Work

Have traditional ways of giving feedback outlived their usefulness?

Feedback reflects the person giving the feedback not the person it is being fed back to, Marcus Buckingham argues

Marcus Bucklingham: 'My ability to rate you is not driven by who you are but by my own idiosyncrasies.'

Olive Keogh's face
Olive Keogh
Fri Aug 12 2022 - 05:00

Marcus Buckingham is a business consultant, performance expert and author whose views on certain aspects of management practice have a hint of heresy about them. In particular, he reckons that feedback as currently used by most organisations is about as useful as giving a fish a bicycle.

Buckingham maintains that for the most part, feedback muddles people up. The only time it’s actually useful is when someone gets something specific wrong and it needs to be corrected or when they miss a necessary step in an sequence.

“On other occasions, feedback and advice are worse than useless,” he says. “No matter how carefully it’s framed, when laid bare what the person giving the feedback is really saying is, ‘You would do better at this if you did it more like me.’

There are times when feedback is necessary and desirable in the interests of efficiency and improvement

“Feedback reflects the person giving the feedback not the person it is being fed back to.” he adds. “The feedback may be well intentioned — ‘I’m telling you this to help you do better’ — but we know that’s not how learning works. Learning does not happen with me pouring information or techniques into you. Learning, growth and development come from within.

READ MORE

“People may say they love feedback. They don’t. Deep down everyone hates it because they’re being told some ‘truth’ about themselves that isn’t them or they’re being asked to do something in a way that says more about the person giving the feedback.”

Buckingham adds that 40 years’ of research shows that humans are very unreliable raters of other humans. “It’s called the idiosyncratic rater effect and it means that my ability to rate you is not driven by who you are but by my own idiosyncrasies. The only thing humans are reliable raters of is their own experience,” he says.

Buckingham’s view may upset those who have embraced feedback as a cornerstone of their leadership technique, but he’s right about one thing. If ever a word deserved a holiday, it’s feedback. Once an occasionally used expression to describe a specific unpleasant sound, feedback has been flogged to death by the corporate world and trotted out as the answer to everything, often regardless of context.

Somewhere along the line someone added the word “constructive” to indicate that this was a superior form of the practice.

There are times when feedback is necessary and desirable in the interests of efficiency and improvement. Good examples of feedback include customer ratings and reviews because they are a direct personal response to a product or service and can provide the basis for specific action.

Buckingham’s eyes were opened to what he calls the “feedback fallacy” when he stepped in to give some well-meaning advice to a friend who was about to record an audio book. Buckingham had recorded several books and had worked out a technique that ensured he could create the tone and phrasing that made for easy listening. He duly passed on his wisdom. It didn’t work at all for his friend.

Very often it’s not feedback employees want, it’s visibility, attention, and reinforcement about what works

After the session, Buckingham asked how it went expecting to be praised for his apposite advice. Instead he walked away completely deflated having been told that his technique bombed and that the friend had worked out his own way of handling the situation.

“My advice hadn’t freed him. It had smothered him,” Buckingham says, adding that his vision of himself as a “coach extraordinaire” took a battering as a result of this experience. But it also taught him a salutary lesson: people have to find their own way and they are more likely to do so if their manager points out what they’re really good and at and asks for more of the same, instead of telling them what they’re doing wrong.

To advance his argument Buckingham draws a distinction between feedback and reaction. “Whenever anyone says, ‘I have some feedback for you,’ politely close your ears. You are about to be, well intendedly, smothered. You can listen but don’t act on it,” he says.

However, if someone shares their reaction with you that’s a different story and you should be all ears. “Reaction is a much humbler gift. It is not a prescription as it’s not saying, ‘do more of this, less of that’. It is merely a response to something you said or did or wrote and, as such, it’s honest with no agenda. Reactions are excellent raw material to help you understand the dent you are making in the world and you will always be at your most productive when you’re inside your own skin,” Buckingham says.

“When someone’s reaction was exactly what you wanted — they loved your call, your email, your presentation, your singing voice, whatever, then spend a ton of time being curious with them about their reaction,” he adds. “Ask them why they felt the way they did, what worked for them, when they leant in, what grabbed their attention. You’re doing this not to fish for praise, but to learn more and more about who you are when you are at your best.

“Very often it’s not feedback employees want, it’s visibility, attention, and reinforcement about what works,” Buckingham says. “Ignoring people hurts them. A really good manager won’t give them “feedback.’ He or she will help them to understand where they have the most ‘power’ in the world and an employee is 15 times more likely to be engaged at work if their manager focuses on their strengths and not on their weaknesses.”