The Feedback Fallacy
~1000 words. 4 minute read.
(Best to read this with an air of the theatrical.)
I had to pick that one up. I mean, for 2 years as a trainee at Deutsche Bank, 6 years in college with all its seminars, group work, and presentations, and for 12+ years as a professional (at that time), I had been taught, maybe brainwashed into believing, that feedback… oh feedback was everything! Learning how to give it and receive it, resisting the urge to explain yourself in the face of criticism, listening for constructive clues on how to improve… my God! The opportunities to become a better version of myself, if only I asked for and gave feedback, ideally every waking hour.
And then in 2019, the Harvard Business Review (March-April 2019, Volume 97, Issue 2) led with: ‘Why Feedback Fails’. The same authors who wrote that article (Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall) also published a book: ‘Nine Lies About Work’, with one chapter dedicated to shredding the ‘lie’ that ‘employees need feedback’! A total of 38 pages, chock full of reasons, research of the behavioral and the neuroscientific kind explaining why it was all a lie, propaganda, a fantasy, a figment of the imagination of performance coaches world-wide and of business leaders, who used this powerful tool to regulate talent, reign it in where required, setting it free where possible.
A few highlights:
The Idiosyncratic Rater Effect
I immediately rejoiced at the discovery and naming of this phenomenon! And how fitting that its acronym should be IRE! It means: 60% (or so) of my feedback for you is about me. Yea – we humans are just not good at letting go of our Ego (in the Freudian sense).Fundamental Attribution Error
(Could these names get any better?) This one describes the tendency to skew explanations of another’s behavior toward stories about who they are, rather than how they acted under any given circumstance. We are not looking at external situations faced by the individual, but rather give them personal feedback (read: feedback about their person) right away. Yet, when we explain our own actions, we are far more generous in attributing them to circumstance, not to our person.Interrupting for the Negative
Business life invented process upon process that interrupts behavior that creates mistakes or constitutes undesirable situations. It may happen, but I am sure it’s rare, that we stop everything to create a high-priority interruption when the team does something that really works. Sure, we will celebrate. But that can wait until the next Town Hall or All Hands meeting. We miss the chance to create a positive memory in the moment, the afterglow of which could sustain us for months. After all, positive feedback is 30x more effective than negative feedback.
There is obviously so much more. So much more that rang intuitively true the first time I read it and has only cemented itself in my mind through first-hand experience and further study of the subject.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The intent to learn from the evaluation of my actions through others is certainly an honest and valid one. So where does my rejecting attitude towards feedback come from that now soars on the wings of vindication?
It comes from what I perceive to be a contradiction between the promise of feedback and the paradigm that:
“Communication happens on the listener’s terms.”
Masterful communicators are adaptable and responsive to the listener. Considering the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect and its distortion, feedback is a guise for an abstract quality in the person providing feedback. Things like business acumen or assertiveness maybe. But how can we accept the complexity of the world and promote diversity, while at the same time allowing ourselves to prescribe that our way is the right or better way – as this is what feedback does best?
If not feedback, then what?
