Who Asks For Feedback?

Should leaders ask for feedback?  Of course.  Everyone should desire constructive input that can help them learn and improve.  Do they ask for feedback?  Oh, now we might have a very different story!  Bradley Busch recently wrote a blog post for the British Pyschological Society's Research Digest about a study of feedback-related behaviors by primary school teachers.   Busch summarized the research findings of James Spillane, Matthew Shirrell, and Samrachana Adhikari.  The three scholars recently published a paper in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis titled, "Constructing “Experts” Among Peers: Educational Infrastructure, Test Data, and Teachers’ Interactions About Teaching.  Spillane and his colleagues examined the tendency for teachers to ask for, or not ask for, feedback from their peers.  Busch highlights a key finding from this study:

The researchers found that the best teachers, as measured by those who had a higher percentage of students who met the minimum requirement to pass their class, and whose classes had higher than average test scores, were no more likely to be sought out by their colleagues for their advice. On the other hand, these expert teachers were the ones who were actually more likely to seek advice from their peers the following year. It seems that the better the teacher performed, the more likely they were to go out and obtain feedback on how to be even better.

The finding that the most able are not particularly sought after for their advice and are instead more likely to seek it from others is perhaps unsurprising. Other research, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, has found that the least able tend to have an inflated view of their abilities, which would presumably lead to them seeking out less feedback. After all, why would one seek out advice if they think there is little room for development? As for the expert teachers in this study, the researchers speculate that their advice-seeking tendencies may be explained as “they represent a group of teachers who are constantly striving to improve by seeking out advice and information from others”.

For me, the study leads naturally to a question about leaders in a variety of organizational settings.  Do the highest performing leaders have a tendency to ask for feedback more often than lower performing individuals?  Are the highest performers not sought out more often by their peers for help and advice?  Future research should explore these interesting questions.   My sense is that we will find results quite similar to those described here in an educational setting. 

Feedback's Impact on Innovation: A Key Tradeoff

Harvard Business School Professor Daniel Gross has a very intriguing new product development research article forthcoming in the Rand Journal of Economics.   Gross studied the impact of feedback on innovation efforts.  Specifically, he collected data from over 4,000 commercial logo design contests from an online platform.  Gross tried to understand the impact of feedback on the quality of subsequent submissions.  However, he also studied whether feedback might discourage some applicants from submitting additional designs in future rounds of the competition.  

What did Gross discover?    First, not surprisingly, feedback does improve the quality of subsequent work.   However, feedback also discourages future participation.  People who receive low ratings in the initial round are less likely to continue in the contest.   "A majority of players (69.5%) whose first rating is the lowest possible rating will subsequently stop investing in the contest."  That's not necessarily a bad thing.  Weeding out low performers can be efficient.  However, Gross finds that the detrimental impact on participation is NOT exclusive to individuals who receive negative feedback initially.  He also finds that, "Feedback can simultaneously reduce incentives for high-performers to participate, relative to incentives in a state of ignorance, by revealing or enabling high quality competitors."   Yikes!  We can actually discourage good people from continuing by being critical of their early work.  We should not be surprised by this finding.  Let's face it.  We all have a hard time receiving critical feedback at times.  

Thus, a tradeoff exists.   Quality improves, but participation suffers, when we provide critical feedback.  There's good news here though.  What's the net effect?  Gross argues that, "Feedback significantly increases high-quality output, with gains in quality far outweighing the costs to participation."  Moreover, he argues that, "Making feedback private yields modest incremental benefits by shrouding information on competitors' performance, which in turn reduces attrition."   In sum, we will have to live with some attrition when we provide critical feedback, but the net effect is positive in the innovation process.  

Positive vs. Negative Feedback

Ayelet Fishbach, Tal Eyal, and Stacey R. Finkelstein have written an interesting research paper titled, "How Positive and Negative Feedback Motivate Goal Pursuit."   They examined the usefulness of positive and negative feedback.  They conclude that timing matters. Moreover, it matters whether you are evaluating your commitment to a particular pursuit (positive feedback more helpful), or whether you are evaluating your progress toward a goal (negative feedback more helpful).  The authors explain: 

We propose that whether people wish to evaluate their commitment or pace of pursuing a goal influences whether positive or negative feedback is more effective. Our theory further predicts that the question people ask themselves (‘am I committed?’ versus ‘am I making sufficient progress?’) shifts over the course of pursuing a goal. People often start by evaluating commitment and then shift to monitoring progress as they gain experience or expertise in a goal domain. They make this shift because novices feel uncertain about their level of commitment, whereas experts are already committed and wish to monitor their rate of progress. One consequence of this shift is that novices should increase their efforts in response to positive feedback on their successes, and experts should increase their efforts in response to negative feedback on their lack of successes.

The authors describe a series of studies on this topic.  As an example, they examined student choice of instructors for French classes.  They found that beginner students preferred instructors who offered positive feedback.   Advanced students preferred instructors who offered more negative feedback.  

What's the lesson here?  If someone is just starting out on a challenging new task, they may want and need encouragement.  They could use more positive reinforcement than negative feedback.  However, as they begin to move toward mastery of that task, they need more negative feedback so that they can continue to improve.  

How We React To Disconfirming Feedback

Francesco Gino has conducted research into how people react to critical feedback.  Unsurprisingly, she finds that we do not deal well with feedback.   Well, perhaps there is some surprise here. After all, I seem to read often these days that millennials love feedback.  I've always wondered about the veracity of that statement.  It seems that it has become conventional wisdom without much data to support the conclusion.   Gino's research shows that we do not like disconfirming feedback - i.e. critiques that are more negative than our own self-evaluations.  Moreover, we try to distance ourselves from those that offer us disconfirming feedback and seek out others to add to our network that will affirm our positive self-evaluations.   Here's an excerpt from Gino's HBR article about this research:

We found that in the year following feedback, an employee was more likely to eliminate someone from his or her network who offered “disconfirming” feedback (i.e., feedback that is more negative than one’s own self-evaluation) than a reviewer who provided “confirming” feedback. More specifically, when a colleague’s review was one point lower on a seven-point scale than one’s own self-review, the employee was 44% more likely to drop the relationship with that colleague.

We also found that when receiving negative feedback from fellow colleagues with whom they must retain a working relationship, employees tried to create a more hospitable network by seeking new colleagues who were relatively disconnected from their current circle.

In follow-up laboratory studies, we found that people engage in such behaviors because disconfirming feedback threatens their own views of their skills and accomplishments.

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Feedback?

The Wall Street Journal reports today on the changing culture at Kimberly-Clark, maker of products such as Huggies diapers and Kleenex tissues.   In this article, Lauren Weber writes the following: 

"One of the company’s goals now is 'managing out dead wood,' aided by performance-management software that helps track and evaluate salaried workers’ progress and quickly expose laggards... Armed with personalized goals for employees and large quantities of data, Kimberly-Clark said it expects employees to keep improving—or else. 'People can’t duck and hide in the same way they could in the past,' said Mr. Boston, who oversees talent management globally for the firm.  It has been a steep climb for a company that once resisted conflict and fostered a paternalistic culture that inspired devotion from its workers."

Weber goes to write that Kimberly-Clark's performance management system reflects a trend taking place in many companies, in which firms have eliminated annual merit reviews and replaced them with more continuous feedback.   She cites examples such as Accenture, Adobe, and GE, all of whom eliminated traditional annual performance reviews.   These firms have adopted real-time feedback systems for a number of reasons including, according to Weber, the belief that, "Millennial workers, meanwhile, demand more feedback, more coaching and a stronger sense of their career path."  

My question is simple though:   Can we take this shift to continuous monitoring, evaluation, and feedback too far?   I keep hearing that millennials want more feedback, but I've spent a ton of time around young people as a college professor.  I'm not sure any of us love being critiqued at every turn.   We work on some projects that take some time to get off the ground.   Some ideas require some time to take shape.   In short, I think this shift taking place in corporate America raises some critical questions:  Is too much early "feedback" going to quash some creative ideas?    Are managers adept enough at offering constructive critique to make this type of real-time feedback system effective at many firms?  Are we evaluating what truly drives success, or are we focused on what is easy to measure?  Are we encouraging short term thinking when we provide real-time feedback, or are we making sure to keep long term objectives in mind?  

Why We Don't Seek Advice, but We Should!

When you face a difficult situation at work, do you seek advice from others?   Do you consult with them before making a decision?   Alison Brooks, Francesca Gino, and Maurice Schweitzer have written a new working paper about the process of seeking advice from others.  These scholars found that many individuals do not seek advice from others, because they do not want to look incompetent or incapable.  They fear that others will perceive advice-seeking as a sign of weakness.  Brooks, Gino, and Schweitzer then asked:  What do others think of you when you seek advice from others?  How do you they actually perceive you?  They found that people tend to view advice-seekers as more competent than those who do not garner input and counsel from others.  The scholars refined these findings further by examining the situations in which people view advice-seekers most favorably.  They found that we have a more favorable view of advice-seekers when the situation is difficult (as opposed to simple), and when people consult with experts (rather than non-experts).  Perhaps most interestingly, an individual has a more favorable view of an advice-seeker when that person came to him or her for that counsel, rather than going to others.  Aha!  So, what really impresses us is when others somehow think we are important/knowledgeable/wise.  That should not surprise us at all!

The Braintrust at Pixar

In this Fast Company excerpt from his book, Creativity, Inc., Pixar President Ed Catmull describes the company's "Braintrust."   Catmull explains the concept of the Braintrust: 

"The Braintrust meets every few months or so to assess each movie we're making. Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid. The Braintrust is not foolproof, but when we get it right, the results are phenomenal."

The Braintrust includes some of the best and brightest folks at Pixar.   The core value at the heart of this feedback process is candor.  As Catmull explains, "Believe me, you don't want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or policy are being hashed out."

What's interesting about the Braintrust, however, is that these people do not seek to dictate to a movie director what to do.    They share ideas with the director so as to "bring true causes of problems to the surface."   They do not advocate particular solutions.   Their feedback is designed to stimulate the director's thinking, and perhaps to encourage him or her to think differently about an aspect of the film.   The director must then take that feedback and find a way to address to the issues that have been raised. 

Too often, I think that people who are offering feedback and criticism do not follow this path.  They advocate their preferred solution.   Recipients of the feedback become defensive, and the entire conversation takes on a very negative tone.  The Pixar process tries to avoid that fate.

Feedback, Critique, and the Challenge vs. Failure Mindset

Stanford Professor Baba Shiv has done some fascinating research on the role of neurostructures related to motivation, emotion, and decision making.   Shiv argues that it's important to take the stress out of a situation if we want people to think creatively, engage in constructive dialogue and debate, and avoid becoming defensive.   By taking the stress out of a situation, we can help others move into a "challenge" mindset rather than a "failure" mindset. In other words, we can encourage them to view a critique as "an exciting challenge rather than a failure."  They become like the kid playing a videogame trying to conquer the next level of the game, rather than the person who recoils in the face of negative feedback. 

Shiv explains, for instance, that you should take someone on a walk, preferably in the morning, when giving them feedback.  Why?  The key is serotonin, a neurochemical that helps put us in a calm state, as opposed to a stressful state of mind.   Serotonin levels appear to be highest in the morning.  Moreover, going on a walk outdoors helps to elevate levels of serotonin.  Thus, this technique may help shift someone into a "challenge" mindset, which can make them less defensive about the feedback that you are going to provide.