Obtaining Feedback
It is important for coaches to be able to reflect fully on their performance and how it could be improved, in order to plan the appropriate CPD.
Essential to this process is obtaining feedback from those that they work with. There are several ways of obtaining feedback from clients, peers and others including client surveys, peer observations and skills benchmarking.
Feedback is important for many reasons including:
- It lets you know what you are doing well
- It lets you know what people value most about what you do
- It lets you know what you are not doing well and should therefore improve
- It can give you information about how you can improve what you are doing
- It can be used to promote what you do
Many coaches are embarrassed about asking for feedback, or worried that it will not be good! However, it is still important to obtain feedback and also to do so regularly. If the feedback that you receive is not good, then it is even more important that you obtain it, so that you can take measures to improve what you do. If you do not, this will result in much bigger problems for you and your organisation.
Feedback from Clients
The best way to obtain feedback from clients regularly is to build it into the standard way that you deliver your business coaching. In this way, it will become routine for you and not feel like an extra job that needs to be done, which may get missed if things get too busy.
Methods could include:
- Asking for feedback on your proposal to a client, by including spaces headed ‘Your Comments and Feedback’ after every section. This will give you with written feedback which you can assimilate, and an opportSessiony to address anything that a potential client is not happy with.
- Referring back to the objectives of a coaching session at the end of the session and asking for feedback on whether or not they have been met.
- Asking for feedback when sending out minutes of a coaching session, by asking a couple of questions, such as
‘What worked best for you in this session?’ or ‘Was there anything missing from this session from your perspective?’ - Asking for feedback at the end of a client project, for inclusion in the ‘Evaluation’ section of your final report
- Asking informally for feedback following specific interventions
Feedback from Others
Useful feedback can be obtained from many sources including line managers and colleagues if you work for an organisation with other employees, other coaches that you interact with or a coaching supervisor.
If you work for an organisation with several employees, it is likely that you will receive regular feedback through performance reviews or appraisals. If you work on your own, it can be more difficult to obtain structured performance feedback, which is where an independent coaching supervisor can be useful to enable you to review your own performance and act as a sounding board.
Acting on Feedback
It is key to decide what areas you will find it helpful to receive feedback on, so ask yourself what you intend to do with the feedback and this will help to guide you regarding what to ask. There is no benefit to you of asking lots of detailed questions and obtaining huge amounts of information which are too daunting to look at. This will also soon become extremely annoying to those you are asking for feedback from.
Feedback can be used in many ways including acting as a quick check that things are still on track, for identifying potential new products or services or for identifying trends by comparing data over time.
Remember: Ask for feedback routinely, review feedback routinely and act on feedback routinely.
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