Teaching the Art and Craft of Giving and Receiving Feedback
Abstract
Innovative Assignment Teaching the Art and Craft of Giving and Receiving Feedback SAGE Publications, Inc. 201010.1177/1080569910385565 © 2010 by the Association for Business Communication Association for Business Communication Patricia L.Harms The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, patricia_harms@unc.edu Deborah BrittRoebuck Kennesaw State University, droebuck@kennesaw.edu Authors’ Note: Portions of this article were presented by the authors at the Association for Business Communication Conference in Portsmouth, Virginia, October 2009. IN T~e WORKPLACe, the process of evaluating and discussing the performance of both employees and managers is referred to as feedback. The process generally involves a discussion of the indi- vidual’s strengths or weaknesses, with suggestions on how to improve upon weaknesses. Feedback aligns workplace behavior with the overall goals of a team or an organization. Although the ways in which work teams and organizations provide employee feedback vary greatly, most formalized systems include some sort of quantita- tive scale coupled with qualitative feedback. To help prepare stu- dents for providing and receiving qualitative feedback, we incorporate feedback assignments into our courses. In this article, we propose two feedback models and introduce four assignments that we have successfully implemented. As observers, we may recognize intuitively that managers and leaders should