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Focus on behavior change
One of the biggest mistakes that leaders make when they give feedback is, they spend too much time judging the person and not enough time trying to focus on behavior change. There was a meta-analysis, a study of studies, published by Kluger and DeNisi, where they reviewed literally a century of research on effective feedback. And they found that feedback becomes less effective when it moves away from the task and the specific behaviors involved, and moves toward the person.
When you start to tell people what they do wrong consistently, what makes them ineffective or incompetent, you invite their ego to show up. Psychologists have even called this “the totalitarian ego” – the idea that within everybody’s head lives an inner dictator, whose job is to control the flow of information to the brain, kind of like Kim Jong-un controls the press in North Korea. And at that point, nothing is going to get through.
If you can tell people one or two things that they could do better, instead of trying to prove themselves, they’re much more open to figuring out how they can improve themselves. There was a study that was published on this a few years back, that I thought was really clever. It showed that you can make people significantly more open to constructive criticism, just by saying about 19 words before you deliver it. Those 19 words are roughly, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I’m confident you can reach them.” That completely changes the tone of the conversation. I’m not attacking you. I’m not judging you. I’m here to coach you and help you grow.
So I taught this to my students at Wharton when I first read this research a few years ago. A few weeks later, I gave out mid-course feedback forms and three different students had written at the top: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I’m confident you could reach it.” And I’m like, “No! No!” You do not need to say those 19 words verbatim. The point is to communicate that you believe in my potential and you care about my success, and you should do that in your own words. When leaders remember to do that, it turns out it is surprisingly easy to hear a hard truth from someone who wants to help you succeed.
Avoid the feedback sandwich
I know whenever I’m giving feedback, and I’m sure this is true for most leaders, I want to build the person up as opposed to tearing them down. And a lot of us instinctively try to do that by serving up the feedback sandwich, right? So we’re like, okay, let me take a compliment and then a piece of criticism and then another compliment, and that way I can sandwich my critique between two slices of praise. Well, guess what? Empirically, the feedback sandwich does not taste as good as it looks.
There are a bunch of things that go wrong when we try to serve that up. If the person you’re serving it to is anxious at all, they’re not even going to hear the praise. They’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. The other problem is, if they’re pretty confident, the opposite problem kicks in; which is they’re going to fall victim to primacy effects and recency effects. So they’re going to remember the first compliment and the last compliment, and what happened in the middle is just going to get erased from their memory.
What’s much more effective is to start off by just clearly segmenting your domains of praise from your domains of constructive criticism. So, I would go into this conversation and say, “I want to tell you a couple of things you’re doing well and a couple of things that you could work on improving. Do you have a preference for which we do first?” When I’m doing that, I’m not only clearly segmenting the praise from the criticism, so that they can realize that those are separate things, I’m also then making this a two-way conversation as opposed to a one-way monologue. And I’m inviting the other person to have a voice in how this process goes. They’re going to feel like they’re taking some ownership over it, they’re an equal participant in the conversation.
I think the last thing, in terms of framing the conversation, is to reinforce that this is truly a two-way street. You want to ask the other person, “Is there anything I can do better?” or “Is there something you want me to know about how I can work more effectively with you?” And that way we’re building a foundation for a better collaboration, as opposed to me just telling you what you need to change. Just like in a marriage, that would probably not work very well if you tell your spouse, “It’s not me, it’s you.” As a leader or manager, the same principle applies. If you show a willingness to grow, the other person is a lot more excited about trying to grow with you.