On How You’re Doing Feedback All Wrong
Leaders, you’re doing feedback all wrong and it’s threatening your ability to make a good feedback culture and drive excellence. Feedback is never neutral, how it’s communicated and by who matters. Want to get excellence from your people? Think about the human side of feedback.
How can we help each person thrive and excel? Why through feedback, of course! But interpersonal feedback can be a field of landmines. We all have a story about getting some feedback at work that was miles away from the truth of the situation or was just plain hurtful that didn’t help us improve one bit. For employees who want to drive their own excellence, what’s the ideal feedback program?
It is a popular tagline of firms to say they want to have a feedback culture, but when you look deeper, the way they are doing feedback makes people not want to participate in the feedback culture.
But if people dislike the way your business does feedback, how are you going to make a feedback culture?
Today on Sassonomics: what’s wrong with your current feedback programs and what you need to consider to fix them according to Behavioural Science.
The Trick About Accurate and Useful Feedback: Finding the Signal Through the Noise
Anyone who wants to improve needs feedback. Feedback from the sales numbers, feedback from project completion rates, and most prominently, interpersonal feedback.
But interpersonal feedback can be tricky. We have decades of research that prove people have a nearly impossible time holding a stable definition in their heads for abstract concepts like “strategic thinking” or “leadership qualities”, creating a real problem when evaluating someone else on those qualities. How truly accurate are the things people are saying to you and about you? Are the things people say to help you to improve, or is it actually to help themselves in some way?
For anyone looking to get an accurate sense of where they stand and where they need to go, the trick is to find the signal through the noise.
This means that you collect feedback from multiple sources and try to see where patterns emerge. If only one person says they don’t like the way you run meetings, but all the other people say they love your meetings, then you know the truth is probably that your meetings rock, and give the words of the naysayer less weight.
But here’s the challenge for your organizational feedback program: you need everyone to have enough feedback.
With smaller amounts of feedback, you run the risk that the feedback someone receives is not accurate or is malicious and hurtful, which could cause a whole host of problems for the employee.
The tradeoff is clear: if the employee only has a few feedback data points, those had better be TOP quality (and we would need some accountability mechanism to make sure the feedback-giver was delivering quality, accurate, feedback), OR if the employee gets lot of feedback, they need to be trained on how to find the signal through the noise.
Bad, Bad Feedback
I’m not talking about feedback that someone did something poorly. No, I’m talking about when someone gives low-quality, inaccurate, unfair feedback.
Kinds of Bad Feedback
Projection
When someone’s feedback to you has little to do with you, and more to do with the feedback-giver’s past experiences. Psychological projection is when people project their own undesirable feelings onto someone else rather than dealing with them themselves. Imagine you’re getting feedback from Brenda on which project team to work with next. You could work on Max’s team, but Brenda tells you that Max is a horrible person and it won’t serve your career. The reality was that Max chose Avery over Brenda in the past, and now Brenda is projecting her bad feelings about that on to you. Whatever feedback Brenda gives you is not impartial or useful to you, it’s all about her and her ego. Indeed, research has found that our ratings of others are deeply coloured by our own unconscious biases in something called the idiosyncratic rater effect, where more than half of your ratings of others tend to reflect you rather than them (oh and it’s been shown that training can’t lessen this effect… great).
Defensiveness
Someone is giving advice to defend their own earlier choice, to avoid making themselves look bad. Behavioural consistency is the notion that people tend to behave in ways that are consistent with past behaviour. This is a heuristic we fall back on to guide our decision-making, the logic being that if I made a decision of this nature before, it must be right, and I should do it again. Behavioural consistency can apply to our own perception of our behaviours as well as making sure our behaviours seem consistent to other people. Let’s say you’re having a conversation with your boss about a project that’s stuck and you’ve decided to pivot towards X, and things are going pretty well. In the past, your boss has pivoted towards Y. Even though the project is now going okay, the boss is still giving you negative feedback because to the boss only things that were consistent with their own behaviours feel ‘right’. Another type of pivot might make them look back for their own choices. In this case, the boss’s feedback is again not about you, but about their own ego.
Not Impartial
When someone gives you feedback to benefit themselves, rather than to help you. Imagine your boss is giving you feedback that you need to be on projects like X rather than projects like Y to improve certain skills. Later, you find out your boss is short-staffed on a project like X and could really do with your help. Was their feedback actually intended to help you or to help them? It’s hard to say, but research has shown that giving feedback can give someone a sense of power, which either might help as a means to an end or just plain boost their ego.
It’s not that the feedback-giver doesn’t care about the feedback-receiver, but we need to acknowledge there are subconscious elements at play here and that actually interpersonal feedback just isn’t that accurate.
What is the consequence of getting unfair feedback?
Oh, so many consequences.
It can erode trust. The feedback receiver can stop seeing the feedback giver as credible, and then the feedback from then-on is not useful.
It can cause the feedback receiver to stop asking for feedback or to have negative feelings about getting feedback at work at all, leading to disengagement.
Poorly delivered, unfair or thoughtless feedback can destroy someone’s self-esteem and self-confidence. Someone could get horrible feedback that is totally untrue and actually start to believe they are terrible, when that’s not even actually what’s happening. It can make them feel hopeless, like trying is pointless, and a whole host of negative emotions that you can bet don’t boost their performance.
It can cause a stress response (‘fight or flight’) that narrows attention so that other, accurate feedback might be missed and an opportunity for learning is actually lost.
Many people assume the biggest thing employees want is money/compensation, but really there is so much to be said by being seen and appreciated. In fact, employees who feel heard are 4.6x more likely to do their very best work. Unfair feedback can completely derail that because the employee no longer feels seen.
Do you really want that, leaders?
What Can I Do To Help Curb Unfair Feedback?
First things first, you can’t just assume that because someone’s a leader, they give fair or accurate feedback. Leaders, bosses, employees… Basically EVERYONE needs to be trained to give good feedback.
Here are a couple things to think about when building a feedback program.
Great feedback should be:
Credible - the source needs to be credible - i.e., someone who knows about the topic, preferably more than the feedback receiver, with demonstrated capabilities and some experience in developing those same capabilities. I would highly discount any feedback I’m getting about my experimental research design from someone who has never designed research before, for example.
Factual - there needs to be evidence to back up the feedback, or else it's just opinion. Feedback-givers need to carefully select examples, but also be sure to do so in a way that isn’t singling someone out for a fluke.
Purposeful - there is always a motivation behind giving the feedback (usually it’s a company policy where a boss has to do a review), feedback is weighted more when the purpose is to help the person improve, rather than serve the feedback-giver’s own needs (i.e., as someone’s boss you need to do a review or else lose your job).
Balanced - no one is ever perfect, no one is ever completely useless. Feedback should represent where someone’s skills actually are on that continuum, so it needs to acknowledge that some things are actually great, some things can be improved. Being harsh and “just being honest” actually don’t really work that well in improving behaviour outcomes. Try saying something positive and leaving it at that, because all too often positive feedback is used to sugar coat something nastier.
Timely - if you truly have someone’s best interest at heart, you’d tell them right away if something needs to change, or if they did something great.
Actionable - the feedback needs to be behaviour-based, and something that can be objectively measured in order to keep the feedback-receiver accountable along the way
Safe - In order for the feedback to be heard, there must be safety and trust. This means there is a right time and place, and even emotional state, to have a conversation that delivers feedback.
Second things second, feedback receivers at every level need to be trained on how to filter out unfair feedback.
There is a LOT of literature out there on helping people be better sports about getting negative feedback. Given that negative feedback can rip your heart to shreds, determine your salary, or even impair a promotion, and it might not even be accurate (!!!!), employees need to be given a tool which they can use to protect their self-concept against unfair words.
Empowering employees to take a critical eye to feedback might be one way to protect people from unnecessary psychological harm and demotivation. Encouraging them to become as self-aware as possible, and then training them to take on board anything they think actually is a gap they can address and use the feedback to improve. But, on the flip side, giving permission to carefully consider and throw out any self-esteem destroying feedback that is not accurate, helpful, or truly a reflection of them. This is key to finding the signal through the noise.
Yes, employers want to use feedback to get the most out of their employees, but unfair feedback actually leads to some organizationally undesirable outcomes, too. So don’t just throw feedback mandates out there. Make a plan. Consider the human side. Think about how you’d want to be treated and cultivated as you work towards excellence.
And if you only have nasty things to say, well, consider what that says about you.
With love,
