Managing to Make a Difference

Chapter 50Provide Frequent, Candid Feedback

Managers often ask how they can create a culture of feedback. Feedback is a tried and true mechanism for enhancing performance. What gets measured gets done. What gets measured and rewarded gets done better and more often (and more willingly). Ask yourself these questions about how you are providing feedback to the people you manage:

• How frequently do you provide feedback to the people on your team?
• Do they know what you expect?
• Do they know how they are doing?
• How long is the lag between their performance and your feedback?
• How do people feel about your feedback? Do they look forward to feedback from you or do they dread it?
• In your culture, is feedback a normal part of the regular routine, or is it a once a year occurrence?

Here is a story about how one manager made progress on creating a culture of feedback:

Frank and the Banquet Housemen

In large hotels, there is a team of employees known as banquet housemen whose job is to clean, set up, and tear down the hotel's many function rooms. It is a very physical job that involves moving tables and chairs in and out of storage areas, setting rooms to precise specifications, and cleaning those rooms so that, when guests arrived, the room looks terrific down to the last detail. Banquet housemen, therefore, are deployed all over the hotel, and they work odd hours (so that guests can dance until 1:00 AM at their awards banquet, and some other group can start their meeting in that very ...