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The Positives Of Negative Feedback

Hearing bad news about yourself has never been a pleasant experience; especially at the moment it occurs. Getting a negative performance review or being criticized for an error induces feelings of anger, humiliation, and weakness. Negative feedback floods the brain with stress-inducing hormones that elevate our consciousness of danger and hijacks our decision-making capacity. However, before we dismiss the condemnation we receive from managers and friends, here’s the amazing thing about negative feedback: It may be in reality very good for us.

Rob Peters
Jul 27, 2017 · 4 min read

Negative Feedback Can Elevate Performance

The leadership firm Zenger Folkman, shared an assessment of almost one thousand employees which reinforced the concept of receiving negative feedback at work. With an almost a three-to-one edge, workers stated that getting recommendations for improvement and being notified of mistakes did more to increase their performance than positive feedback and praise. When employees were asked to name something that could help advance their careers, 72% believed their performance would get better with more recurring and genuine evaluations from bosses; even if that suggested taking in tough messages on the the journey.

These data points spotlight a second positive to negative feedback: Experienced employees have a preference for hearing it. Given their area of expertise, battle-hardened workers as a consequence aren’t always looking for encouragement, but realignment. Those practical pieces of information that modulate their performance and understanding of progress.

Negative Feedback Ignites Innovation

The hurt of a severe review can yield a short-term surge in inventiveness. Researchers at Columbia Business School discovered a strong connection between artistic expression and the social rebuff that’s often brought on by negative feedback. While it may seem contradictory, we do our best inventive labor when we feel most helpless.

Making the Case: After getting evaluated for their public speaking abilities, a group of young professionals challenged themselves to a contest to see who could design the most creative collages. The competitors who experienced failure on their talks ended up generating more novel and imaginative work than those with higher quality speaking scores. Not by accident, the ramifications of negative feedback assisted in creating a crystal clear path toward a stronger inner focus and creative planning. What started as disappointment soon turned to resolution and perseverance.

Negative feedback is more helpful

That dynamic seems to play out beyond the workplace as well. Management specialists at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business revealed that advanced-level students in a French literature class preferred teachers who pounded them with more immediate and corrective feedback over those who took a sweet-tempered technique.

Negative Feedback Produces Positive Behavior Change

The research shows that we are inclined to disregard other people’s suggestions as much as 70% of the time. According to one calculation, only a a percentage of the potentially useful feedback we garner gets conveyed into practice. With its prickly boundaries, negative feedback takes on a greater sense of priority that increases our self-awareness and the likelihood that something positive may occur from it.

Combining Gamification and Peer-to-Peer Feedback

Gamification is the use of game-thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems. There has been incredible growth in the adoption of gamification by business the past few years. Gamification has been studied and applied in several domains, such as to improve user engagement, physical exercise, return on investment, data quality, timeliness, and learning. A review of research on gamification shows that most studies on gamification find positive effects from gamification.

These can come in many forms, such as points, badges, leaderboard rankings, discounts and free merchandise. However, one thing is certain: recognizing and rewarding employees, customers, and all key stakeholders develop more risk-taking that results in breakthrough innovation, less malfeasance, greater talent retention and higher financial performance.

“Employees, especially across younger generations, become disengaged easily, causing low productivity and retention levels. Game-based motivation can be a powerful solution for today’s top workforce challenges … It’s a wise long-term investment to create an environment where employees can manage, visualize and digitally share their performance, achievements and skills.”

Peer SaaS “5-Star Feedback”

Conclusion

My hope is that you take the research from this article and rethink you feelings toward negative feedback. We have created the Peer SaaS platform in order to provide more frequent feedback and appreciation from managers as well as peers. By leveraging gamification elements such as relationship capital points, appreciation badges, and achievement trophies, we can elevate performance in our business organizations. It is now quite obvious that there are many positives that come from it.

www.StandardofTrust.com

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Originally Published on March 9th, 2016 on Linkedin Pulse

Rob Peters

Written by

Relationship Capital | Gamification | Co-Creator of Peer SaaS Platform | HR Tech and Workplace Culture Strategist | CEO| Author of Standard of Trust Leadership