Negative feedback from a positive place

If elite performance is your personal or collective goal, negative feedback is critical to improvement. People need to know what they're doing poorly so that they can make the necessary adjustments and raise their performance.

I love coaching team sport because it's the perfect testing ground for so many skills that are critical for working well with other people. One skill that I've been really focused on developing over the last few years as I've been growing as a sporting coach is the ability to ensure that my charges understand that my intent for them is wholly positive, and that everything I do, I do for their benefit.

It's a challenge, because I'm trying to do this while criticising them near-constantly!

One piece of data that constantly drives my behaviour is the results of this study, which show that the best performing teams have a positive-to-negative feedback ratio of nearly 6-to-1!

In order to deliver the negative feedback that I need to deliver in order to help my players improve (comments like "you need to keep your outside foot closer to your centre of mass when you change direction", "that shape of throw is too high-risk from that field position, you need to choose a better option"), I need to earn the right to do so, by delivering six times as much positive feedback.

When coaching, I want to hear myself delivering little bits of encouragement near-constantly. Even tiny little acknowledgements of basics executed well is enough. "I saw you watch that all the way in, nice job", "that was a great decision not to throw that, well done", "you really put in the effort on that point, and your teammates appreciate it".

It's not hard to offer that positive feedback, but it does take a conscious effort to do so.

And when you do, you earn the right to offer constructive, negative feedback, confident that it will be received by someone who knows it's coming from a positive place.