and putting it into perspective will help to make us realize how our weaknesses contribute to our daily failures.
Pay attention to your top performers
Feedback helps us to identify and improve the people we consider our best and brightest. By regularly giving feedback, we are making sure they continue to learn and grow.
Conclusion
Everyone is seeking to be heard, to know they are important to their team, and to feel their contributions are appreciated. The people who care about feedback understand its value and use it to help their teams improve. But few people take the time for feedback, and those who do are rarely recognized for their contributions.
So, why should you take the time to give your team feedback? It will lead to higher quality products and better decisions.
Feedback can help you improve productivity. When you communicate with your team, there is a lot to learn about your business and your team.
