Start Up Great Feedback With Your Team Members. Step 1 is YOUR MINDSET!

To start a feedback habit in your team, there’s no preparation needed other than deciding it needs to happen. You want to inspire a culture of continuous improvement.

You see it as a good thing.

You are convinced that it’s a good thing and you are impatient to see everyone, including yourself, getting better and better at what they do to reach team goals and gain new skills.

If you think about it, you realize you want this to happen regularly, not just when you are formally reviewing everyone’s performance. You want it to happen every day as an ordinary occurrence or the “normal” way people work. You want to start an “everyday feedback” program.

As the leader, you are in a position to inspire and influence everyone to take part. Spend some time getting yourself psyched for this new way of working and talking to one another. Think of all of the benefits you and your team members will gain from continuous learning.

This may be a new direction for you.

In the past, you may have been afraid to introduce a feedback plan if you worried about how people would receive the idea. Even though you have a leadership role, you may not have been practicing day-to-day feedback when you talked to people about their your work.

Get into the mindset by testing it out on yourself.

Ask for feedback on specific areas of your work that you want to improve. Notice how helpful it is to get answers. Even if the suggestions differ from person to person, try to appreciate the value of all of it. Use what you find helpful and let the rest of it stay in the background in case you want to draw on it later.

Strengthen your mindset by imagining people learning two or three times faster.

Realize how great it will be for team members to jump right in and make some positive changes if they were to receive feedback tomorrow and how they will be willing to give you, one another, and the whole team more feedback, if you enable the process. Reduce any stress you had in the past about feedback by envisioning all the positive outcomes.

Start talking about the value you see in feedback during meetings or in other team communications.

Share the benefits you have received with feedback from your team and from customers and others in the organization. Explain that you would like the team to actively start giving and receiving feedback often. Now, you are experiencing a super-positive feedback mindset.

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