Can we stop giving feedback now? 5 better ways to actually improve team performance.
I said what I said. “Feedback” is one of my least favourite words in the English language.
Have you heard of the Feedback Fallacy?
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall summarised that telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel. In fact, research suggests that giving people our opinions of how we think they can and should improve actually hinders growth and learning.
You’ve felt it, right? “Can you I give you some feedback?” - it gives you the chills. It’s a roundly negative thing to be given feedback, as soon as you hear those words your body starts to respond. And that response is a stress response. Our parasympathetic nervous system reacts in the same way to all threats, fight or flight. Putting someone in this state of heightened stress is hardly the best way to have a reasonable conversation with them about their performance and opportunities for growth.
Would you still be giving your team honest feedback if you knew that every time, regardless of the outcome, you were triggering a stress response? Well, you shouldn’t.
Have you heard of the Idiosyncratic rater effect? Humans are not objective creatures, we rate other people’s behaviour and skills based on our own characteristics and not theirs, and this is resistant to both awareness of the phenomenon and being taught about how to avoid it.
Now, it’s important that we work in cultures where we can talk to each other about strengths and weaknesses, so as a leader, how do you approach this? Over the years, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and learned, through mostly trial and error and a good amount of reading, that it’s actually quite simple;
You remove the threat, real or perceived
Focus on strengths, rather than weaknesses
Here are my five top tips on how to drive growth, by exacerbating strengths instead of calling out weaknesses.
#1 - Catch people doing the right thing, always
This one is just Pavlovian, we repeat behaviour we are consistently praised for. If you want to create a team culture of performance, make sure you catch people doing the right things.
This is not the same as ignoring the opportunities for improvement, this is just simply taking the time to acknowledge things which are awesome about what someone has just done. For this to be the most effective, go from “Nice work in that meeting” to “Nice work in that meeting. The way you summarised and played back the results in that slide, and left the awkward silence for the client to fill with their interpretation really opened the conversation”.
Be specific. Focus on the things you like to see and want to see again. Consistently.
#2 Check yourself first
Are you frustrated because someone has just given you something laughably clear of the mark? Check yourself first.
Quite often, when I have been in this situation it has been because I was not clear, or specific about what I expected, to what standard and by when. If you can’t take the time to give clear direction and expectations, you’re always going to be disappointed by what people deliver to you. You might think leaving ambiguity gives people space to add their interpretations and creativity, but it really just leaves a void of “uhh no idea” which can’t ever be filled.
You are always going to be disappointed by what other people deliver you if you aren’t specific with your expectations. This counts for work projects, birthday presents, holidays, everything.
Just like it is roundly unreasonable of me to wait and sulk until my partner correctly guesses what I want for dinner, you cannot “give feedback” when you are vague AF.
When you set tasks, have your team member repeat their interpretation of the task back to you to check for understanding. Provide them with clarity about what you expect on the level of detail and when you want the first draft. Set regular catch-ups for coaching and review. Think about it, the more help you give someone with your expectations the more likely they are to succeed.
#3 Lead with empathy and connection
“You can’t use that slide, there’s too many words on there”
How about “I get what you’re trying to say, but here’s where you’re losing me in the details”
Leadership is a full-time job, coaching and managing people is your first concern. Take the time to think about what you’re saying and how it’s coming across. You want to give constructive feedback to someone without triggering their fight or flight response because once that is triggered they’re no longer listening.
There was once a time when you had too many words on slides and you said the wrong things at the wrong time and didn’t shut up in meetings. Take the time to build a connection with whomever you want to give feedback to, and give them something useful and constructive. Collaborate to improve, because two heads are honestly better than one.
Most importantly, if someone is having a bad day, give it a rest. Once, one of my team came to me to tell me what a hard time they were having at home, which to be honest really explained quite a lot of the dropped balls and lack of focus. In the days and weeks that followed, instead of hammering them for lack of focus and silly mistakes, I took the time to set clear directions on specific tasks and redirected a lot of the noise to other members of the team. I specifically gave them work I knew they would thrive at because when we feel like everything is shit, sometimes it’s the support of others and the little wins that make all the difference.
You don’t have to be pushing people all the time. Sometimes, everyone needs some downtime.
#4 Make it operational and focussed on what you want
It’s super easy to tell someone they have rubbish communication skills. Or to tell them they need to improve their communication with the team because no one understands what they’re working on.
Calling out a specific flaw in someone’s performance at work is absolutely necessary, especially if it’s having detrimental impacts on others. Even if you catch people doing the right thing always, you’re clear about what you expected and you’re empathically trying to understand where they’re at right now, sometimes you need to be blunt about what they need to improve.
You can do this without using the word feedback, you can do this without accusing them (or having them feel like you’re accusing them) of being rubbish at something. Focus on the outcome for others, rather than the absence of skill within them.
For example “When you don’t respond to our Slack channel I interpret that as you haven’t gotten the message, which slows down the operation of the team as a whole. I need you to ensure you’re participating in this way (insert specific way) so we all know we’re on the same page. How do you think you can improve your communication efficiency and reduce the ambiguity for the rest of the team?”
In my experience, rather than call someone out for their shitty communication, you want to provide them with an impact their behaviour is having and a suggestion for improvement. I always like to give people space to come up with their own suggestions, but again you need to be specific about the expected improvement in whatever the behaviour is. Coaching someone by asking specific questions means they (typically) have to respond with an actionable outcome which I can then hold them to.
As leaders, we always have to face the possibility that we actively have to manage a deficiency in someone’s performance in a more formal way. Coming at it from a coaching approach rather than a negative feedback approach gives you the opportunity to be direct in your experience and expectations, without suggesting that they aren’t performing well. Remember, “performing well” is subjective.
#5 Focus on the balance
This could have gone under #2, but I think it’s important enough to stand alone.
The second element to “checking thy self” is to check whether you’re asking people to live up to your expectations of good, the expectations by which you measure yourself. This is an impossible paradox and you’re being seriously unreasonable. You don’t need to build a team of clones, you need a team of individuals who complement each other (and you) in skills and experiences. You cannot feedback your way to a team of people who are all excellent at the same things, that’s ridiculous.
If you have 4 people on your team all with different strengths and weaknesses, then play to the strengths. One of the most profound leadership lessons I have learned over the years is that diversity brings creativity, collaboration and innovation. Build teams of balance in skill and diversity of experience and then celebrate it.
Ultimately performance is wildly subjective and when you put your focus is where your energy will flow. You want people to bring their whole selves to work, to be happy and fulfilled and you want to see better results today than you had yesterday. Focus on the positives, eliminate the feedback loops and celebrate the things which make some people good in some ways and others good in others.
Focus on creating a team united by its strengths rather than improving it’s weaknesses. The plants you feed and water are the ones that grow.
