Mary considers herself a good manager. Whenever one of her employees struggles with an assignment, she swoops in to help them put things in order and offer helpful pointers.
Her company is now introducing a 360-degree performance management system based on the concept of continuous feedback. As a manager, she’s been encouraged to lead the transition by asking for feedback from her team first. She’s excited about this change because she thinks it will help a few of her team members to open up and resolve conflicts with each other.
However, after receiving feedback, she’s surprised to find that several people says she needs to let go more and allow people to work out assignments in their own way. One person even used the term micromanaging.
Even though Mary is supposed to be setting an example, her first reaction is anger. After all, she has set aside time to help her employees solve problems and has (in her mind) only received criticism in return. Encouraged to act on feedback and ask employees to do the same, she’s feeling betrayed.
What are the psychological factors that make us afraid of feedback?
The most common answer is our body's natural negativity bias. Prominent psychologists and neurobiologists have found that our brains are hardwired to react to negative stimuli faster. This was originally necessary for our survival. Sensing an attack would trigger our body’s natural fight-or-flight mode, increasing the amount of hormones released to the bloodstream, elevating reaction time and heightening our emotions. The experiences that trigger these reactions become etched into our brain so that we can react to dangerous situations faster. This is why we tend to remember negative experiences more than positive ones.
However, in an office setting, our negativity bias and flight-or-flight reaction can actually work against us. Even when receiving mostly positive feedback, it tends to be the constructive feedback that we recall most acutely. Though feedback doesn’t constitute a physical attack, in their separate research, psychologist Peter Gray and management professor Neal Ashkanasy note that criticism can signal a sense of exclusion. In hunter-gatherer societies, people were dependent on the group for survival. For this reason, constructive feedback can sometimes trigger our fear of exclusion from the group.
Is fear of giving feedback more about yourself than others?
A study by Dr. Carla Jefferies of the University of Southern Queensland discovered that a failure to give constructive feedback may actually be more about protecting ourselves than others. In her experiment, participants were told to give feedback on an essay face-to-face, anonymously or to someone other than the author.She found that participants with lower self-esteem gave more positive feedback face-to-face and more critical feedback via the two other means..
Supporting this research, a study conducted by leadership development consultancy Zenger/Folkman found that 74 percent of employees who received constructive feedback already knew there was a problem. This shows that employees aren’t necessarily blind to the things they need to improve, they just either aren’t sure how to improve or aren’t fully aware of the impact on the rest of the team. In fact, in their previous research, Zenger/Folkman found that a majority of employees actually want constructive feedback.
However, the caveat is that people don’t want to receive top down instructions on what to do. In their study, Zenger/Folkman also found that the more managers carefully listened to their employee’s point of view before giving feedback, the more honest and trustworthy their feedback was perceived. The best way to give constructive feedback? Give the other person the chance to explain the situation and what they think went wrong. For more information on giving constructive feedback, go here.
So what are we still so afraid of?
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Creating a feedback habit
Among our clients, we’ve observed that as employees share more and more feedback through a system like Impraise, they begin to develop feedback behaviors. As the habit forms, people become more comfortable expressing feedback face-to-face. For our largest client, a major hotel booking platform, we’ve seen this lead to an increase in the exchange of unsolicited feedback and better professional development conversations.
Utilizing their employees’ affinity for games, a gaming company we work with has created a reward system in which people vote for the best feedback given, resulting in a bonus for the top contributor.
When creating your own feedback habit, keep in mind these three elements to habit forming. For example, your steps could be:
Cue: Receiving a feedback notification from a colleague
Routine:
- Analyze the feedback
- Ask questions to better understand
- Thank them
- Strategize ways to improve based on your feedback5. Set goals for yourself based on these strategies
Reward: Using the feedback to reach the professional goals you’ve set for yourself
To put this into context, let’s go back to Mary, the manager who just received surprising constructive feedback from her employees. When her thoughts of betrayal and exclusion start to set in, she should recognize her fixed mindset voice: “It’s not that my employees are ungrateful for my help, they just want more opportunities to grow professionally.”
Following the steps above,, after receiving her cue,, Mary should automatically read through them and write down keywords and patterns she sees. She should then respond to her feedback to fill in the gaps, for example: “What can I do to better support you when you reach an obstacle?” She should finish by thanking her employees for their feedback.
Finally, Mary should consider aligning her own professional goals based on feedback: “Becoming a better leader by providing more autonomy to my employees.”Ideally, Mary will then check in from time to time and ask her employees for feedback on her management style and what she could do to more effectively reach her goals.
