FEEDBACK

The Problem with Feedback

The challenges of giving and receiving feedback are regular topics in the popular and business press. The widespread interest in and use of feedback are built upon an assumption that receiving feedback will result in improved performance. This assumption can be traced back to a confusion between behaviorist research on positive and negative reinforcement -- think of Pavlov's dogs who would drool when they heard the dinner bell -- and performance feedback for people. The behaviorist terms from the 1920s of positive and negative reinforcement were equated with positive and negative feedback in the business literature of the 1950s.

Because many belief that feedback leads to improved performance, many organizations require annual performance reviews as a way to help employees improve. These reviews are designed to provide employees with feedback on their work performance over the previous year. However, as Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone wrote in the Harvard Business Review,

…in many organizations, feedback doesn’t work. A glance at the stats tells the story: Only 36% of managers complete appraisals thoroughly and on time. In one recent survey, 55% of employees said their most recent performance review had been unfair or inaccurate, and one in four said they dread such evaluations more than anything else in their working lives. (para. 2)

If 55% of employees find these experiences of feedback unfair and 25% of employees dread feedback more than anything else, then even though performance reviews are a well-researched topic in business literature, the experience of giving and receiving feedback remains unclear and problematic.

One challenge regarding feedback in the form of performance reviews is that these reviews are typically given by those in power to those under their power or control. However, research has suggested that this power differential itself influences how giving and receiving feedback is experienced. Batista (2014) described the problem this way:

When we encounter people of higher status, when we experience uncertainty, when we feel less autonomy or freedom of choice, when we feel less connected to those around us, and when we believe that something is unfair we are more likely to experience a social threat. It’s no wonder that feedback can be so stressful!

Receiving feedback from someone of higher status, when there is uncertainty about the content and possibly a sense that it may be unfair, leads to an experience psychologists refer to as “social threat” that can activate our “threat response,” which includes physiological, emotional, and cognitive reactions to the perception of conflict. Willis, a psychologist, describes what happens to the brain under these conditions:

“when stress activates the brain’s affective filters, information flow to the higher cognitive networks is limited and the learning process grinds to a halt”

In other words, the experience of receiving feedback from a superior may undermine the central purpose of giving feedback, which is to promote learning or change.

But, according to research by Paul Green at Harvard Business School (Berinato, 2018):

The idea behind performance appraisals, and feedback in general, is that to grow and improve, we must have a light shined on the things we can’t see about ourselves. We need the brutal truth. There’s an assumption that what motivates people to improve is the realization that they’re not as good as they think they are. But in fact, it just makes them go find people who will not shine that light on them. It may not be having the intended effect at all.

Because of these many problems with feedback, corporations are beginning to recognize that feedback as it is currently done results in very little improvement, often results in poorer performance and it takes a lot of time and money to do. As a result, they are doing away with performance reviews. Deloitte, in 2014, did away with the entire system for all of their 250,000 employees around the globe. The Harvard Business Review reports that Adobe, Accenture, Cargill, ConAgra, Gap, Intel, Juniper Networks, Medtronic, Microsoft, and Sears have also either done away with performance reviews or were in the midst of doing so.

Feedback for Teachers

Most teachers receive no input on their performance, a study on teacher feedback reported that “74% of teachers reported that they received virtually no feedback or suggestions from their supervisors. Researchers Drago-Severson and Blum-DeStefano (2016) argue that: “Throughout the education world, there remains a growing sense that we need to do something different in terms of feedback, not just something more”.

Much of the feedback that teachers do receive is experienced much as the performance reviews described above. It is experienced as being more about the supervisor than the teacher. There is a sense that it all depends are who is giving the feedback, that it is arbitrary and can be unfair or irrelevant to their work. All of this rests on a deeper problem. We are sure what we mean be the term "feedback," what it is and what it isn't.

What is Feedback

So, we've learned so far:

• Often feedback doesn't work, and sometimes it makes things worse.

• Most people hate giving it and almost everyone hates receiving it.

• It is especially difficult for supervisors to give effective feedback to the people they supervise because the difference in power can lead to a "threat response" that causes the brain to stop taking in information and to stop learning.

• We assume people need to be told what they're doing wrong so that they will get better, but it doesn't seem to work that way in real life.

• That teachers get very little feedback, and what they get isn't very useful to them but does cause them stress.

But what we don't know yet is, what do we mean by "feedback"?

The word feedback is in common usage today, and the idea of feedback as a telling somewhat what they are doing right or wrong has a long history. Hippocrates and other prominent Greek physicians described this as a feature of medical teaching in the ancient world. The problem is that the idea of giving clear direct information about to someone about a specific task that has clear learnable steps has shifted to also include almost any kind of information or opinion. This is why 'feedback' is so often experienced as unfair and not helpful. What is often called "feedback" is just opinions shared from a position of authority.

Contemporary use of the word feedback began during the Industrial Revolution in reference to regulating steam engines. The most common experience of this sort of feedback loop is an air conditioner: If the room is warm and you turn on an air conditioner, the machine will keep working until it reaches the temperature you set. Then it gets a signal (feedback) to stop working. When the room begins to warm above the temperature you set, the air conditioner gets a signal to start working again. In this way the air conditioner starts and stops in relation to the feedback about the current temperature. There are really only two messages: keep going or stop.

There is no opinion involved. The information is factual and observable. It has nothing to do with a person's personal perspective. Interestingly, those are exactly the factors that are present when feedback DOES work.

Effective and ineffective Feedback

Kluger and DeNisi, in 1996, conducted a meta-analysis of more than 2,500 papers and 500 technical reports on feedback. Their research indicated that the impact of a feedback intervention is dependent on where the person receiving the feedback focuses. There are three possibilities:

1. Helps the receiver focus on the task at hand. This feedback is information about a task, such as reminding the receiver of a step that was missed in a process they are learning.

2. Leads the receiver to focus on the details of the task at hand. This feedback may be evaluative, judging how well or badly a step in the task was done, or whether they are doing the task quickly enough.

3. Causes the receiver to focus on the self. This is feedback that results in the receiver thinking about themselves. Something like "why am I even doing this?" or "I'll never learn how to do this."

In their research, only feedback that led to a focus on the task at hand (#1) resulted in an improvement in performance. Feedback that was experienced as evaluative, suggesting that they weren't doing something well enough, or feedback that led the receiver to question themselves both resulted little change or a in a decline in performance.

Interestingly, it didn't matter whether the person giving the feedback was kind or unkind, direct or indirect, had good intentions or not. What mattered was where a receiver of feedback focused their attention in response. Did they look more carefully at the task at hand, or did they feel they were being judged, or did they begin to judge themselves. Only focusing more carefully on the task led to improvement.

Here are the characteristics for feedback that helps the receiver focus on the task at hand:

• Information about how the task was supposed to have been done. Modeling, for example.

• Information about how the task was actually done.

• Information that compares the task was supposed to be done with how the task was actually done. A way to compare the two in order to identify the difference. For example, a rubric.

In other words for feedback to be effective it needs to be focused on a doable task, not on the person. The recipient needs to have clear information on how they are supposed to do the task, and to understand that. They need to have clear information on how they did the task. And they need a way of comparing how they did to the goal.

Conclusion

Feedback is a complex topic. The assumption that people need to get feedback to get better is flawed, only some very specific forms of feedback result in improvement. Much feedback results in problems, conflicts, even worse performance. Part of this is a misunderstanding of what feedback is and what it is not.

Feedback is:

• concrete, observable information -- information that both the giver and receiver agree is true.

• specific to a task.

• information on the difference between the goal performance and the actual performance.

Feedback is NOT:

• a supervisor's opinion.

• evaluation or judgement

However, much of what we call "feedback" is actually, opinion, evaluation or judgement. So the first question to ask yourself is "what is my motive in offering this feedback?" If it's not to tell someone to keep doing what they are doing, or to do a very concrete task differently, backed up by clear data, then you are probably not giving feedback, you might be sharing your opinion, judgement or evaluation. If so, and you still feel you need to share, be clear that it is your opinion, judgement or evaluation.