Don’t Confuse Criticism with Feedback!

If you are a small business owner who is leading a team, then one of the most important skills that you need to develop is how to provide effective feedback to your team members. If you are not providing feedback in an appropriate way, then there is a risk that you are not getting the best out of your team.

The real challenge is making the distinction between criticism and feedback. Because when our team members are not performing as well as they should be, it's really important to be able to provide feedback and not criticize. In the video below, I show you the difference between feedback and criticism.

The difference between criticism and feedback

Criticism is when you dump your frustration or your anger out on a team member, it's very general, it can often turn into blame on an individual, and it focuses on the person as opposed to the problem.

Whereas feedback actually presents the need for your team member to change and is specific to a particular situation. The objective of feedback is to focus on what needs to change in the future to work towards a solution.

An example of both

Let's say you have a team member called John, and you're not happy with their sales numbers. An example of Criticism would be.

“Hey, John, I'm looking at your numbers here, and they're just no good, what is going on, you don't come prepared to the sales meetings. You really need to work on this, I just kind of get the feeling you don't care about this organization. You don't care about this team. And hey, look, if you're not happy here, then there's plenty of other people that are willing to take your job”.

Feedback might look like this.

“Hey, John, I'm looking at your sales figures. and your conversion. I can see that your conversion percentage is much lower than the other team members and what we expect as an average as an organization. I've observed a few of your sales meetings and what I'm finding is that your presentations are not really tailored towards the client. Therefore, I'm going to ask you to really go into these meetings prepared, make sure that you have done your research about the company. Make sure you understand what their pain points are and instead of just using one of our company presentations, I would like you to adapt the presentation to the client's needs.”

If you would like some more details on how to structure a feedback conversation, feel free to message me and I will happily send you a guide on how you can structure your feedback to make sure you're getting the best out of your team.