Welcome back to Giving Helpful Feedback. We're already on the fourth feedback skill. This one is about keeping your feedback well-timed. Let's give a little definition to this concept. In previous lessons, we looked at making feedback specific and behavioral. We also emphasized impersonal feedback and the importance of focusing on people's goals. In this video, we look at timing. You know the old saying timing is everything. Well, it's especially true when delivering feedback. When we talk about timing, we're talking specifically about when during the work day the feedback occurs. First, an event has to occur which triggers a need for negative or positive feedback. The time between the event and when the feedback is delivered is the timeframe we're talking about. Let's check your natural intuitions about this. In general, what is the best time to give feedback? Scientific research has a definite answer to this question. Stay tuned and we'll get to the answer. Let's get to some examples now. First an easy one. Here you are, just standing in line. You're trying to get on a plane with a big carry-on bag. It's important to get on the plane so you can put your bag in an empty overhead bin. Someone with a giant bag cuts in front of you in the line. Now the question is, when do you give feedback? That's right. You give it now, immediately. It's pointless to give feedback later because you won't get your bag on the plane. Here's another example. You're in a weekly meeting with six people who work for you. One of your subordinates is talking too much. The others aren't giving as much input as you want. It took you a little while to figure out this pattern was going on in your meetings, maybe about three months, and all you know is that it has to stop. So, think about it. What's a good time to say something to this talkative employee? While this situation is less urgent than, say, our bag example, the answer is similar in many respects. You need to give the feedback soon after the event occurs. Let's think about the importance of this a little and flesh out our example. If you think about these examples, you may have some objections. For example the one about the employees in the meeting. You might say you can't give this kind of feedback in front of other employees, it would be humiliating. Most of the time, you're right. However, the key principle here is that both timing and speed are very important. Let's explain why by using an example that may at first seem a little bit unrelated. What did you eat the last time you had lunch? Where were you? Did anything happen during the lunch? Maybe something out of the ordinary. I bet you can remember quite a bit about this last lunch of yours. But if we move on just a little bit and I ask you, what did you have for lunch a week ago? Where were you? What did you have to drink? Did anything happen during the meal? If you're like many people, I think you're going to have trouble remembering some of this detail. And so it becomes a lot more difficult to remember something that happened a week ago in comparison with what happened yesterday. The reason this example is important is that if you plan on waiting a week to give feedback, the person who needs the feedback is probably going to forget the details of the incident. You, on the other hand, the supervisor, will rehearse the incident in your head for a week as you think about how you're going to address the problem. And as a result you're going to remember a lot of detail. The feedback conversation then becomes lopsided, with an employee struggling to remember what happened, but you remembering it in vivid detail. And, by the way, the employee may also think you're a little bit strange remembering the incident in such vivid detail. What you need is to give feedback when it's fresh in both people's minds. Why? Well, if you remember our first skill, you're going to give people specific and behavioral feedback. It's critical that the employee remembers the behaviors that you're talking about. This is even more important because it's human nature to distort information that's not favorable to us. Psychologists tell us while people are great at remembering the good things they've done, their memories for the bad things they've done are not as good. The moral of the story is don't let time take its toll. Give feedback sooner rather than later. Here's some opportunities for you to practice this skill. And as an introduction, all of the skills in this course, of all of them, this one may have the most exceptions. So use this skill with care. There are times when you won't want to give feedback right away. You can probably think of a few of them, so I'm going to give you a moment to do that. When would you want to not give feedback right away? Probably you want to avoid giving feedback to somebody in front of other people. It's humiliating. Probably you want to avoid giving feedback when you personally are angry. You want to avoid feedback definitely if you're unprepared and might say the wrong thing and make things worse. Bottom line, though, don't let fear of giving feedback keep you from sticking to this important principle and do your best to give feedback right away. Now for practice, let's go back to the incident we described at the beginning of this video. We've got an employee, they talked too much in a meeting. Think a bit about how and when you'll arrange the feedback meeting with the employee. Let's make the situation just a little bit more difficult, and imagine the employee has to leave to go to the dentist directly after your meeting, and won't be in until the next day. So you've got a problem. What are you going to do? The solution is to catch the employee the next day first thing in the morning. Before they leave, you need to set up the meeting for the morning. If you don't have any privacy and other employees could overhear you, then send an email to this employee. Be truthful, but not too specific. You could say something like, I'd like to meet with you to go over our meeting and see if we can make them more effective. Let's meet at 8:00 AM in my office. In summary, timing is everything. Try to give feedback as soon as possible. This increases your chances of getting the right message across, because the person getting the feedback will remember the examples you're bringing up. Our next skill is to ensure understanding, and we'll get right to that. [MUSIC] And now, as a bonus, a little optional psychology. Going back to our lunch example in this video, why don't we remember lunches going back several weeks? After all, we spent quite a bit of time at that lunch. Think about it, we eat it, we thought about ordering it, we spent a lot of time, we do a lot of things with that lunch, and yet we don't remember it. Seems that all that exposure and time spent at that lunch doesn't really mean anything at all. So let's try a little experiment, unfortunately this will only work for our US viewers, but everyone will get the point. I'm going to flash a picture on the screen, and then I want you to draw what you saw. Okay, so in order to do this exercise, you need to pull out a piece of paper and a pencil. And if you're not from the US, you can try it as well. I'm going to give you one minute to draw what you see. I'm going to give you a second to get that pencil and paper. Great, I hope you're getting it. Here we go. Here goes the picture. Okay, now it's time to draw. I'll give you a minute to draw. Great work. Actually, from experience I know a little bit about the drawings that are produced in sessions like these. I'm guessing that there's some heads being drawn, they may have hair on them. In the corners of the dollar bill, you've probably got the rectangular shape, there may be a 1 in a corner, or maybe a 2 in a corner. Maybe there's a little bit of writing on your drawings. It's hard to say. But you get the point. The drawings that you put together are fairly crude and capture just a few main features. So what is my point with this exercise? My point is that even though our US citizens are exposed to dollar bills their whole life, and even though they go to work 40 hours a week, week after week, their whole lives just to get more of these things, they still don't remember it. It's very important, and yet we can't draw them. It turns out that it's a lot of work to store information permanently in long term memory. But one thing is clear. Mere exposure is not going to do the trick. You can see the dollar bill a million times, but if you don't work at remembering it, you won't remember it. Just like the lunch. Again, we get exposed to lunches, but we aren't motivated to do the work to keep them in mind and we won't remember them. You may be curious about what I mean by doing the work to keep something in mind. And unfortunately, that really is a psychology course and it's a big subject, it takes us too far off track. But it means focusing in and trying hard to remember something, whether that's by associating it with something else or whether that's by thinking about it every day on purpose or writing it down. Let's get back to our original example. If an employee makes a mistake, but it isn't anything too remarkable to them, they too will begin to forget it ever happened at all. And just like the lunches, that memory will be brushed out of their minds. [MUSIC]
