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Home » Business And Finance Articles » Good Feedback Benefits Both Giver And Receiver

Good Feedback Benefits Both Giver and Receiver

Effective leaders are effective communicators. And part of this skill is the ability to deliver useful feedback. Good feedback benefits both the giver and receiver. It nourishes growth and development. Without it, the leader-as-coach is unable to clarify performance targets, develop skills and abilities, reinforce progress, or build on strengths. Strong, relevant, and useful feedback shows how much leaders care about the growth of people on their team.

In their book Vitamin C for a Healthy Workplace, Luke De Sadeleer and Joe Sherren offer the following useful tips for giving good feedback:

It is descriptive rather than evaluative. By describing one's own reaction, it leaves the individual free to use it or not as they see fit. By avoiding evaluative language, the manager reduces the need for the individual to react defensively.

It is specific rather than general. If a manager tells an employee that they are "dominating," it will probably not be as useful to him or her as to be told that "just now when we were discussing the issue, you did not listen to what others said and I felt forced to accept your arguments or face attack from you."

It is directed toward behavior that the receiver can do something about. Frustration is only increased when a person is reminded of some shortcoming over which they have no control.

It is well timed. In general, feedback is most useful at the earliest opportunity after the given behavior. This depends, of course, on the person's readiness to hear it, along with such variables as support available from others.

It is checked to insure clear communication. One way of checking for clear communication is to have the receiver try to rephrase the feedback he/she received to see if it corresponds to what the sender had in mind.

It is checked for accuracy. When feedback is given in a training group, both giver and receiver have an opportunity to check, with others in the group, the accuracy of the feedback. Within the group it's easier to determine if the feedback is only one person's impression or an impression shared by others.

It takes into account the needs of both the receiver and giver of feedback. Feedback can be destructive when it serves only one's own needs and fails to consider the needs of the person on the receiving end.

"Empathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person's frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel...you're listening to understand." â€" Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

The ability to ask questions â€" and listen attentively to the answers â€" is one of the many factors that differentiate management and leadership. Managers tell. They would rather be wrong than be quiet. Leaders listen. They know that growing and developing people is impossible without listening. Asking and listening are fundamental to leadership. They are learnable skills. Whether we choose to develop them or not depends upon our values. Do we really care about the people we lead? Do we really think they have something useful to say? Are their feelings and issues misguided and petty or do they really matter to us? Are their attitudes something to be adjusted rather than probed for underlying improvement opportunities? Do we believe that customers' perceptions are to be changed rather than better understood and learned from? Do we often see internal or external partners (such as distributors, other agencies or departments, and suppliers) as whiners who just don't get it? As Winston Churchill put it, "courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."

And here is another random article you might be interested in...

How to Get Free Credit Cards

Free credit cards - what a concept! We're all enticed by the very word free. The more common term for free credit cards, however, is 0% (or zero percent) APR credit cards. APR stands for annual percentage rate. In other words, free credit cards can refer to those that charge you no interest on the purchases you make with them.

Years, and decades ago, the APR was standard no matter which card you chose, and which financial provider. The APR simply depended on the bank rates, which in turn were influenced by the federal reserve. 18 percent was then a fairly standard APR. This was clearly not a time when free credit cards abounded and, in fact, competition wasn't very frenetic, because the rate was the same no matter which card you chose.

Then, however, monoline banks came into being. These banks, unlike the traditional financial institution that accepted deposits and gave out loans, served simply as issuers of credit cards. These still didn't create free credit cards, but they did have a decreasing effect on credit card APR, because competition for credit card users started to become stiffer.

Nowadays, unlike the past decades, you're almost certain to find introductory promotional offers on just about every credit card. While they won't always qualify as one of the free credit cards, most will qualify as low interest first year credit cards. The most popular, of course, are the free credit cards - the ones that offer the zero percent APR at least for the first year.

What's so great about these free credit cards? The primary usefulness is not for the new credit card user (although free is certainly an enticement - and useful - for novice or long time user, young or old) but for those who already have accumulated a hefty amount of debt from the use of cards that don't qualify as free cards.

As an example, let's say that you owe $5000 on a credit card whose APR is twenty percent. You're going to have to pay $1000 just to keep up with the interest. If, however, your credit card is a member of the free credit cards family, your $1000 payment will actually bring the principal down to $4000. What a difference, then, these free credit cards can make!

Free credit cards can best help you get out of debt when you transfer the balance of another high-interest APR credit card to the account of the free credit card.

You might also benefit from free credit cards that charge no annual fee. Some of these do this as a promotional gimmick, eliminating the annual for the first year only, and then charging anywhere from $19 to $250 each year thereafter. Some instead charge an annual fee in subsequent years only if you don't use the card for the number of purchases the free credit cards companies designate as your minimum requirement.