Why instant feedback might hurt your team’s performance?

Would you be surprised if I tell you that a study by HBR has pointed out that instant feedback hurts our performance? The study included 382 Singapore residents who participated in the hope of getting an insurance discount. The participants allowed a mobile-app to monitor and rate their driving on the basis of behaviors like speeding, braking, accelerating, etc.

When the results came out, the researchers found that driving scores were 13.3% worse on trips taken right after drivers had reviewed their ratings. In comparison, people who hadn’t reviewed their ratings displayed no such erratic behavior.

An obvious reaction to this study would be — How can feedback make someone’s driving worse?

If you too are caught up in the same thought, here’s your answer- feedback impacts different people in different ways. Those who looked at the feedback were able to see whether they can achieve their goal or not. That feedback drew them either into despair or cheerfulness. Realizing that they have already achieved their goal made them a slacker. And learning that they can never reach their goal, no matter how hard they tried, made them even worse.

One might argue that real-time feedback is very different from peer-to-peer feedback and therefore, this study wouldn’t translate well in case of high-growth organizations.

I have a slightly different opinion on this. I agree that feedback must not be delayed to the point that it turns out to be meaningless. However, one must not rush too fast either and must deliberate before giving feedback. Especially if it’s critical feedback and you want the other person to take it positively.

Confused much?

I get your point. Let’s take it one by one.

When the feedback is small, but important

“Good job on the sales report, Dave! It was very insightful. There was just one thing missing though. I would have loved to see how many offline sales we made in the last quarter.”

“Chris, we talked about it last week as well. And I was under the impression that you’re going to deliver your goals by this Friday. Please help me understand what’s causing the delay and why we aren’t chasing our deliverable as fiercely as we should? Is there something that I’m missing here?”

“I have shared it before, but I’ll say it again because I want all of us to be on the same page. When we say that a customer comes before anyone else, we mean it. There’s no way we are going to compromise on the quality of our product. As a quality inspector, you have to ensure that nothing faulty leaves from our table.”

These are just a few examples of what comprises small feedback. When you’re delighted with a team member’s work, don’t stop yourself from appreciating it then and there. When you see that even after frequent reminders, a team member is still missing major deadlines, stop by and check again to remind him/her of the commitment.

You don’t necessarily need to set up a meeting to convey small feedback to a team member. You can quickly get it over with when you meet them in the hallway, or just when you walk out of the meeting room. Whether it’s praise or criticism, the best time to say those words is shortly after the incident has occurred. Otherwise, the moment would be lost and it will affect the way the other person acts when you give him/her feedback in future.

Also, in cases when a team member’s behavior is affecting the entire team/organization, one should act immediately and give transparent feedback.

When the feedback is big, urgent and important

Human beings have this innate ability to feel threatened while receiving feedback. A biochemist wrote on The Neurochemistry of Positive Conversations in the HBR article-

“When we face criticism, rejection or fear, when we feel marginalized or minimized, our bodies produce higher levels of cortisol, a hormone that shuts down the thinking center of our brains and activates conflict aversion and protection behaviors.

We become more reactive and sensitive. We often perceive even greater judgment and negativity than actually exists. And these effects can last for 26 hours or more… Cortisol functions like a sustained-release tablet — the more we ruminate about our fear, the longer the impact.”

For this reason, it’s a good practice to wait at least a few hours, or a day, before giving feedback to a colleague who hasn’t performed well. Moreover, it gives you time to think through the situation and collect all the information (past and present) to put forth the context of the feedback.

Ideally, it’s best to set up a time with 2–3 days prior notice when both of you have reflected on the incident and are out of the misery of a failed project/presentation. For the leader who is giving feedback, it’s better to schedule a 1:1 discussion with enough time and patience to deliver the feedback in a calm and thorough manner.

By choosing an appropriate time — and considering what the other person is going through– there’s a big chance that you’ll increase the likelihood of (positive) acceptance of the feedback. And when teams receive feedback well, it’s a sign that they’ll do something about it. Mostly, something great!

While your intentions about giving feedback might be in the best interest of the team member/organization, it’s always a good idea to keep yourself in the same situation and think through it. Keep the human heart at the center of every decision and you’ll be fine.

I wrote this blog for our Medium Publication- Unboxing Product Management. The publication is a weekly column by people of Quovantis to share their learning.