Performance management is one of those things that many of us don't enjoy doing. Some of us find it virtually impossible to have difficult conversations, while others actually find it tough to give praise for a job well done. Truth be known, both aspects of feedback are equally important - your team needs to know when they are doing well just as they need to know when things aren't up to scratch.

So here are a few tips to help you ensure that your feedback does the job:

Always be specific. Imagine you are the coach of your favourite sporting team and that at the halfway mark of an important game you are trailing the opposition. When it comes time to give your team that crucial piece of feedback, that coaching gem, you simply say: "You just have to play better in the second half." 

Will this piece of advice do any good? No, because it wasn't specific. You need to tell people exactly what areas require improvement and how you think that might be accomplished. 

Don't wait until the performance review to provide good or bad feedback.  Well known English physicist, Sir Isaac Newton said that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In physics, that reaction happens almost straight away whereas in business, it is quite common for the reaction to be delayed or not occur at all.

What should actually take place is that for every (notable) action, the consequent reaction is your feedback.  Just like in physics, make sure it happens straight away, or else you risk you and your employee forgetting about it.

Be constructive. This doesn't mean be soft - it means that you have to come from a positive place, with a genuine desire to help. The best way to provide constructive feedback is to ensure that you focus on the situation, issue or behavior that needs to be addressed and not on the person themselves.

Does your staff member know exactly what they have to do? From the very outset you need to be clear about what exactly it is that each of your team members needs to do. That said, particularly in the early stages, staff might need a little nudge in the right direction to ensure they are on the correct path. This rule also applies if you have a team member who has been with you for some time but has moved into a different role.

If they haven't performed, can you hand on heart say that you have done all that you can in an attempt to help them improve? Your role is that of the coach. This means it is your job to help your team to understand what needs to be done and to then enable them to make progress.  If you wholeheartedly believe you have done this and performance hasn't improved, act. Don't wait. 

Ask any CEO what they regret in their career and 99% of them would say that they didn't act fast enough in making decisions. This is true of all decisions, including people decisions. If you've done your bit and it hasn't worked its time to move them on. 

If you can, help the person come to their own decision- let them tell you. They (generally) know things aren't working out.

Avoid the feedback sandwich - its rubbish and it doesn't work. The feedback sandwich is the approach that involves starting with a positive, covering the negative and then finishing with a positive. To be quite frank, it is just plain dishonest to you, your staff and your organisation.

Your staff are thinking to themselves: "When's he going to hit me with the but?" You lose the trust and faith of your staff and any good feedback you'll want to give moving forward will be met with suspicion.

Prepare. You can't begin a performance review session with a staff member without concrete examples. You can't just say: "you never build any rapport with customers on the phone", you have to have (at least 2/3) clear examples of times when a particular situation has occurred.  This helps you to support your comments and allows the employee to understand the issue much more clearly.

Get your staff member to prepare, and send them away if they haven't - they'll get the message. Just as you have to prepare for performance appraisals, so do your team. Ask them in advance to think about questions like:

- What did you feel was your biggest accomplishment for the year?
- How do you feel about your overall performance?
- In what areas do you feel you didn't perform well?
- What can you do to make your performance better?
- What can I do to assist you in improving your performance?
- What areas would you like to focus on for development next year?
- What will you need to achieve this?

By thinking these things through before you sit down together your conversation will be much more constructive and you will both be able to walk away with a clear vision of what lies ahead.