Feedback Fallacy — A Top of the Page Review
February 2023
Performance reviews suck. They don’t work. But there is a better way.
This month’s Top of the Page review features dual publications — a recent webinar hosted by the Harvard Business Review and an article previously published by the same journal — centered on the provocative idea of re-imagining how feedback is delivered.
Buckingham, Marcus. “Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and What to Do Instead.” Webinar from Harvard Business Review, December 14, 2022.
Buckingham, Marcus and Ashley Goodall. “The Feedback Fallacy.” Harvard Business Review, March-April 2019.
Quick Summary
Feedback, as it is currently understood and delivered, does not work. Instead of improving performance, it triggers a fight or flight response that undermines learning and growth. These two ingredients are critical for improved performance. The goal of feedback should be to help each person thrive and excel. To meet that goal the way feedback is delivered, both in terms of timing and mechanism, must be reimagined if we are to develop the high performance teams that are necessary in today’s rapidly moving market.
To build feedback delivery systems that meet the goal of supporting growth and actually improving performance, we need to get clear on a few compelling, but paradigm shifting points. First, feedback is inherently shaped by our own feelings, experiences, and reactions, resulting in “more distortion than truth.” Second, skills develop when they are piggy backed on areas of strength, active knowledge, or intrinsic interest. Finding fault is not useful; but finding areas of active success and grafting onto it is. Finally, excellence is like a fingerprint: unique and individual. Minimum competence may be prescriptive, but excellence (the real goal) is entirely descriptive and variable. There are many ways to be excellent and most can not be imagined until they are experienced.
To achieve the desired outcomes of learning and growth to drive improved performance, the authors offer up the following suggestions.
- Focus on outcomes by highlighting patterns of excellence as they happen.
- Own your reactions by clearly describing how you feel as a mirror of the observed actions.
- Prioritize real time recognition and dissection of excellence when you observe it.
- Assume your team members have a solution for improvement and need help only in structuring their past and present success to gain clarity.
Key Takeaways
Process Design
In the webinar cited above, Buckingham uses the term “feed forward” as a way to describe a more effective feedback system. I love that idea because it keeps the goal front and center. What’s the goal of feedback? Quite simply to help each person thrive and excel. It is not to tear down, find fault, or re-adjudicate the past. The goal is to identify excellence, support learning, and promote individual and organization growth.
To create a more effective organization, look at the feedback system and design it to achieve the goal of growing each individual to develop their own excellence in support of the organization’s mission and purpose. It is so easy to conflate criticism with “potential for improvement”. It often happens with the best of intentions. Even with the feedback sandwich (good — bad — good), our premise rests on making criticism more palatable, not on actually driving growth, much less investing in how our team members thrive. A system built for driving growth recognizes that future greatness is rooted in current goodness.
A redesigned system is good not only for the individual contributor, but also for the managers who need the same opportunity for growth and learning. Very few people talk openly about the stress, fear, or incompetence many managers feel when they are required to give feedback to their team. Those feelings are often exacerbated when feedback is rare or high-stakes, as is the case with annual or semi-annual reviews. When we shift our mentality from giving feedback to looking for opportunities for feed forward, the burden fades. A well designed system supports all stakeholders within it doing the work.
Effective feedback must be structured not only into management processes, but into the very system of interactions throughout the organization. Learning organizations build personnel systems that set people up for success. In systems designed for growth and excellence, every manager (and their direct reports) can point to the activities that regularly ask and answer the following concerns:
- What they are doing well
- How their personal strengths are displayed in their work
- Why they were selected for a team
- Why and how they continue to add value to the team
- Their unique contributions to the team’s and the organization’s goals
- Desired outcomes and the reasons for those desired outcomes
- How to get support for their (self-initiated) career growth
- Where to take concerns when they are ill equipped or overwhelmed
- When they are at their best or their performance exceeds expectations
People Management
Many employee pulse surveys indicate that people want more feedback at work. This is particularly true of younger employees. The feedback they want is not a litany of things they are doing wrong. They want to know what they are doing well and how to do other things equally well. They want to know what makes them good and how to get even better. In spite of the language being used, what those surveys reveal is that what people really want is more connection.
When I was a new mother, I read an article extoling parents to “catch” their child being good. The concept stuck with me and found its way into my management style, eventually. In my early career, I was guilty of many of the pitfalls of feedback cited in the article. Today, I hate telling people how they can improve for many of the same reasons expressed in this article. Now, I put much of my people management effort into catching folks being excellent.
One of my favorite tactics is to provide feedback every time I am pleasantly surprised. To me, surprise is interesting and worth investigating. Surprise means something unexpected or different than usual happened. In analyzing what happened and why, I usually find an unacknowledged strength that can be utilized not only for that individual’s growth, but also to help the team and the organization thrive. This tactic requires deep humility and intentionality. (In honesty, I find the intentionality easier than the humility!) Nevertheless it is a powerful way to build trust, promote value, and, most importantly, give ownership of action and results back to your people where it belongs.
Memorable Quotes
1️⃣
“We humans do not do well when someone whose intentions are unclear tells us where we stand, how good we ‘really’ are, and what we must do to fix ourselves. We excel only when people who know us and care about us tell us what they experience and what they feel, and in particular when they see something within us that really works.”
2️⃣
“[L]earning happens when we see how we might do something better by adding some new nuance or expansion to our own understanding. Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not on what we’re doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly.”
3️⃣
“If you study failure, you’ll learn a lot about failure but nothing about how to achieve excellence. Excellence has its own pattern.”
Final Thoughts
Too many business organizations employ feedback systems that force their people into survival mode. Cloaked in the Orwellian doublespeak of “radical candor” or “growth opportunities,” these systems claim to seek excellence while actually quashing it before it has a chance to develop. The good news is that there is nothing inevitable about these systems. They can, and should, be replaced. When we center our focus on supporting our people in learning and growing while pursuing the purpose that unites us (bringing the organizational vision to life), we can create systems that recognize and reward people’s greatest strengths and we can use those strengths to supercharge growth. A good feedback systems gives people what they really need — lots of regular, meaningful attention.
To borrow a thought from the US Supreme Court: We don’t need to define excellence in advance. We just need to be able to know it when we see it.
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Thanks for reading! I am a self professed nerd who loves reading and learning. To me every book is a conversation. By the end of the conversation, I always have new ideas that I want to try. What are you reading?
