As an effective day to day leader, one of your principal responsibilities is to help your people to develop to get better at what they do. And the main way we do this is we set them tasks. We let them succeed, or fail. And then we give them good quality feedback so they can learn from their experiences. And I say fail because how many times have you learned a lot from getting something wrong? Your job as a leader is not to stop people making mistakes.

It's to stop them making the wrong mistakes, to manage the risk so that they make mistakes that are safe for you, for them and for your organization. And then help them learn from those mistakes. So in this video, I want to talk about the basics of good quality feedback. And the model I'm going to use is to give them a boost. Boost stands for the five components of really good quality feedback. And the first component is to make it balanced.

Now, a lot of people have talked about the feedback sandwich. You tell them everything that's good about what they've done. So they feel good. And then you hit them with the mistakes they've made and how to correct them. But you don't want to leave them feeling depressed. So you remind them of the good stuff.

And they kind of forget about the mistakes because they're so boiled up. I don't think the feedback sandwich quite works. But the principle is right. Start by giving someone feedback on what they've done well, because they want to hear that they'll listen to that and they'll engage with that. It was rapport. And when you got rapport, you could start to introduce your concerns about what they need to learn from mistakes they made.

But what's really important He's having made mistakes you then. And this is the bottom of, if you like the feedback burger, then you need to reinforce your support for them. You're not supporting the mistakes they've made, but you're supporting them as an individual, as supporting and reminding them that you're there to help and develop them. So that's the balance. Here's the things you did well, here's the things you didn't do so well. Here's my support to wrap around it.

The first Oh of boost stands for objective. When you give feedback, give feedback about the behavior and the performance that your team member has conducted. Not about them themselves, not subject to performance. It says you are this or you can't do that. But this is what you did. This is how you did it.

Be objective in the sense of giving feedback about their activities. Because that's what they can change. They can't change who they are, frankly, you don't know whether they can or can't do something you only know for sure what they did or didn't do. The second hour of boost stands for observed only give feedback on things you have observed and speculate about what might have happened only give feedback on what you know for sure did happen. Now, it is possible to use third party feedback if a reliable sources told you something that happened or the way they did something or their behavior or performance, then you can use that but use it carefully. The best quality feedback is feedback based on what you have observed.

The S stands for specific, the more specific you are in the feedback, the easier it will be for your question. To understand what they need to do to change, or what they need to do, to continue to improve. If you give general feedback, this report isn't very good or I didn't like the way you presented. I have no clue about what they need to do to make it better. Whereas if you say, Your use of color in the graphs meant that people who are colorblind couldn't get the benefit of it, that's easy to fix. When you present it, you want it around and turn your back on the audience.

Okay. Now I know how I need to fix my presentation skills. And finally, T for timely. The best feedback is the feedback that comes as soon as possible after the performance or after the behavior concern, but not sooner. Obviously, you need to wait till an appropriate time. It's not appropriate to give feedback to someone before publicly when other colleagues are around, unless it's complete praise.

But as soon as you can take someone aside to a suitable place, give them feedback there and then that way, your recollection and their recollection of what happened is sharpest and the learning will be the most precise. So give your feedback. Give your people a boost with balanced feedback, objective feedback, observe feedback, specific feedback and timely feedback.