Thank you for joining me again! In this installment we're going to start where a business has to start: hiring people. Then we plunge headlong into the minefield called "Feeback". When I began building faculty evaluations, I got a quick lesson in how to lose friends and alientate colleagues. While my instrument was good, the process for using it was misapplied by an administration that had another agenda.  Instead of giving feeback they chose to justify employment decisions.

Why is feedback so darned hard? The short answer is that we don't have any clear idea about what we should and shouldn't be doing in a feedback situation. So we screw it up behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively. Now I can't describe all the pitfalls of feeback in one email, but I can tell you the foundation on which effective feedback must rest.

Effective feedback must be:
1. Timely
2. Specific
3. Unambiguous
4. Personally meaningful to the recipient (salient)
5. Grounded by observable and objective criteria

It isn't enough to use good objective systems if the person evaluated just doesn't care about all the factors and behaviors you've carefully reviewed. Feedback has to be salient if it is going to change what a person does on the job and in the rest of his or her life.

Keep a Good Thought,