Giving Feedback

Feedback is a kind of team communication. Effective and comprehensive feedback helps team members keep in sync the view and understanding for individual working status and achievements. Feedback includes positive and negative ones. Positive feedback is used to give recognition and appreciation to someone’s contribution. Negative is employed when someone identifies some improvement for others.

 

As team leader, giving feedback is one of main working methods to keep the team members’ performance and working progress on track. So giving feedback effectively and instantly is so important. Especially, when you give others negative feedback, utilizing some well established skills can largely improve feedback effectiveness and avoid offense.

 

STAR principle is a good feedback method which has been widely used in my daily team management. STAR stands for Situation/Task, Action, and Result. This is a typical talking procedure when you give others positive feedback. It says when you give feedback, you clearly describe what situation or task someone has recently worked in, then what action someone has taken, finally what working result has been produced.

 

For giving negative feedback, append one more AR to STAR to form STARAR method. STARAR stands for Situation/Task, Action, Result, Alternative and Result. That means besides clearly describe what the guy did in what situation and made what result, you also should give improvement suggestion – Alternative and what better result can be got if alternative is adopted.

Giving feedback, especially, giving negative feedback is hard. If we can not carefully organize the whole feedback giving procedure, it’s easy for us reach opposition and make the situation worse.

STAR/STARAR principle gives us clear talking structure. If it can be correctly used in our daily job, we can avoid lots of misunderstanding and have the team easier reach a same view for the things under question.