So, my second day volunteering at Northey Street City Farm (www.nscf.org.au) and I am learning new stuff all the time and most of it isn’t about plants! Yes, I am expanding my knowledge of the green world . . . for example, I now know what a Wampi is. It’s a Chinese fruit distantly related to citrus.

No, what I am learning about is people and how they interact with each other. For example, I have moved from planting seeds to repotting seedlings (so I must be doing something right!). However, it appears my repotting skills need some work. I was working away when my supervisor came along and gave me some instant feedback on my work. Nothing was said at first, he simply started redoing what I had done and then started to comment on why it was wrong. It was done in a nice way but it was interesting how it made me feel. Given that my training on how to do it was fairly brief, I thought I was doing OK. However, he had not given me instructions on what to do if I encountered a particular scenario with a plant and I, using my initiative, just made my own decision on what to do and got it wrong. No plant was harmed as a result but maybe my pride was just a little. It has been a good lesson for me and I will watch out next time to think ahead about possible issues to bring up when getting my work instructions and to check before just going ahead with my own ideas. After all, one of the reasons I am volunteering is to learn more about gardening. I gave some feedback to my supervisor that I’m not experienced with seedlings so he is aware for next time to give me more information on what to do and what to watch out for.

Giving feedback in the workplace can also present challenges. You don’t want to dampen people’s enthusiasm by giving them overly detailed instructions or watch them too closely (ie micro managing) but if you keep your directions too high level you can leave yourself open to needing to give more constructive feedback when they get things wrong. Your feedback process also needs to be two way so that you can understand the level of information that is appropriate for that individual, when using their initiative is OK and when it isn’t.

One of my preferred methods of starting a feedback session has always been “how do you think you went?” It allows the receiver to take the conversation in a number of directions and gives you an insight into their level of self awareness. This way there are three possible outcomes:

1. If they think their performance is below standard and you agree then it is easy to discuss the issues.
2. If they think their performance was brilliant and it wasn’t then you are forewarned this could be a difficult conversation.
3. If you both agree their performance was good you can work on ways of expanding that area of strength.

You want the end result of a feedback session to be that the person is happy to continue working with you and looking forward to doing more in the future. I know I’m looking forward to going back to the city farm and will be using my recent experience to improve the way I deal with feedback not only there but also in other areas of my life.

Tags: Employee Communication, employee engagement, Employee morale, engagement, Engaging conversations, Karen Schmidt, Leadership and management, Leadership skills, Productivity, www.nscf.org.au