Is 'negative' feedback worth your time?

By Pradeep Chakravarthy, leadership expert

At work or at home, one thing we cannot escape from is feedback. Either we are giving it to others (often, when they don’t want it) or we are hearing it from others (often, when we don’t want it)!

Anyone will give a list of what should and should not be done when giving feedback since we get it in different forms and flavours since our childhood. Today, with increased demands for highperforming teams and a reduced tolerance for one another, feedback needs to be efficiently given so the other person acts or thinks differently and the way we want them to. It is this universality of feedback that makes it so much easier to rely on anecdotes rather than research-based evidence to give and receive feedback in a productive way. But two recent studies — one by Avraham N Kluger and Angelo DeNisi, and the other by James W Smither, Manuel London and Richard R Reilly — have made some astonishing discoveries.

Here are the Key Findings:

1.Feedback is detrimental to performance in a third of the cases, because it is not executed effectively. So it is not enough to pride in giving feedback, how we do it becomes more important.

2.Feedback can lead to change of behaviour when it is based on previously set goals and standards, and the feedback looks at the gaps between them and performance. Many of us can relate to how we have hated getting feedback only during appraisal time. So does this mean you need to give feedback every day? Surely not. By extrapolation, it may help for each of us to ask others around us how often do we need to exchange feedback. It could be on a time basis or on a milestone basis. Either way, the very spirit of inclusion will improve trust and, therefore, the likelihood of the feedback being accepted and acted on.

3.Attention of the receiver is limited and what s/he pays attention to is what will influence their change of behaviour. This means when a person is receiving feedback, it may save a lot of time and energy in focusing on the behaviour more than hypothesising the intent behind it.

4.Leaders who direct the attention of the receiver to ideals rather than to contractual transactions seem to be more effective.

5.Improvement is more likely to occur when –

a. The change is seen as necessary by both the giver and the receiver

b. The behaviours that need change are explicitly listed and agreed upon

c. The change is seen as feasible

d. The reactions to the feedback are positive

e. The new goals are set to regulate the behaviour, and actions lead to measurable (objective and subjective) improvement

f. Attention is also paid to skill improvement, where needed, to execute the feedback
Kluger, A. N. & A. DeNisi. (2004). Feedback interventions: Towards the understanding of a double-edged sword, Reprinted in T. F. Oltmanns and R. E. Emery, Eds., Current Directions in Abnormal Psychology, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

James W Smither, J W, London, M &Reilly Richard R, (2005), “Does Performance Improve Following Multisource Feedback? A Theoretical Model”, Personnel Psychology; Spring 2005; 58, 1; Pp 33 – 66.