Employers need to make sure they give a balance of positive and negative feedback for it to be effective, says Jan Hills
For example, the work of Denisi and Kluger (although it dates back to the 1990s) revealed that feedback either does nothing or makes things worse more often than it improves performance.
I believe that when feedback is unsolicited it creates a threat response, which makes it harder for the person receiving the feedback to ‘hear’ it and do anything constructive as a result. In effect the older parts of the brain hijack the rational logical parts and this reduces the ability to understand, and act on, what is being said.
When giving feedback most managers focus on what is wrong. Implicitly people often believe poor performance comes from not understanding the ‘right way’ to do the work or from ‘getting it wrong’, and that if people only knew better they would be able to perform. I think this is an outdated notion.
In today’s complex organisations managers can’t know the details of every team member’s work in sufficient detail, so feedback comes more from their opinion of what should be done, rather than knowledge of what will work. The premise that managers should give feedback on job details is based on a simpler world than people now work in.
Aspects of performance and people’s reaction to that performance also depend on the beliefs of the feedback giver and their interpretation of the situation. For example: ‘Was the CEO bored in the management meeting or reflecting on an important point you had made?’
Part of a manager’s, or colleague’s, motivation to give feedback is the desire to improve the receiver’s performance. Feedback givers believe they can help the other person, and that makes the brain feel good, because a reward response is triggered when giving advice or assistance. However, this encourages the giving of more advice – rather than a focus on analysing if the feedback is actually helping or not.
Another implicit assumption is that people want help and will change their behaviour when they are given it. But research suggests that in anything other than small task-oriented activities people don’t change their behaviour just because they are told what to do. They only make changes when they are in receipt of insight into why they should and the benefits the changes could bring. But this is less rewarding for others to do, and requires more effort, while managers may not have been trained to ask insightful questions that generate insight.
A key challenge in giving effective feedback is also the fact that we are biased towards noticing what isn’t working, or what is different from what we would expect, rather than observing a mix of positive and negative aspects. This is why, in most businesses, employees give little or no positive feedback, according to Head Heart + Brain research.
Generally speaking, feedback can be useful if employees receive advice on what is working and, specifically, what to do more often – but this is hard to do. It also works when people seek it for themselves. In other words, they ask for it.
If you can restructure the manager’s role in performance management, remove the burden of collecting and giving feedback, and instead train employees to understand the standards expected of them – and to ask for feedback to help them meet those standards – not only will you shift the balance of power, and in turn reduce the levels of threat and increase the levels of trust, you will have happier managers and happier employees.
Jan Hills is a founding partner of Head Heart + Brain