Effective Goal Setting and Feedback Conversations for Team Leaders

Please contact us on eyevents@mt.ey.com or ediana.guillaumier@mt.ey.com if you wish to personalise this exclusively for your teams. 

Sessions Outline

These two sessions will cover the required skills for effective performance management and performance appraisal discussions, including goal setting and providing feedback. They will also address strategies on how to instil a culture of seeking feedback on a regular basis, how to provide it, and ways to empower team members to provide feedback as and when required.

Session 1: Active Listening and asking the right questions

Listening is not something that just happens, listening is an active process in which a conscious decision is made to listen to and understand the messages of the sender. It is a skill that enables individuals to engage more effectively, it is about the ability of the receiver to properly understand the sender's intentions, feelings, ideas and process information. When done correctly it improves relations between individuals and consequently increases productivity.

Asking questions is a uniquely powerful tool, it spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and performance improvement, it builds rapport and trust among team members. Asking the right questions is the cornerstone of building empathy and rapport. To actively listen, people should be able to encourage the other person to enter a “talkative mode”. To do this, the right questions should be asked.

Key learning outcomes:

• Recognise importance of active listening
• Outline the steps of Active listening
• Identify the different levels of listening
• Recognise the benefits and outcomes when active listening is applied
• Model the techniques for active listening
• Practice active listening and develop the skill
• Recognise why it is important to ask questions effectively
• Describe the different types of questions and when they should be used
• Outline various questioning techniques to gain the information needed
• Identify what makes a good question, and why
• Model the skill of asking the right questions to build empathy and rapport

Session 2: Goal setting and effective feedback

During this session, we will use the approach adopted in the first session to apply these in performanance management and performance appraisal conversations. We will explore goal setting as a shift in mind-set, and a tool to be utilised to optimise our time and resources in our day-to-day working roles, as well as our personal lives. Adopting strategic goals as a habit, a way of working, can be key to encouraging us to look at the bigger picture, enabling teams to reach tangible business goals that align with the organisation’s vision.

We will also explore how to instill a culture of continuous feedback, and understand why constructive feedback is one of the most effective mechanisms for performance management. Feedback has many forms though, and not all are effective. We distinguish between positive, negative and constructive feedback, and focus on how to provide constructive feedback.

Key learning outcomes

• Understand the importance of  viewing goal setting as a habit, a way of working
• Identify characteristics of effective goal setting
• Apply and reflect on goal setting as a tool to address real day-to-day work scenarios
• Distinguish between short term and long-term goals and their impact on output
• Explore the impact of goal setting on an individual level and within our teams
• Recognising the importance of giving constructive feedback
• Identifying  the feedback key tips and practicing the feedback process
• Defining Constructive Feedback
• Apply methods for providing constructive feedback 

Registration fee

• Both sessions: €185

Date

• Session 1: 20 February 2025 | 9:00 to 12:00 
• Session 2: 25 February 2025 | 9:00 to 13:30

*Coffee break and light refreshments will be available during all sessions