One of the main responsibilities that a leader has is the development of human talent, achievement of results and creation of an organizational culture. For these 3 goals, some of the key leadership tools are recognition and constructive feedback.
And yet, being elements so relevant to leadership, companies often do not have recognition processes or programs or train their leaders to give adequate feedback aligned with the expected results.
I share some key points to consider in each topic to strengthen these processes and skills in your leadership.
The important thing about a recognition plan is that it has a good reach with the employees, so that they use it frequently and add value to the organization, causing positive interactions that generate a high-performance community to continuously innovate and deliver great results.
More and more companies have recognition programs and use platforms to execute them. When designing the program, consider elements such as:
- Create categories aligned to organizational values: a program can help you strengthen the values and attitudes on which you want to base the organizational culture. Both the objectives and vision of your organization can be supported by this program.
- Peer-to-peer manager recognition, as well as peer-to-peer recognition: a democratic program, where everyone has the opportunity to recognize the work of anyone within the organization, increases participation, adoption and visibility of the program.
- Performance managementWhen you design your recognition program, seek to integrate the entire organization to promote collaboration and a customer-centric culture. In parallel, some areas have objectives that can be measured with numerical metrics, for example, areas of sales, costs or waste in manufacturing, etc. In these areas, specific competitions or categories can be implemented that are based on the metrics that measure the performance of each individual and thus create a program or competition in the area that motivates them to meet and exceed their objectives.
- Recognition Tracking: having a follow-up of the recognitions of each associate, allows to reward those people who have the highest number of recognitions in a certain category. This would give greater visibility to both the program and the winners with the entire organization and motivate them to continue to recognize more people.
- Catalog and Prize Points– Both incentive and loyalty programs often use points that participants can redeem for prizes. This allows the employee to include his family in the awards and thus remain motivated to participate and improve his performance and results.
- Social recognition: the platforms give you the option of doing the recognition in private or public and even give points that can be exchanged for prizes or just make a mention of recognition and congratulations, this generates community and also helps to make the achievements and value publicly known that the employee contributes with his work.
It is important that in the organization there is a culture of constructive feedback, in order to continue improving the performance of the associates, maintaining the respect and dignity of the employee and without breaking the rules and values of the organization.
Feedback should be considered to be multidirectional (between peers and also between managers with peers) and that it occurs both spontaneously, as well as part of the performance evaluation process. When you go to give feedback to someone consider the following points:
- Review your motives and the purpose of giving feedback: having a clear intention is the basis for giving feedback in the right way. Your purpose for feedback should dictate the tone and manner of communication, as well as the goals and agreements you want to reach after the conversation.
- When it is a particular event, do it on time and immediately: Do it in private by being specific and having examples and facts to avoid giving general perspectives and supporting the retro with particular facts. It will be important that you share the impact that these events are having on the organization, clients or service they provide. It is important that you give feedback to people on issues that have a direct or indirect impact on your area. If this relationship does not exist, but you see the damage that the behavior of the person is causing in the organization, then talk to your superior or the superior of the person to share your concern and concern or find out if there is any channel established in the organization to through surveys, compliance or other mechanisms.
- Avoid assuming and keep an open mind: When you give feedback, be willing to open a space to have a dialogue with the person and thus give him the opportunity to share his vision of the situation or probably specific challenges that he is facing.
- Give feedback in your day to day: do it regularly, being present and attentive to the actions and behavior of your team
Remember that recognition and constructive feedback promote collaboration, loyalty, happy, motivated employees and high morale!