The Feedback Imperative: How to Give Everyday Feedback to Speed Up Your Team's Success

by Anna Carroll

The Feedback Imperative: How to Give Everyday Feedback to Speed Up Your Team’s Success reveals the hidden reasons why giving feedback to employees can be so difficult and yet so urgently needed in today’s workplace, and provides the definitive steps for overcoming feedback avoidance and taking great leaps forward with employee engagement, retention, and performance.
Anna Carroll applies her extensive research and expertise in business consulting and psychology to illustrate how brain science, generational trends, our information economy, limiting beliefs, and organizational culture collide in the new workplace, creating a huge gap between the supply and demand of helpful professional feedback. In her “Seven Steps to Everyday Feedback” and sixteen tools for self-assessment and planning, Carroll provides detailed instructions for leaders to execute a feedback turnaround that will quench their team members’ thirst for helpful feedback and build a culture in which employee-to-leader and peer-to-peer feedback are welcome as well.

Genres: Business, Leadership, Nonfiction

236 pages, Paperback

First published July 6, 2014

About the author

Anna Carroll, MSSW is an author, feedback coach, and speaker. She helps leaders and professionals speed up their cycles of feedback, improvement, and results on shared goals. She accomplishes this via training people on how to give and receive great feedback as well as facilitation and coaching.

She currently works with Austin Regional Clinic, Horseshoe Bay Resort, NES Global Talent, PayPal, and Zimmer-Biomet and other individual coaching clients.

Carroll wrote The Feedback Imperative: How to Give Everyday Feedback to Speed Up Your Team’s Success (River Grove Press, 2013) and Everyday Feedback - The Workbook: How to Use the Everyday Feedback Method with Your Team (2015). She is working on a book describing organizations who are successful using fast, frequent feedback, and the keys to their success.

Reviews

[Dirty Dayna · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 Talking Stars

I give feedback daily, quarterly and annually to many people both above and below me. I find the first 7 chapters are more for people who have never given a feedback or understand what one is.


Some really key notes in here are:

Sudden feedback after a drought is scary
Become a great coach
give feedback in a crystal clear fashion

Overall I have read better feedback books but for the starter in a leadership position I think you should read this.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Felt pretty basic, read it in just a few hours. Could be good for someone just starting in their career or looking for general theory content!

[Vivek Antonio]

For newbies tothe topic

For a book that came highly recommended, i was a little confused about the review i wanted to give.

The good thing is that the book focuses on one topic and doesn't digress, and provides useful frameworks to think about the why/how to give feedback.
On the other hand, i have been in the L&D domain for over 15 years (and a voracious reader) and so had to struggle to find something of value here.

So I'd recommend this for those new to the (people) supervisory roles or someone new to this topic.
Don't buy this is you've read the likes of Crucial Conversations or other books in this area.

[AJ Jimenez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Approachable and insightful

This book is extremely helpful for those looking for tips on improving their everyday feedback practices, both giving and receiving. It's not bogged down by overly scientific or research jargon, but rather, packed with easy to follow approaches and tips for self improvement.

[Daniel Bastardo · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intro to feedback. This book is quite basic and repetitive. Considering that younger generations strongly prefer receiving and giving feedback often—as reported by Gallup surveys and the author—older generations with little historical exposure to feedback might gain the most from this book.

[Cariadne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought Anna Carroll did a great job in writing and organizing the book. I find the COIN framework to be very useful and look forward to sharing it with my organization. I always think understanding how to phrase and deliver to different personality types helpful and saw value in reading about the Analyzer, Changer, Empathizer, Motivator, difficult-types. However, as we all know from real-life experience, no individual reacts as if they are in 1 category, so I'm sure we'll all be doing a dance around various methods to convey solid feedback.

Unfortunately it takes a while to get to all this good information; really it’s the last ½. Fortunately, the writing and book layout makes it easy to breeze through to… oh, let’s just say Chapter 9. There also appears to be helpful exercises/assessments/templates at the end of the chapters which I did not try myself but can see the additional value.

[Thomas Quiroga · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the exercises at the end of each chapters, interesting method to set an everyday feedback culture in your company. Covering all aspects of it (theory, practice, plan to move forward, solving worries etc)

[Phillip Klien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really extensive thoughts about corporate feedback pushing towards everyday feedback. The author definitely knows what she's talking about.

If you want to dive deep into feedback, this is a must-read.