The antifeedback: general feedback

Reading Gallup’s statistics, we know that feedback is important for motivation within a group. However, feedback doesn’t always produce the desired result. If we give feedback in the wrong way, people can feel less motivated rather than encouraged to do their best.

One of the reasons behind this outcome lies in generic feedback.

Let’s see a practical example: if I say to improve your work organization, you might think about better organizing your schedule, and thus you will undertake a series of actions to improve managing your appointments. In reality, by ‘you need to improve work organization,’ I meant organizing your files differently because I have difficulty finding things in your folders.

This lack of clarity about the expected output creates friction that generates frustration on both sides. The requester doesn’t get what they expected, and the person who worked hard to improve their schedule feels like they’ve wasted time.

So, when giving feedback, it’s crucial to be precise about what we mean and what we expect.

The suggestion we provide in our courses is to decide with your team a criterion for measuring results. This helps to clarify what you want and supports the change process by monitoring the progress of what you actually want to improve.

Returning to the previous example, if a measurement criterion had been decided – e.g., the speed at which one can find a document in the cloud – it would have been immediately clear to the discussion participants that improving work organization meant different things. Thus, the object of improvement would have been clarified before taking actions in the right direction.

This technique yields two benefits: the first is to clarify the objective, avoiding wasting time on useless actions; the other is to reduce tensions while maintaining high employee engagement.

In summary, when we give unclear feedback, people might try to improve, but not in the way we would like. This can cause frustration and confusion. Therefore, it’s important to be specific in our feedback. If we don’t, it can cause problems both at work and in personal situations. In fact, the techniques we teach provide people with valuable tools to address the challenges of their daily lives.