How and why do supervisors provide feedback? How does feedback influence retention? These questions are posed in this week’s Roundup article. While it focuses on the corporate world, the discussion also applies to the academic environment. Feedback is intended to help faculty, staff, and students improve performance, but the article notes that, “Telling people they are missing the mark is not the same as helping them hit the mark.” Just conveying negative feedback reduces engagement, so supervisors of faculty, staff, and students can build a culture of high performance by shifting from critic to ally.
The article recommends four steps. The first is to communicate by listening and empathizing with the challenge, expressing confidence in the person’s ability to prevail, and then asking to partner with them on brainstorming strategies. Steps 2 through 4 frame outcomes through actions. Partnering as an ally centers the faculty, staff, or student employee in the plan while supervisor management aligns resources and collaboratively develops strategies to help the employee grow. Using these strategies increases communication, morale, and helps position all individuals to succeed at their highest level of performance.
Today’s feature was shared with us by the ADVANCE PIs. If you have an article you think we should feature, please email it to advance-mtu@mtu.edu and we will consider adding it to the ADVANCE Weekly Roundup.
The ADVANCE Weekly Roundup is brought to you by ADVANCE at Michigan Tech, which is an NSF-funded initiative dedicated to improving faculty career success, retention, diversity, equity, and inclusion. These articles are available on the ADVANCE Newsblog (https://blogs.mtu.edu/advance/). To learn more about this week’s topic, our mission, programming efforts, and to check out our growing collection of resources, contact us at (advance-mtu@mtu.edu) or visit our website: www.mtu.edu/advance.