Bottom Line: What Will Giving Feedback Really Do For You?

Try out exchanging “everyday feedback”—clear honest, frequent, and helpful feedback—with people on your team right away. Many team leaders and members I’ve talked with discover a lot of great benefits! Here are a few:

Feedback dramatically speeds up learning between people.

Once people get a clearer picture of what will work better, they are actually happy to change what they are doing right away! Team members are often working a certain way because they simply don’t know how to perform differently. When they can see a route to being more successful, they behave differently.

Actions based on feedback can be a huge driver of success for the company.

A business leader told me this after they regularly shared feedback: “Even small changes in the way my team members treat customers or colleagues, even small increases in the amount of time someone spends meeting with their team, and even the slow but genuine progress I make myself in following my co-workers’ feedback motivates me to try harder and build momentum toward greater and greater impact."

Your brain calms down when you see that feedback is the opposite of scary.

Personally, I actually enjoyed helping people, after I started this practice. Although I was very uncomfortable getting started on my everyday feedback routine, I quickly changed my whole attitude about it. Some team members actually told me they had been hoping for frequent feedback for a long time and they were so grateful that I had shown the courage to initiate it. As I got into it more and more, I saw that people had been hungry for the honesty that I had been avoiding.

Feedback isn’t time-consuming. It actually saves time.

Once you and your team members put your cards on the table, exchange helpful feedback, and establish trust, you will spend much less time tiptoeing around tough issues and figuring out how to avoid people’s defensive reactions. The route to improvement becomes a direct one, with no time-consuming detours. Sometimes the fastest route to success is sharing sharply different views of how to achieve goals and how they can be very productive. You will build an environment that welcomes everyday feedback, and you will collectively increase your efficiency!

You will become a better leader as a result of your everyday feedback conversations. Since the job of a leader is to get things done through other people, you must stay focused on what you can do to expedite and assist others in their work. This is your task, even though your environment may be changing so fast that you feel compelled to stop and do some of the work yourself. Remember that everyday feedback keeps you involved in coaching conversations with team members, and that is the most effective thing you do as a leader.

Notice your feedback outcomes as soon as you get it going!

As you review your own feedback loops and what everyday feedback has accomplished for you, I believe you will report positive results for yourself personally—by lightening the stress you may have expected, speaking your own truth to others, feeling the gratification of developing others to do more than they thought possible, and experiencing exciting business wins!

Read Best Seller The Feedback Imperative for more tips and strategies for leading remotely.