Constructive feedback is a management tool that’s drummed into every leader, and we practise it almost daily – but what if we’re getting it all wrong? What if providing critical feedback is actually affecting our employees’ performance negatively rather than positively?
Research by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall from ADP Research Institute shows that criticism – no matter how constructive – actually impedes our ability to learn.
Buckingham and Goodall found that the human brain responds to critical feedback as a threat – the sympathetic nervous system lights up and the body focuses only on survival. Basically we are all in flight or fight mode when someone criticises our performance, and no learning occurs.
Instead, humans learn best when we are feeling good. Highlight what someone is doing well, and ask them to replicate it. To put it another way – while it’s common to say we learn more when we are out of our comfort zones, the opposite is true. In fact we are more open to possibility, more creative and more productive when we are in our comfort zone.
To promote excellence, we need to focus on outcomes. If you see an employee doing something that is really working well, highlight it and focus on what excellence looks like. Rather than use bland praise like ‘good job’, dissect which aspects impress you and have good outcomes. Use your reactions – ‘This is how it came across to me…’ or ‘Did you just see what happened there?’
If you do need to correct poor performance, again use your own reactions, ‘when you did this, I felt that’ and lead your employee to work on their behaviour, ‘what have you done in the past to fix this situation?’
It’s clear as humans we perform at our best when people we respect notice and emphasise success, not failure. How will you give feedback today?
