Waterstones The Feedback Book
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Price: £9.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Maintaining performance today is no longer simply about having an annual appraisal and telling employees you must try harder. Research demonstrates that regular discussions about performance and providing feedback to the people you manage is a more effective way to motivate them and keep them on track. Distilled into this single, handy-sized volume are 50 tips, advice and techniques to help any manager become quickly skilled at regularly discussing performance, setting goals and objectives and providing the necessary feedback to ensure individuals and teams thrive in the company. Structured into five key parts, each of the 50 concise chapters also contains a practical exercise to help the reader understand and implement the concepts and ideas of this book. Waterstones The Feedback Book - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781910649572
Delivery cost: 0.00
ISBN: 9781910649572
Author: P. Jedrusiak
Rating: 5
Review: Have you ever shied away from giving your colleague a constructive feedback on a specific action or behaviour you have observed? Have you ever got embarrassed about offering praise to acknowledge their efforts? Well, I suspect that just like me, you are regularly asking yourself: should I or should I not? No matter how awkward those moments may be, or how comfortable you feel about offering feedback, there is a way of making it easier. It takes a form of THE FEEDBACK BOOK – 50 WAYS TO MOTIVATE AND IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR PEOPLE. This is the second book by Dawn Sillett, a management trainer, coach, author, and I am proud to say, also my friend. In her latest book, Dawn is sharing her tested and proven framework for giving feedback, she is giving us the EDGE: EXPLAIN – using a clear example of the exact behaviour or action that has prompted your feedback. The sooner the better. Stick to the facts and be brief. DESCRIBE – the effect of the behaviour. What impact has it had on colleagues / results / stakeholders? Keep it factual, short and simple. GIVE – the recipient the mic. Invite them to speak and give them a fair hearing. What action will they take? What will they do more / less of? END Positively – with your encouragement and your recipient’s commitment. Let them have the last word whenever possible. Dawn’s latest book does not start and end only on the EDGE. Her feedback odyssey touches on the ‘why bother with feedback’, proportion of ‘positive strokes’, consistency of ‘course correction’, offering feedback ‘upwards and outwards’ as well as being on the ‘receiving end’. It is a truly rounded exploration of feedback. The book is jam-packed with examples, exercises, tips and a handy cheat sheet. It is a 150-pages jargon-free guide on everything you will ever need to know whenever offering and receiving feedback is on your agenda. THE FEEDBACK BOOK should be found under every corporate Christmas tree this year. I know I will be sharing it with my clients this year.
Author: Hamish Pringle
Rating: 4
Review: Positive feedback on The Feedback Book I like the main premise of ‘The Feedback Book’. It asserts that the annual employee appraisal system is less effective than more regular feedback sessions. The book is a succinct and simple guide to help managers adopt this practice with their direct reports, and for themselves in relation to their bosses. Indeed the lessons can also be applied in personal life to improve relationships with family and friends. It’s intended to be a quick and easy read, and it is – it took a couple of hours to go through its five parts and fifty points. Graphics and work sheets break up the text, plus a ‘Verbs cheat sheet’ to use in feedback that’s clear, and non-judgemental. There are lots of useful hints and tips, and some acute ways of describing things. For example “The horns and halo effect”, “Don’t feed clever people stupid sandwiches”, and “Don’t ‘reload’ while they are speaking”. ‘The Feedback Book’ is a welcome guide for people early in their careers, and a useful refresher for more experienced managers. It can be used as the basis for training sessions too. If more companies adopted Dawn Sillett’s approach, then inter-employee relationships would develop more quickly and performance would improve. For those organisations which require structure in their approach to HR, then scheduling regular feedback sessions between formal appraisals could be a solution, especially if combined with ‘check-ins’ on progress on employees’ annual objectives. The only quibble I have is with the naming of the ‘EDGE’ framework, which is used throughout. The acronym stands for ‘Explain’, ‘Describe’, Give’, and ‘End positively’, and summarises the author’s four-stage technique for giving feedback. For some reason, despite referring to it many times, I find it hard to remember. Maybe that’s because the words making up the acronym aren’t aligned tightly enough to what’s actually proposed within each stage? Maybe the tail wagged the dog and ‘Edge’ was chosen for its meaning, but at the expense of clarity? The whole idea of the book is to enable the reader to be ready at any moment to seize the opportunity to offer feedback. Compact though it is, they’re unlikely to carry the book around, so it would be an added benefit if the acronym was more memorable, and explicit. For me a better word than ‘Explain’ for the first stage would capture the idea of not dodging the issue when problematic behaviour occurs, and taking the opportunity to offer feedback immediately. ‘Describe’ is fine for the second stage in the process, but I would have preferred a word which implied a short, specific instance about which feedback is to be given, and an explanation of the impact it had on colleagues. The third stage, ‘Give’, is where the recipient of feedback is encouraged to respond by talking about the event the manager has cited, and engage with the issues arising. In fact this stage’s title is a sentence: ‘Give the recipient the mic.’ The four words following ‘Give’ are necessary to convey idea that it’s the recipient’s turn to speak, and the manager’s to listen, empathise, and then encourage dialogue. However this short sentence doesn’t capture the crucial two-way aspect of the process, and it’s harder to recall. The final stage is referred to by two words: ‘End positively’, and this also hinders memorability. In an ideal world this concluding term would have been a single one which captures the recipient’s commitment to modify their behaviour in future, and the giver’s encouragement. How about 4Es? Engage. Exemplify. Explore. Encourage. The Feedback Book: 50 Ways to Motivate and Improve the Performance of Your People (Concise Advice)
