Ciao a tutti e ben ritrovati.
Setting goals is the start of the journey, but a constant feedback is your guidance to lead individuals and teams to success and achievement.
How do you facilitate the analysis and, most of all, the understanding of the objectives and the path necessary to achieve them?
First of all, we need to focus more than on the “understanding” part of your feedback, on the right positioning and timing: the person with whom you are conducting the session must have the perception of a stimulus, not of an interrogation which, on the contrary, would result in the opposite effect, leading to closed positions.
It is therefore important to calibrate the discussion and identify the correct moment of the conversation in which to ask them, leaving enough space for mutual clarification.
So how do we stimulate the feedback and understanding of it?
- Priorities first. Check what is the most important goal for you as a manager and for them as employees so to identify the most relevant to focus. Immediately after, try to better understand the rationales for this relevancy. With this you will gain insights not only on the main focus of the person in front of us but also the motivation and the ability to assign priorities and whether they are in line with the ones we set.
- Clarify results. Don’t be shy, there’s nothing more frustrating than non having a clear understanding of what we are expected to achieve: so let’s clarify it! What is the result you expect from achieving this goal? This question allows you to analyse the level of internalisation of the goal and its implications for the person and to keep out misunderstandings from the discussion.
- Is succeeding obtained through results? Strange it may sound, success does’t require only to achieve results of intermediate milestones, but sometimes depends on factors external to the person. Try to understand how do you imagine the success linked to achieving the goal will be linked to the intermediate results and how the person will be able to influence it.
- Visualise the steps. If you want to give a meaningful feedback you need to focus on how a person is following and achieving over a plan. There’s no other objective way to measure the progression, What do you need to reach the goal? What slipped off and what is still current? Where we are?
- Offer help that is valuable for the person. What kind of support do you need? From who? Allows you to position the expectation of support in the path but, most of all, enables the person to ask for the support it is needed and you to complete the request with the results from your experience.
- Think big. If you look at your goal from above, what do you notice? Understand what is the framing of the goal in a broader perspective to provide a feedback not only on the activity but to the contribution of that one to a wider journey.
