Whether you are a recently promoted supervisor or a seasoned executive this course explains why giving performance-related feedback is SO hard to do effectively even if you’ve taken training before. The PAF Technique (Performance Analysis and Feedback) enables you to overcome the root cause of the problem by showing you a completely new and different approach to analyzing your employees’ performance. It then provides a simple and easy to follow way to validate that information and put it into the exact words you need to hold a successful coaching conversation that achieves desired outcomes.

The course focuses on how to use PAF feedback to manage all employee performance and development conversations either informally or formally. However, it places a special emphasis on providing knowledge and building skills to deal effectively with “tough” or difficult issues in a way that increases their motivation, engagement, and productivity.

The PAF Technique: A Specific and Detailed Formula for WHAT to do and HOW to do it

• Because we only specialize in this subject matter we provide the kind of deep dive into it that other training doesn’t. PAF is a different approach that goes beyond the traditional general advice and tips about how to give feedback you can find anywhere and that can leave you wondering how to make such information work for your own more complex situations. Instead, it gets down to the specific nitty gritty details - because the devil is always in the details!

• PAF makes it easy for you to analyze even the most daunting negative performance or behaviour situation to understand and validate exactly what to focus on (the what to say). And then find the exact words to confidently give feedback that achieves desired outcomes regardless of what the employee may say or do (the how to say it).

• The course teaches PAF only through examples because we believe it is the best way to learn new material. It also provides comprehensive practice exercises designed to turn knowledge in to skills. Included are 25 examples (which double as additional practice exercises) showing how PAF has been applied in many different real-life situations. You will also have BLANK worksheets you can download to help you create PAF Feedback for your OWN employees

Overcoming the Root Cause of the Problem with Giving Tough Feedback Helps You Become a More Effective Manager and Coach

The hardest part of managing performance through coaching is in having to talk about and deal with tough issues, and tough issues usually involve resolving the most sensitive or uncomfortable performance or behaviour problems.

In other words, the stuff you know is important to deal with but that you don't know how to bring up and discuss effectively because it contains subjective negative opinions, is complicated to explain or validate, or is emotionally charged with the potential to cause negative reactions. For example, "you're too defensive" or "you aren't a team player".

(See the Free Course Introduction Video for a complete example of the kind of tough coaching situations covered in the course and why PAF overcomes the root cause of the problem with talking about them.)

Since PAF overcomes the root cause of this problem you will be able to communicate such tough feedback in a way that ensures the employee understands what you are saying, accepts it as valid, knows exactly how to make the necessary changes and is motivated to make them - all while keeping the manager/employee relationship intact.

This means you’ll gain a whole new level of expertise to fulfil your critical supervisory responsibility to give feedback and coach. You won't feel that you have to avoid dealing with problematic issues or worry about tackling them head on.

Instead you’ll replace any anxiety with the confidence that comes from knowing you can manage any difficult employee performance situation to create a win-win-win outcome. The organization gets better performance, you become a better manager, and employees overcome any barriers to success.

Content and Overview

You’ll learn how to use the straightforward 2-Step PAF Technique to:

Give PAF Corrective Feedback to Your Own Employees

This module is the most comprehensive and takes about an hour. It contains the two critical videos that will teach you the PAF Technique itself. The third video shows you how to manage the feedback conversation. Specifically, you will learn:

• PAF Step 1: How to analyze what you "know in your head" about a problem issue but in a very specific way - called the PAF Performance Story. This analysis ensures that you fully understand the situation and can justify and validate the opinions and conclusions you've drawn about it.

• PAF Step 2: Translate that information into the exact words you need to convey the message in an honest and "kind" way in less than a minute (called the 30-Second Sound Byte) without the fear or worry that what you will say will cause a negative reaction.

• Manage the Discussion: Confidently deliver and discuss the feedback in a way that will be successful in achieving desired outcomes regardless of what the employee says or does and that maintains or improves your relationship.

After you’ve learned the technique you can apply that knowledge in two comprehensive practice exercises and see it applied to an additional 16 corrective feedback examples (that double as practice exercises) taken from real-life situations.

The Module also contains a downloadable Blank PDF template Worksheet that provides a template of the steps to follow when applying PAF to your own situation.

Give PAF Corrective Feedback for Non-Reports

This module shows you how to tweak the technique to talk to people who don't report to you, your boss or peers for example, in a way that ensures they will want to listen to what you have to say and increase the chance you will achieve your desired objective - without it backfiring! It has its own examples/exercises and Worksheet.

Give PAF Reinforcing Feedback to Anyone

While the emphasis of the course is on how to give feedback about tough issues it is only because this is what managers find the most stressful and difficult to talk about, and they therefore want to learn how to do it more effectively. What it doesn't mean is that it is also more important to do. From a managing perspective it is just as important, perhaps more so, to recognize and acknowledge good performance. So, this module shows you how to use PAF to give superior reinforcing feedback to encourage even more desired performance, motivation, and productivity. It also has its own examples/exercises and Worksheet.

Understand How and Why PAF is Different from Typical Feedback Approaches

We've given this course in a classroom setting to a lot of managers since 2004*. And in all that time the vast majority of them have relied on a variation of the same typical approach to giving corrective coaching feedback that, albeit inadvertently, not only causes them to fail to effectively communicate the message, but often ends up making the situation even worse.

And this has been the case regardless of their degree of managerial experience or level in the organization. It also holds for whether or not they have taken training in how to give feedback in the past. The general advice and tips managers learned from observation or through this training are simply not up the task of dealing effectively with the kind of real life tough situations they are struggling with the most.

This optional module illustrates what this typical default approach looks like. It also explains why it works in theory (and therefore perhaps why it is so ubiquitous) but falls short in practice for dealing with the "tough stuff". The module also provides the background research and real-life observations that informs our understanding of it.

* Online version made publicly available in January 2022.

At the end of this course you will:

• Have gained a new insight into an old topic.

• Be inspired to use the specific knowledge and detailed skills you learn here to immediately be able to deliver all feedback, but even the most daunting kind, in a way that gets better results for the organization, yourself, and your employees.

• Have increased confidence to manage performance/coach more effectively and successfully in any context.

• Reap the rewards from being seen as a more effective manager in fulfilling this critical part of your supervisory role.