Providing feedback is a funny thing. You’d think it would be straightforward, but rather it’s a prickly nest of thorns. It’s delicate. Get it wrong and your employees become demotivated. But get it right and you open up one of the keys to employee engagement and motivated employees.

So, feedback is important. It’s how we learn. However, most managers aren’t skilled at providing performance feedback. International research has identified two important success factors for people managers – coaching and motivating people. Of the skills involved in these success factors, research consistently shows that employees rate their managers lowest on providing feedback.

Do you give effective feedback? The best place to start when you ponder this question is to think about what effective feedback looks like. And what it looks like is both consistent and balanced.

If your feedback is balanced in giving both corrective and positive, then yes, you are on the right track. The correctional feedback is more likely to be actioned in a balanced feedback environment. This is because people know that you are supportive of them because you notice when they are on-track as well as off-track.

If your people are constantly bombarded with correctional feedback then it weighs them down. They are less likely to action it as they become closed off to change –thinking ‘what’s the point, I don’t do anything right anyway’.

The power of giving balanced feedback is becoming essential part of frontline leadership skills. It not only reinforces the critical behaviours and actions an employee needs to reach their goals, but it also means they are more open to improving their performance when the opportunity arises.

I have worked with frontline leaders for over a decade and have found that the ratio is approximately four or more positive comments to every correctional comment. The key to both kinds of feedback is that it is, behaviourally specific (rather than judgemental), and accurate.

For example, when you notice an employee doing something right your conversation should go something like: “Great work Sarah, I noticed when you were talking with that last customer you discussed with them the benefits of moving up to our premium software package. In particular, I really liked the way you identified that this package would enable them to save money by replacing their current time recording system.”

Giving balanced feedback takes practice and time. You need to be out there making sure you have significant face time with your team everyday, so you have the opportunity to see what’s going on and coach through the behaviours.