Giving Good Feedback

“Feedback is essential to our growth and development,” contends career coach Cheng in her lackluster debut on how managers can better communicate with their subordinates. She offers a series of frameworks and models to make professional feedback more productive, but the utility of each varies. Her “giving good feedback framework,” presented as a confusing series of concentric circles, overcomplicates the straightforward observation that feedback should focus on “the behaviours people can see and change” rather than “challenging their values, beliefs, and attitudes... or commenting on people’s personality.” However, her “six golden rules for giving good feedback” are more helpful, urging managers to focus their comments on what employees can do better in the future (rather than “looking back to apportion blame”) and outline how a problematic behavior is affecting the team and its work. Unfortunately, Cheng’s reliance on corporate buzzwords and insider managerial concepts can feel deadening (“My giving good feedback framework... links the idea of a communication loop with David Kolb’s experiential learning circle”), and the client stories she uses to illustrate her advice are sometimes of dubious relevance (Cheng stretches the meaning of “feedback” by suggesting it includes an employer’s request that a new hire go by a different name because another employee also had that name). With its few useful tips buried beneath abstruse discussions of simple concepts, this disappoints. (Oct.)