Are you a business professional who feels there is all talk but no feedback at work? The turmoil in companies and redesign of performance ratings means that HR Professions, talent teams and managers feel lost. Sergey Gorbatov and Angela Lane provide scientifically robust evidence on why we respond poorly to professional feedback
Bob Eichinger, CEO and talent management guru, perfectly summarises the research on feedback and career success: ‘For those with the potential to grow and lead, feedback is the best lubricant. The privilege of developing in a feedback rich culture is a gift to the ambitious.’
The positive relationship between good feedback and results is well-documented. Writing for American Psychologist, organisational psychologists Edwin Locke and Garry Latham said that getting feedback – and acting on it – is one of the most powerful drivers of performance.
When we get information on how we are doing and what good looks like, we simply produce better results.
Without feedback we are unaware of the need for change. We remain comfortable with habitual behaviours. But in a 2005 article for the Review of General Psychology psychologist Robert Hogan and journalist Robert Kaiser wrote that this is a sure recipe for derailment. And, in 2018, Harvard Business Review reported that a mere 10-15% of the population are self-aware. Failing to be shown the performance gap ensures no improvement will happen. Feedback reveals that gap and provides direction.
Feedback is contagious
Writing in Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior in 2016, Ross School of Business Professor Sue Ashford, Vlerick Business School Associate Professor Katleen De Stobbeleir, and Mrudula Nujella oif Michican University, said: ‘The more feedback you seek, the more you get. The more you get, the more you seek.
‘It’s a virtuous cycle. When giving and getting feedback becomes routine, when it is no longer personal, where everyone is doing it… employees grow exponentially. This is the true “gift to the ambitious”; a culture of feedback.’
Yet, according to Avraham Kluger, a professor at the Herbrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University’s Angelo DeNisi writing in Psychological Bulletin in 1996, one of the most influential meta-analyses on the topic found that just about half of feedback interventions increased productivity.
What happened to the other 50%?
There are two sides to this story: one relates to the giver, the other, to the receiver.
It won’t be a revelation that defensiveness by those receiving feedback, inconsistent with their own view of self, is normal. But what about the giver? Beyond managing their own emotions and the myth that critical feedback damages relationships, feedback givers often fail to identify the right issue and deliver feedback in ineffective ways. Or they fail to package feedback in ways that minimise defensiveness and set clear expectations for change.
The perils of poor feedback
Before we tell you how to get it right, a cautionary note about getting it wrong. Poor feedback hampers fairness, and evolution has wired us for fairness.
In a famous Nature article ‘Monkeys reject unequal pay’, the authors demonstrated how capuchin monkeys indignantly rejected cucumbers for completing a task when other monkeys received grapes for the same task. The authors explain that the same desire for fairness applies to humans. Organisations expect leaders to give honest, timely, and useful feedback to employees. It is no wonder we feel treated unfairly when that does not happen. And there is scientific evidence that unfair feedback leads to job dissatisfaction and increases chances of depression.
Fair feedback, on the other hand, makes people happier and they stay longer with the organisation, yet often managers withhold feedback, or worse!
Some managers give bogus information to employees: they manipulate facts, protect their turf or consolidate personal power. Whatever the reason, the result is increased opaqueness, with corresponding decreases in employee growth, loyalty and effort in the long-term. Transparency is the winning strategy.
And so, it’s time to find out how it’s done well.
Giving fair, focused and credible feedback
Liken your first step to that of a doctor. You need to diagnose ‘what’s up?’ in order to take action. While human performance is complex, there is a simple framework to help you assess the critical variables. Performance is a function of our capability, characteristics and the context in which we perform.
These make up the three Cs of performance and a powerful framework for any manager wanting to diagnose performance issues.
Capability is the intelligence, experience and competencies (knowledge and skills we’ve learned over time) we bring to work. As a leader, you observe a performance gap. Ask: ‘Does the employee know, or can they figure out, what to do next to get the job done?’
If the answer is ‘no’, the solution is feedback that emphasises your expectation that the employee build expertise.
Characteristics relate to how we go about our work. It includes our personality and preferred approach tasks, as well as the attitudes and motivators that determine the effort and energy we give. If they employee has the expertise, but isn’t doing well, ask; ‘Does what I need align with the employee’s personality and preferences?’
If the answer is ‘no’, the issue is an alignment one. Feedback is still the solution, but it must emphasise your expectations for results.
Before acting on either of the above, the fair leader considers the third C. Performance is highly context dependent.
Context is the environment in which work happens. It could be external, like a trade war, or internal, like a budget cut. If an employee should be able to do well, yet isn’t, ask, ‘are environmental factors impeding performance?’
Can you identify the uncooperative peer, the broken process, the misalignment team, or the inadequate technology? If there is an issue that is “external” to the employee’s capability or characteristics the feedback, first and foremost, may be to you! Your leadership role includes removing roadblocks and creating a high-performance environment. Figure out what you need to do. There may still need to be feedback to the employee. But it must be tempered, or modified, to consider the context.
When it comes to delivering the message itself, we recommend keeping it simple. A proven, three-part statement provides a mental model for giving feedback. Don’t fear having a model. Jay Zimmerman, Talent Leader at AON, says: ‘Most great leaders have a feedback model … mastered to the point that it is constantly in play during conversations but invisible to the receiver.’
The three-part statement starts with stating the reason the employee should care about the issue and the feedback you’ll provide.
Humans want meaning and to understand ‘why’. Whether the feedback is about skills and experience, behaviors or attitude, always explain why the issue matters in the first instance and why it is important to performance. Our research confirms that, given sufficient explanation, the probability of behavior changes almost doubles.
This powerful opening reduces defensiveness, by positioning the feedback as non-personal and critical to success.
The second step is to describe today’s performance versus expectations. We covered opaque feedback; vague insinuates, broad generalisations and equivocal conclusions work directly against employee self-awareness. As tough as it sounds, being clear about current performance, compared to expectations, positions you as honest and straightforward, with clear, thoughtful requirements. So, tell the employee exactly how she is doing.
Finally, provide your requirement for action. Too often leaders give feedback but fail to make clear what they expect as a result. Describe the outcome, or destination, you want. In detail. Express this in terms of development, focusing on the future and what needs to be learned. And ensure your ask is do-able. If the performance gap is large, consider setting expectations for smaller, more incremental improvements.
This simple three-part statement: ‘Tell me why it matters, tell me how I’m doing, tell me what to do’, is a structure for a powerful, performance enhancing conversation.
What’s in it for you?
We opened with a quote from Bob Eichinger.
In their seminal research, Bob, with his colleague Michael Lombardo, identified the competencies of successful leaders. One set of competencies related to ‘getting work done through others’. In addition to delegating and directing work, and measuring its progress, leaders get things done by developing direct reports. Giving feedback is a prerequisite for that.
And here is where it gets interesting. The same research found that developing direct reports was not among the harder skills leaders must learn it’s actually not terribly hard to learn giving fair, focused, and credible feedback. And yet this skill is scare. It is not frequently observed in those who manage others.
This should be music to the ambitious leader’s ears. Here is a skill, only moderately difficult to master, yet scarce in the population. It improves my ability to get things done by lifting the team member performance. Effective diagnosis and clear feedback trigger the process and, as the individual improves, so do results. And because this skill is scarce, doing it well sets me apart from others. I can build my personal brand by… giving fair feedback.
For the ambitious leader, learning to give feedback should simply makes career sense.
Sergey Gorbatov and Angela Lane work and write about the complex science of human performance, while making it simple. Leveraging Fortune 500 experience gained across four continents, they equip leaders with practical tools for success. Their new book Fair Talk: Three Steps to Powerful Feedback is available on the AMBA Bookclub and AMBA members can enjoy a 20% discount on the recommended retail price.
