Manila, 23 March 2022 — The three feedback traps you want to avoid.

Story

It happens regularly. Also this week. Colleagues who break down in tears after receiving feedback that was unskillfully provided. There is something about our human experiences with feedback that can be very stressful. Yet not to everyone and all the time. People are different, and so is our mental readiness that sets the stage for how receptive we can be to feedback at a particular time or with a particular person. At the other end of the spectrum, I worked with some leaders who are happily and constantly looking to receive feedback so that they can improve their performance. In my experience, that’s still a minority.

Researchers at the NeuroLeadership Institute have discovered that it’s not just receiving feedback that can cause stress to rise. The same can happen, they found, when we are asked for feedback, and when we give feedback. One way or another, when engaging with feedback it seems that we feel more at risk than at other times to experience what is called a threat response inside us. Something deep inside us, in the most ancient parts of our brain, can get triggered, and once it is, it’s not that easy to calm it down. Hence the apprehension, fear, and tears.

If you would ask me what I consider to be the most important behavior that leaders should learn to master, I would respond, with only a brief hesitation: Feedback! Why, you might ask, if there are so many other critical behaviors to learn? Here is how I would answer. First, that we humans are a social species, and that leadership — beyond self-leadership — is all about how we relate effectively with other people. Second, that influencing other people for change requires collaboration. And third, that we don’t get very far with the first two without building trust. And that’s where feedback is essential. The way we handle feedback either builds trust or reduces, or even destroys it. Handling feedback the right way is a foundational leadership skill.

Challenge

Whether you are apprehensive about receiving, asking for, or giving feedback, or you are enthusiastically practicing feedback behaviors in your workplace without feeling restrained, I believe we can all learn a few lessons about handling feedback better. From my experience, I see Three Feedback Traps to avoid. I have called them No Feedback, Threat Response, and Creating Dependency. Let’s look at these in turn. We are in the No Feedback trap when we avoid asking for, receiving, or giving feedback. This is more common than you think in many workplaces, because of the risk of having to deal with the stress that comes with a threat response. Better stay safe and avoid or minimize the risk, a part of your mind might be telling you. Needless to say, that when you’re in this trap, you and everyone around you miss out on the potential benefits of effective feedback behaviors.

The Threat Response Trap is where you are still lacking the skills to avoid or minimize a threat response in yourself or others. We can fall into this trap easily, most often with the best of intentions as we want to share with others how they can improve what they do or just did in their work, or did over the past year or six months when it comes to feedback given during performance review discussions. With what we now know from neuroscience, it is simply a waste of everyone’s time when you give ‘constructive’ feedback after a threat response has been triggered that has shut down the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain where we should figure out how to do things better. If you are not aware of this, you can find yourself in this trap.

And when do you fall into the Creating Dependency Trap? This has to do with the way most people understand what feedback is all about, that it focuses on advising someone else how to do something better. Well-intentioned as we are, for most of us in the workplace it’s not difficult to open up and come up with many points of feedback to share. Depending on the mental makeup and position of the person receiving the feedback, there is a risk that they will accept your feedback as good advice, even when it may actually not be what they need most. While given with the best of intentions, feedback can result in a greater dependency on colleagues rather than in empowering them to come up with their own solutions and fully own these. We all have, as Michael Bungay Stanier has pointed out in his TED talk, an advice monster that sits on our shoulders and loves to give feedback in the form of advice.  

Question

My question for you this week is to review how you experience asking for feedback, receiving feedback, and giving feedback. How comfortable are you with these three behaviors? Go ahead and score your comfort level between 1 and 10 for each of these three. And while you’re at it, how skillful are you at avoiding the Three Feedback Traps in your workplace? I know that I have been in all three, and that’s why I can write about them. I recognize them from my own experience. 

A reminder about the Threat Response Trap. When someone in your presence feels triggered by the thought of feedback coming up, that doesn’t mean that you are triggering that response. The situation can make that happen too. Thankfully, there are ways we can help others to avoid or minimize such a response, and thereby create the conditions for a rewarding feedback experience. That’s where neuroscience can help us be better leaders.

In earlier posts, we recognized how important our choice of words is for our leadership. One of the tips of the researchers at the NeuroLeadership Institute deals with that too, when they encourage us to find synonyms for giving feedback, such as sharing ‘perspectives’ or even ’strengths.’ That might help to avoid the Three Feedback Traps. The most powerful behavior I discovered to avoid the three traps is to learn to acknowledge a person for a behavior s/he has shown or a result achieved. That brings us back to the need for us to build trust for collaboration, instead of provoking a threat response that sets us all back.