Management

The Best Way to Develop Your Team Isn’t Feedback

If you want to help your team improve their performance, feedback isn’t always the best way.

Every leader wants to get the best performance from their team. In startups, the importance of learning on the job and continuous employee development can’t be overstated.

But how do you create an environment that helps people learn faster?

For many years, I followed conventional wisdom, which says that the best way to help a team improve is by giving them plenty of feedback. I spent copious amounts of time learning how to give ‘good feedback’. I described specific situations, pointed to concrete behaviours, and explained their impacts from my perspective, all in a caring and professional way.

Sometimes, my feedback led to behavioural improvements. But other times, it didn’t. The results were patchy at best.

What’s Up with Feedback?

The term feedback has become so widely used that it’s now virtually a synonym for communication. However, it’s worth being specific about what feedback means:

Feedback — (noun) information about reactions to a product, person’s performance of a task, etc. which is used as…