Developmental Feedback That Changes Performance
Course record permalink
- Format — Workshop, 2–4 hours
- Audience — Managers, team leads, and supervisors
- Practice area — Leadership training
- Led by — Dr. Kevin Westbrook — background and credentials
Feedback is the cheapest performance lever a manager has, and the one most often wasted. It arrives too late, it is softened until it says nothing, or it is delivered in a way that teaches the person to defend rather than to change. This workshop is about the other kind: specific, developmental, and followed by something the person actually does differently.
What the workshop covers permalink
- Why feedback fails. The tactics that quietly damage performance, and what a productive feedback conversation has instead.
- Evaluative versus developmental. The distinction that decides whether a conversation is a verdict or a route forward, and how to pick the right one for the situation.
- A conversation a manager can repeat. A sequence for taking a team member through a feedback conversation, so the result does not depend on how the manager feels that morning.
- Handling the response. Defensiveness, silence, and the agreement that changes nothing.
Who it suits permalink
Managers who give feedback rarely, and badly, because it has gone wrong before — and managers who give it often but cannot point to anything that changed. It pairs with Difficult Conversations with Difficult People when the conversation has already been avoided too long, and with Effective Listening Skills for Leaders when the problem is hearing the answer.
What a manager leaves with permalink
The sequence, the words, and their own case worked through — not a theory of feedback. A manager leaves able to run the conversation next week: what to name, how to frame it, what to ask for, and how to close it so the person knows exactly what happens next. That is the difference between feedback that is delivered and feedback that changes something.