One of the things that bothers people about feedback is whether they should use negative feedback or positive feedback. And those two words themselves, for me are problematic. Because what people mean by positive feedback is I support you, you're great. You've done well, fantastic Congratulations, which is to me praise rather than feedback. And on the other hand, negative feedback is critical. You did this wrong, you made mistakes, which isn't very helpful.
But the principle behind the question is very, very important. When should you skew the balance of your feedback towards the negative aspects of performance? And when should you skew the balance towards the positive? And for that there's a very clear answer. If performance is inadequate, then the best way to raise performance from an inadequate to a good basic level of performance, adequate, if you like, is to focus on what people are doing wrong, and how to put it right to enforce the rules to make sure that the basics work. So for under performance, we do need to skew the balance of our feedback towards correcting errors.
However, once someone reaches a good base level of performance, to get them to a higher level of performance to exemplary levels to excellence, in focusing on the negative aspects of their performance will not work because they'll be aware of the many way. What you need to do is to focus on the positive aspects, what they've done well and how they've done it well and help people to learn from that to understand the details. subtleties of what works and what doesn't work and to tweak their performance to build habits and effective procedures around what they've done well once and then oil, those procedures and to customize them and to tweak them. So they run immaculately excellence is about constant polishing of what's already good to make it better. So your role in giving feedback is not just to talk about what you've observed in a balanced way.
It's to understand the right balance to get someone from under performance to a good standard. Then you need to correct stakes and to get someone from a good standard to excellence. Then you need to point out what they've done well help them to recognize it and help them to make those