Building healthy team relationships using great feedback
- What’s the impact on team relationships when feedback is poorly delivered?
- What’s the worst feedback you have ever received? What made it the worst?
- What’s the best feedback you ever received? What made it great?
- How comfortable are you in receiving feedback?
- What’s the impact on relationships with your colleagues when communication is dysfunctional?
- When the energy of your team and teammates is being impacted by poor communication are you sitting back and letting it happen or taking a lead to create a more positive workplace?
What role does emotional intelligence play in the formation of great relationships and teams?
Over the last 30 years, I have seen people being shouted at in front of a hundred people in an office. I have witnessed poor feedback resulting in damaged low-confidence people and teams. Leading to subdued creativity, low psychological safety, and a lack of confidence to take risks and try new things. essentially, experimentation stops and true teamwork stops and team relationship conflict rises.
We are all leaders! We all have the ability to lead in our own lives! We can all grow our level of emotional intelligence for the benefit of everybody around us and help build teams with lightness, heart and soul that are truly inspiring.
Team Knocks and Antidotes
The scissor icons represent knocks to relationship health. Every time a knock occurs, without intervention, the relationship takes a step closer to red.
Feel into your current team relationships. What colour would your current teams health be?
The medicine icon represents repair bids, the actions you can take to move you and keep you in the healthy green zone.
Stand up for Team Health
Engage your leader within and show the way. Stand up to poor communication and aggressiveness. Yes, that may include yourself. By listening in to your own communication and practicing feedback we can all start to grow our emotional intelligence.
Let’s take a look at a common feedback method
Please first understand that receiving feedback well can be difficult and that feedback can feel like a social threat. We also know that receiving feedback can be triggering, causing our amygdala responses (fight or flight) to kick in. Given this, we think it’s good to focus on learning to receive feedback well before focusing on giving feedback well.
Context Observations Impact Next – COIN
Context
When you’re giving feedback, put it into context. When and where did you observe the situation? This gives the other person a specific reference point.
For example, you could say:
“When working with the team this afternoon discussing the XYZ solution I observed aggressive personal attacks on the quality of the work completed by the team”
Avoid vague terms like “the other day” or “in that meeting last week.
Observations
Your next step is to describe the specific behaviors that you want to address. This is the most challenging part of the process because you should only communicate the behaviors that you – and you alone – have observed directly.
Avoid making assumptions or subjective judgments about someone’s behaviors. These could be wrong, and they may undermine your feedback.
For example, The approach to providing feedback is being delivered with sarcasm and demeaning language aimed at the skills and experience of the team.
Tip:
Aim to use measurable information in your description of the behavior. This will keep your feedback specific and objective.
Impact
Finally, use subjective statements to describe how the person’s behavior has impacted you, the team or the organization. Use “I” or “we” to make the point.
For example, you could say:
“The impacts on the team I have observed are damaged confidence in tackling complex technical problems and low self-esteem. This is resulting in reduced team working behaviours and is impacting self-management, creativity, and safety within the team to experiment”
Throughout the process, emphasize the importance of finding positive solutions, and avoid “passing the buck” or playing the blame game.
Next
Asking about intent encourages a two-way discussion. It can help you to uncover why your team member behaved as they did.
It also gives them a chance to assert themselves and to open up about any problems that they’ve been experiencing. Perhaps they have confidence issues, or they feel that their skills and knowledge aren’t adequate.
Uncovering intent can also help you to address your own false assumptions. Your team member may have had a legitimate reason to behave the way that they did, which you haven’t understood. This can help the initial feedback session develop into a useful coaching conversation
Next will result in designing Actions and Learning with the coachee.
What’s Next
BAgile offers two courses. The first course, ICAgile Certified Agile Team Facilitator develops advanced skills in managing dysfunctional behaviours, facilitation, and lean-agile facilitation. These skills can be used in any situation to have every team bring out the very best of themselves.
The second course ICAgile Certified Agile Coaching further develops skills in professional, relationship, and team coaching.
BAgile offers Co-Active Professional and Leadership Coaching and Relationship and Team Coaching. Please contact us for further details on professional services.
