How NOT to provide feedback. —-LOL, the irony!
Follow 3 simple rules to give feedback, so it doesn’t blow up in your face.
We all want to give feedback that produces positive results, minimizes ill feelings between parties, and maximizes buy-in from our partners. Organizational psychology focuses on how to accomplish just this. We (partners, parents, friends, family & community members) can benefit from adopting successful communication practices of high-achieving, loved and inspiring leadership or partnership. Here is what we know so far:
Effective feedback is future-focused, collaborative, solution-oriented, and more clearly specifies desired outcome. It reflects recognized buy-in and assumed intact motivation; it fosters growth mindset.
It is so easy to get feedback wrong, and so easy to go off-track. We are narrowing in on how to get it right, however, and this post provides an important update to what we know about how to and how not to provide feedback.
In studies, even when the feedback was given under the premise of helping develop better behavior, feedback that highlighted the poor behavior choice and/or sought to gain agreement on establishing blame, cause, or explanation, backfired demonstrating reduced motivation for change and increased ill-will between all parties involved in the feedback.
So, it is better to avoid focusing on the past and trying to gain agreement on who and what was at fault for the failure/poor outcome as this decreases motivation and intention for change.
Here is what you want to focus on in giving feedback to your partner or your child (or your friend, or your co-worker, etc.):
- State specifically —get as specific as possible about your hopes, and invite their collaborative, solution-oriented discussion of worthwhile alternative efforts/actions. Brainstorm potential solutions and identify opportunities for success.
- Stay positive about the past, be reflective of your positive experience of your partner’s competence and acknowledge your assumption of their sincere motivation for success.
- Stay future oriented! Avoid going back to focus on what happened in the past.
Studies showed that even when the feedback was very negative, if the feedback that was given was future-focused, it tended to be received better and led to higher reported motivation for change.
So saying,
“I am feeling horrible about missing the garbage pickup, I am so mad, so frustrated, that we will have the stink piling up in the hot summer sun, stinking up the whole entire neighborhood, throwing off the air pollution monitoring systems, sending up plumes into the cosmos and scaring away aliens that would have landed here to provided a cure for cancer, and the Corona virus! I know we both want to make the trash pick up and I do know you care. We are usually pretty good with setting up ongoing calendar reminders. It would help me if we got the trash out right after dinner clean-up, that would certainly free me up from worrying about in the evening. Maybe it might help to set a reminder for just after the time when we normally finish up dinner? What else might help or could you or we try?”
…is way better than saying,…
“You got up late again and hadn’t put it out the night before like we talked about last week, honey. We’ve just got to work on procrastination, and I do understand that your friend had called in a favor.”
The first super negative script is way more motivating for changing behavior than the last because it does not focus directly on the past behavior.
The first script stays away from labeling behavior that needs to change; instead it focuses on collaboratively identifying future behaviors that might produce a specifically different, hoped-for outcome.
In sum, do remember, that in studies, those who rated feedback discussions as most future-focused, more readily accepted feedback and indicated high intention to change even when the feedback was most negative. And keep in mind, it is a positive to initiate the conversation with expressing the goal of improving things in the future, but don’t sabotage it by focusing on the past mistake, or what explains or caused the failure. Instead, reflect and assume growth-mindset and encourage input about what to try next to reach a more specifically outlined, achievable goal.
Content inspired by: Jackie Gnepp, Joshua Klayman, Ian O. Williamson, Sema Barlas, 2020. The future of feedback: Motivating performance improvement through future-focused feedback.
Where the science comes from: the field of organizational psychology (Jackie Gnepp, Ph.D.—of Humanly Possible).
