In this article, Mara Gerstein, CEO of Loupe, a feedback platform for the new world of work, lays out five things organizations, coaches, and other leaders must do to bring about the feedback revolution we need to make sure all individuals get the feedback we need to:
+ develop professionally and personally
+ drive organizational engagement and productivity
+ deepen connection and relationships to people we trust.
Self-awareness has been coined the “meta-skill of the 21st century.” Research shows that without it we get lost in unhealthy rumination, make costly, bad business decisions, often suffer from imposter syndrome, and move through the world without understanding how we impact others. On the flip side, self-aware people — those who understand themselves and how others see them — have stronger relationships, are better managers, are easier to manage, run more successful businesses, and tend to be happier and more satisfied with their lives.
So it’s no surprise that people on an insatiable hunt to better their performance and enhance their well-being are focused on increasing self-awareness. And it’s no wonder that self-awareness has risen to the top of every hiring manager’s list of job qualifications.
Historically, self-awareness has been an individual pursuit: we’ve been on our own to discover why we do things, what we love, and what makes us tick. But, contrary to expectation, research shows that people who introspect tend to know themselves less well. We are actually terrible at thinking about ourselves! We tend to distort reality and arrive at misguided conclusions. Research also shows that other people tend to see us more objectively than we see ourselves.
So how might we engage others in the pursuit of self-awareness? Well, we could simply ask.
But there are two widely accepted truths about feedback:
1- Getting feedback is scary.
2- Giving useful feedback is hard.
These truths consign feedback to the realm of untouchable fear and lofty aspiration. We don’t ask for feedback because we’re scared of what we might find out, we don’t give it because we can’t figure out how to give the most important feedback the right way, we do neither because now is not a good time. We’ve heard every excuse. Yet when we fail to ask for and receive candid feedback we deprive ourselves of the greatest, and, ironically, the most accessible means of developing self-awareness and growing both personally and professionally.
Less expensive than therapy, less invasive than psychedelics, and less time consuming than traveling the world or meditating for hours on end, it’s widely known that getting good feedback is essential for growth. (Don’t get me wrong, we’re in favor of all those other things too!)
Instead, most of us move through our lives trying to figure ourselves out on our own with only the biased perspectives of a single family member, close friend, or manager, or with our (usually off-base) assumptions about what other people think. It’s a problem. Decades of focus on “self-care” have left us isolated and somewhat disconnected from ourselves and others. Trying to figure it all out on our own is a sisyphean task; our collective mental health is at an all time low (it is estimated that 1 in 4 people globally suffers from some form of mental health disorder¹), while rates of burnout² and spending on wellness³ are at all-time highs.
The lack of personal feedback is not just a problem for the individual, but for the communities to which we belong — our family units, parent-teacher associations, classrooms, teams, and especIally workplaces, where we spend the majority of our time. Because feedback is how we grow. It gives us a sense of self that is informed by reality — and not just the reality we tell ourselves and our therapists and coaches. Feedback, and knowing how to process it and take action, are what make us better people, friends, coworkers, bosses, and CEOs.
How did we get here?
For too long, “feedback” has been co-opted and tainted by our workplaces, used as a cudgel to justify manager-driven compensation and promotion decisions. Feedback systems and tools are often administered by people without the expertise, time, or line of sight into the day-to-day behaviors and performance of the people to whom they are delivering feedback. Most tools used for collecting and delivering feedback are anonymous, rely on quantitative data, and fail to actively address the conscious and unconscious biases that we all have and that stand in the way of delivering productive and actionable insight.
Most of us have experienced feedback as a tool to surveil and control. We have been told that feedback is for our development as well as to serve organizational aims, when in fact evaluation and development are conflicting goals. This has been the felt, unspoken truth of all kinds of performance management and feedback systems for decades. The system is broken. 90% of HR leaders believe that performance management tools do not yield accurate representations of employee performance.⁴ Sounds like a terrible tool for organizations to use for evaluation, let alone development.
As a result, most individuals associate the word “feedback” with negative, anonymous feedback. They think of it as hard to swallow medicine, as opposed to something which can enlighten, empower, and inspire.
Here’s the essential challenge: to unravel decades of conditioning based on our experiences of feedback being used against us; to take the fear out of feedback; to make candid and actionable feedback accessible to all people in support of growth; and to promote growth based on input from others. Fundamentally, we have much to gain from reframing feedback as data on what we are doing well and what we can do better or differently to chart an informed path for a lifetime of growth.
There are hundreds of research studies about what makes for effective feedback exchanges — how to train the giver and prime the recipient, set the right context and medium, and so much more. But the reality is that these learnings live in academic journals and rarely make it into practice. For two plus years, we’ve worked with coaches, organizational psychologists, DEI experts, and users from all walks of life and at all career stages to understand how to crack the feedback code and re-orient the entire process of asking for, giving, and receiving feedback.
So what must be done to take the fear out of feedback and make it effective?
1- Put the person asking for feedback in control.
An experimental 2018 study by West, Thorson, Grant, and Rock showed that receiving feedback that you have solicited provokes less anxiety than receiving unsolicited feedback. Interestingly, it’s also less anxiety-provoking to give feedback when someone has solicited it than when offering unsolicited feedback.
In other words, it’s best to allow individuals to choose what they want feedback on, when and whom they want to ask, and how they want to ask for it (i.e. let them choose from a set of specific, research-backed questions–not just “Hey, can you give me some feedback?”).
This shift in power — from manager to individual — changes what people are willing to ask, what others are willing to tell us, and what we’re willing to do with what we hear.
Once feedback is received, leave it up to the individual to decide what…
- feedback themes are most resonant,
- behavior or mindset change is aligned with their personal goals,
- to share with their manager and community, and
- support they need to achieve their goals for change.
The entire experience of feedback is transformed when it is no longer something that is happening to us, but a process we are driving for our own benefit. There is an opportunity for companies and organizations here too: to walk the walk when it comes to employee-centricity and trust their employees to self-manage the development process. The additional upside for businesses is that they no longer have to rely on biased “check a box” performance management systems. Managers without the time, skills, or line of sight into their reports’ day-to- day work will no longer be solely responsible for the feedback process. And, their employees will finally receive candid, actionable feedback data that motivates them to change.
2- Make feedback for growth private and separate it from evaluation.
Research has consistently shown that receiving feedback in public / in front of others instantly makes a person feel self-conscious. This diverts significant cognitive resources INWARD toward ourselves, rather than on hearing and processing the feedback.⁵
For individuals to feel comfortable giving and receiving feedback, it must be received in private and disaggregated from evaluation. Performance management (and other workforce management tools that incorporate feedback modules) attempt to do many things at once — namely, to evaluate us, while using the same feedback for your development. In the process, these systems do all things badly. The other benefit to private feedback exchanges, disaggregated from evaluation, is that the people you ask for feedback can answer your questions knowing that the information will not be used against you. This creates a closed loop system in which people are free to ask what they truly want to know and for those giving feedback to say what they really think. The people who care most about you, or are invested in your success, growth and development, will finally have a way to share useful, positive, and critical feedback.
Often, simply being asked to contribute private feedback can have a powerful impact on a relationship. Imagine if your boss regularly asked you: “What’s something I could do differently to better support you and/or your growth and development?” or “What is one thing I do that gets in the way of me being a good manager and/or leader? How does this impact you or our team?” When a piece of feedback provides new insight, it deepens relationships. When a piece of feedback requires a follow-up conversation, it can unlock previously closed channels of communication among colleagues because it is happening in a private space between two people, unmediated by a manager.
3- Let people take their feedback data with them.
When it comes to data portability, our position at Loupe is straightforward. It is time for companies and organizations to let employees own their development data. Our goal is to ensure that in addition to data privacy, Loupe users take their data with them throughout their career, so that they can set and track career-long development goals. Instead of leaving a job with a paper printout of feedback, it will be held in a dashboard that is always accessible to you to reference and build upon as you move throughout your career.
4- Acknowledge that mindset is key and mutable.
Psychologist Carol Dweck identified mindsets around growth in 2007, and these mindsets are key when it comes to our willingness and ability to engage in the act of asking for and receiving feedback. If you have a “growth mindset,” and believe your qualities can be developed, feedback feeds your growth. On the other hand, if you have a “fixed mindset,” feedback is a sentence, i.e.,information about who you are that you cannot change. The good news is that one’s mindset is not fixed, and that the very process of getting effective feedback can push one towards a growth mindset. Sometimes just becoming aware that a growth mindset exists can be transformative!
Likewise, past experiences with feedback impact how open you are to the feedback process — your “feedback orientation.”⁶ If you’ve received feedback in the past from people with bad intentions, you may be wary of opening up again. To shift someone’s feedback orientation, you must put them in control of deciding when and what to ask and from whom to solicit feedback. When feedback is disaggregated from decisions around promotion and compensation, it becomes possible to think of feedback as data for self-awareness; to remember that no one person’s opinion is more important than another’s; and that, in the end, the feedback solicitor is the arbiter of their own truth. That said, it’s important to look for feedback patterns, particularly when multiple people you trust are saying the same or similar things. This leads us to…
5- Find a signal in the noise.
Renowned organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant has articulated this approach to feedback data: “One person’s reaction is an opinion. If multiple people make the same point, it’s a pattern. The best way to grow is to find the recurring signal in the noise.” In the world of performance management and other assessments on the market, there are generally two types of data: quantitative data and raw, qualitative data. If you’ve gotten feedback data in the past, you’ve likely received numerical rankings and raw, usually unattributed quotes in response to preselected qualitative questions. These types of feedback reports make it incredibly hard to, as Grant says, “find recurring signal in the noise,” to make sense of the data or know what to do with the feedback you receive. It’s no wonder so many feedback reports wind up stuck in drawers.
The great news is that with machine learning, large language models, generative AI, and custom algorithms it is now possible to do so much more with feedback data for individuals at scale. Feedback seekers can now ask qualitative questions and receive customized feedback synthesis reports that identify personalized patterns and themes. We no longer have to rely on quantitative measures or parse through raw data, but can receive actionable insights based on free form, qualitative inputs.
The impact of seeing that three people you trust all gave essentially the same feedback is profound and hard to ignore and tends to lead to “breakthroughs.” Seeing a named pattern can bring something into full relief in a way that raw feedback simply can not.
So what’s next?
If these insights resonate, the next step is up to you. By “you,” we mean business leaders must trust their employees to self-manage their growth and goals. They must demand that platforms for feedback exchange are designed to minimize fear and maximize development. We mean coaches who recognize the vital importance of getting perspectives beyond those of their clients (self-reported) and their clients’ managers. We mean people giving candid, thoughtful, and evidence-based insights. And, most importantly, we mean individuals who solicit feedback to foster their own growth, recognizing that feedback can provide a “sanity check” that is essential for self-awareness and growth.
This is a call to engage all of us in the project of helping each other reach our highest potential, to make growth a less lonely endeavor, to shift the notion of “self care” to a more realistic and ultimately fruitful one: “community care.” We could all use each other’s help — to expand our consciousness, develop a self-awareness not dictated but informed by input from others, and in community with people invested in your well-being and growth as you are in theirs. So we invite you to join the feedback revolution in pursuit of personal, organizational, and societal growth.
Mara Gerstein is CEO and Co-founder of Loupe, a feedback platform for the new world of work. To learn more about Loupe visit www.askloupe.com.
[5] Levy, Albright, Cawley, & Williams, 1995 and Hull, J. G., Van Treuren, R. R., Ashford, S. J., Propsom, P., & Andrus, B. W. (1988)
[6] London & Smither, 2002 and Linderbaum & Levy, 2010
