Feed-forward !

Its been a while I ve posted something here. Been a week or so. Not that I do not come across incidents that is worth writing about.

Life has never been that dull :) Just that other stuff took priority over posting the blog.

The yearly appraisal season is going on. This is a corporate process when one as a manager, provides feedback and rate his / her employees.

For some people its very stressful season. For some, business as usual.

My personal approach towards giving feedback and rating peoples performance is very basic and down to earth simple. I like to provide the feedback on a continuous basis. Feedbacks, that I derive from the delta between my experiences and the person's experiences. And the feedbacks I give, are in very non-threatening environment and media.

In a hallway. Over cup of coffee. PJs, Story telling. Over instant messaging.

There has seldom been an occasion where I set up One to One meeting with my employee to do feedbacking ! (This has its pros and cons both. )

My main goal always has been, that no one should hear something new and surprising when it comes to this session of feedback and rating. Everyone should know where they stand by this time. Everyone should be aware of the areas they can improve in.

Often I come across a very few employees who do everything right for their experience level. Always surprise me by thinking ahead of me. Getting involved before being asked. Doing things the way I would have done. I find myself in a situation of not being able to provide any feedback that can result in a positive change in those employees.

I had this appraisal session with one of those employees recently. I found myself doing stuff which is more future looking that backward looking. The correct word to explain that would be "feed-forwarding". Its like if you do these things, org will see you there. That "there" is somewhere beyond where the employee is right now.

This is a technique I learnt recently and I am happy with how it works so far.

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When you can not feed-back, feed-forward.