Mike Clark's Business Bites: Speed of feedback key to success

Make sure you regularly ask your staff if they have any roadblocks stopping or hindering them from being successful. Photo / Unsplash

How often do you give feedback to your team? Do you aim to catch people doing things right or wrong?

There are lots of ways of rewarding your team and one of the most popular is to provide food. It is well known that communing together and eating together is a great way to build relationships and to break down barriers with people. In fact, it is so well documented it's a wonder we don't do it more often.

The downside to providing a weekly breakfast, of course, is that it begins to become expected and viewed as an entitlement rather than a benefit that is gifted. One way around this is to link the weekly breakfast to the attainment of weekly goals.

However, I have found a far more powerful way of engaging people is to give them the breakfast Ken Blanchard calls the food of champions. This food of champions is feedback.

The speed of feedback often reflects the speed of success. Organisations that have good feedback loops create a culture that is responsive, engaging, innovative and are often viewed in an admirable light. This is because they achieve extraordinary results, benefiting from the wonders of synergy - where a team is able to produce far more by working together as a cohesive unit striving towards a common goal.

When we watch sport we understand this concept. In tennis, for example, we know the boundary lines, the rules, what winning looks like, and when a ball is hit the opposing player is able to respond accordingly to the feedback cue.

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" is the quote that gave me the inspiration for this article. Does your culture have an effective way of consistently giving feedback? Looking at the companies I have seen excel and the companies I have seen grow in leaps and bounds, I realised one of the tools and strategies they have taken on board is the weekly one-on-one feedback.

The idea of doing weekly feedback is that it is short, direct information a team member can use to make sure they are on the right track; that they are succeeding and winning in their role and helping the company to win as well.

These short (10-15 minutes) meetings can be managed with four questions: "How are you doing?" (connect with the person as a person!); "Do you feel you are winning in your role?" (KPIs can be used here to give a quantitative data perspective); "Do you have any roadblocks stopping or hindering you from being successful?" (it is the manager's job to remove these) and "What is your focus for the coming week?"

If you have never tried this before, it could be a simple way to improve your feedback loops and dramatically increase the effectiveness of your communication.

Here's to your success.

+ Mike Clark is director and lead trainer and facilitator at Think Right business training company.