My report and I regularly give each other critical feedback and it isn’t taken personally. If your report does work that you don’t think is great, are you comfortable saying that directly? Similarly, would your report tell you if he thinks you’ve made a mistake?

My friend Mark Rabkin shared a tip with me that I love: strive for all your one-on-one meetings to feel a little awkward. Why? Because the most important and meaningful conversations have that characteristic. It isn’t easy to discuss mistakes, confront tensions, or talk about deep fears or secret hopes, but no strong relationship can be built on superficial pleasantries alone.

Here are some ideas to get started:

• Discuss top priorities: What are the one, two, or three most critical outcomes for your report and how can you help her tackle these challenges?

• Calibrate what “great” looks like: Do you have a shared vision of what you’re working toward? Are you in sync about goals or expectations?

• Share feedback: What feedback can you give that will help your report, and what can your report tell you that will make you more effective as a manager?

• Reflect on how things are going: Once in a while, it’s useful to zoom out and talk about your report’s general state of mind—how is he feeling on the whole? What’s making him satisfied or dissatisfied? Have any of his goals changed? What has he learned recently and what does he want to learn going forward?

For a leader, giving feedback—both when things are going well and when they aren’t—is one of the most fundamental aspects of the job. Mastering this skill means that you can knock down two of the biggest barriers preventing your reports from doing great work—unclear expectations and inadequate skills—so that they know exactly where to aim and how to hit the target.

Share Behavioral Feedback Thoughtfully and Regularly

When you zoom out and look at many examples of task-specific feedback for a report, what themes emerge? Does he make decisions quickly or slowly? Is he a process wizard or an unconventional thinker? Does he gravitate toward pragmatic or idealistic solutions?

Asking this question about themes helps you reflect on your report’s unique strengths or areas of development as shown in his patterns of behavior.

Behavioral feedback is useful because it provides a level of personalization and depth that is missing from task-specific feedback. By connecting the dots across multiple examples, you can help people understand how their unique interests, personalities, and habits affect their ability to have impact.

How do you ensure that your feedback can be acted upon? Remember these three tips.

1. Make your feedback as specific as possible. When I told George, “Your presentation was complicated and people had a hard time understanding it,” I was assuming that his definition of complicated and mine were the same. This is rarely the case, so my feedback ended up sounding vague. Which aspects were complicated? What was said, exactly, that led to people being confused? Use clear examples that get at the why so it’s easier for the recipient to know what you mean.

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1. Clarify what success looks and feels like. Even if your feedback is specific, heard, and understood, it can still be hard for the other person to have a clear picture of what they should aspire to.

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1. Suggest next steps. Often the easiest way to help your report translate your feedback into action is to share what you think the next steps should be. Be clear about whether you’re setting an expectation or merely offering a suggestion. Also, beware of overdoing this—if you’re always dictating what should happen next, you’re not empowering your team to learn to solve problems on their own. A softer approach is to ask your report, “So what do you think the next steps should be?” and let them guide the discussion.