What Organizations And Leaders Get Wrong About Creating A Healthy Feedback Culture

The most sustainable long-term competitive advantage a company can create is a workforce that learns more quickly than its peers. A healthy feedback culture is essential to establishing this advantage but creating an environment where feedback is continuously shared and received is an elusive goal. The following research highlights why feedback is vital in the workplace despite it being difficult for providers and receivers.

• 62% of employees wish they received more feedback from their colleagues.
• 83% of employees appreciate receiving feedback, regardless of if it is positive or negative.?
• 96% of employees said that receiving ongoing feedback is a good thing.
• Four out of 10 workers are actively disengaged when they get little or no feedback.

Developing a feedback culture may be the most cost-effective way to establish healthy, ever-evolving work cultures, but few leaders have figured out how to create this environment. Below are the two most common mistakes companies and their leaders make about developing a healthy feedback culture and practices for success.

Mistake 1: Feedback Is About Telling Others How To Improve

Most leaders and employees have a misconception about what effective feedback should look like. Many leaders mistakenly believe that the primary skill for providing effective feedback is telling others how their behaviors need to be developed, changed, or stopped to improve their performance. The truth is that the most critical skills for creating a culture where employees provide effective feedback are asking questions and listening.

In today's matrixed, virtual and ever-changing world, very few feedback conversations are so straightforward that you do not need to hear others' perspectives and gather more information. It is a rare occasion that the feedback that needs to be shared is so critical or urgent that it justifies that you should not take the time to ask questions and listen.

Two-way feedback conversations allow employees to take the lead role in advancing their professional development and establishing behaviors that will increase their performance. When you take the time to ask questions and listen when providing feedback, you create an environment where others feel valued, empowered, and motivated.?

Taking time for questions and listening enables greater insight into how best to deliver your difficult feedback messages, create clarity on the next steps, and establish shared accountability. Leading with questions demonstrates that you don't have all the information. It allows you to uncover insights, perspectives, and challenges before deciding what is needed to best support the employee.?

Below are some examples of questions you can use throughout the feedback process.

Taking time to ask questions before providing feedback does not stop you from being clear with expectations, direct with your communication style, or straightforward about establishing shared accountability. It only means that you choose to understand others' views so you can be more informed when sharing your perspectives and feedback.

Mistake 2: Giving More Feedback Is The Answer

Yes, employees must understand why it is important to provide others feedback and how to give well-intentioned feedback. Unfortunately, organizations have continually invested in building skills and encouraging their employees and managers to share more feedback, but most have had little success.?Science suggests that the solution may lie in the opposite direction—instead of solely focusing on giving feedback, the most significant leverage point for creating a healthy feedback culture is encouraging and equipping everyone to ask for more feedback.?

We all understand that giving and receiving feedback is hard. Research shows that people feel equally anxious about offering feedback as they do when receiving feedback, which helps to explain why so few people provide others with needed constructive feedback. We have all experienced or witnessed situations where someone tried to give well-intended feedback that damaged a meaningful relationship.

Research suggests that feedback conversations must begin with the goal of minimizing the threat response. Since sharing feedback with others is challenging and risky for employees, leaders must be deliberate about creating an environment where asking for feedback is a part of employees' day-to-day habits. When employees actively give permission and express openness and desire to receive feedback, it helps remove the barriers of threat others feel about providing honest feedback. The practices below will help employees minimize potential threats while encouraging others to give them honest feedback.

• Be Specific with Feedback Requests?– If you ask general questions like "What can I do better?" it is difficult for others to understand what type of feedback is "okay" to provide. A more specific feedback request would be, "I am working on improving how I lead our team meetings. What am I doing that is getting in the way of our meetings being more collaborative?".
• Ask for Feedback Often?– As this becomes part of an employee's routine, people start to feel safe about providing upward feedback.
• Avoid Defensiveness?– If an employee is perceived as defensive, they are making a statement to others that it isn't safe to give them constructive feedback, and they do not value feedback.

Few things accelerate individual and organizational performance as much as receiving constructive feedback about how your actions and behaviors can be more effective. To create a healthy feedback culture, organizations must develop an environment where employees regularly ask for feedback and lead with questions for effective two-way feedback conversations.

BONUS: DOWNLOADABLE PDF'S ON SELF-LEADERSHIP

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

I am the President and Founder of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping executives and managers bring their best leadership self to their most challenging situations. I am the author of,?Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life. You can also follow me on?Forbes?to see my latest articles on Self-Leadership and Leading Others.