There's a big debate about Feedback at work. Here's why I think that's a great thing.

We are in the midst of a debate about feedback that I'd like to unpack.

In the last several years, new conventional wisdom has emerged that, to improve performance (and even engagement), managers should provide tons of real-time feedback. Ray Dialo at Bridgewater Associates promotes "radical transparency" where employees were inoculated against the sting of difficult feedback because they received it all the time. Kim Scott tells us that we should deliver feedback with Radical Candor, first by establishing a strong personal relationship and then by delivering feedback as clearly and directly as possible. Brené Brown, in Dare to Lead, encourages us similarly to be "clear and kind." We now are told to toss out the "feedback sandwich," or the old tactic of saying something nice before and after delivering challenging feedback. Human Capital Management Software (HCMS) purveyors and start-up companies playing in the "future of work" space have reinforced this trend by building technology to enable all this feedback. It's fair to say that once-yearly feedback through the annual appraisal is officially a relic.

We do need to be careful with feedback, though. The Neuroleadership Institute warns of the dangers of saying "can I give you some feedback?" By signaling to an employee that they are about to receive a challenging messages, they say, we are flooding their brains with cortisol, the stress hormone, and creating the evolutionary analog of a life or death threat. We are making threats to their Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and sense of Fairness (SCARF). In that "fight or flight" mode, the employee can't hear and absorb the feedback. So instead, we are encouraged to create a culture of continuous feedback and employees feel comfortable asking for feedback. (Using Neuroscience to Make Feedback Work and Feel Better)

Either way, it seems like we have settled in to conventional wisdom that more feedback is better, even if we need to create more of an enabling environment and be more aware of its pitfalls.

Earlier this year, that conventional wisdom was challenged in a big way: Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall adapted a chapter of their book Nine Lies About Work in their Harvard Business Review article The Feedback Fallacy. The book was informed by Buckingham's work on the ADP Research Institute's Global Study of Engagement and his work on strengths-based approaches at the Gallup Organization. In the article, and in much greater detail in the book, Goodall and Buckingham they describe the ways in which "humans are unreliable raters of other humans," and our attempts to rate others are fundamentally misguided. They say instead that "excellence is idiosyncratic," and we thus shouldn't build our feedback systems and cultures to try to create "well-rounded" employees who score well on every dimension of a "competency model." The argument is making a splash. I personally find it convincing and fascinating.

Since Buckingham and Goodall threw down the gauntlet, groups like the Center for Creative Leadership have warned that this all-out assault on constructive feedback is overkill. They suggest that Buckhingam and Goodall are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, risking depriving leaders of information about how they are perceived and what weaknesses really could derail their careers if they don't get proper attention. They make these points in last months' article:What Good Feedback Really Looks Like. (CCL has some skin in the game, as they do good business running leadership 360s and coaching leaders through their results. I've done one myself through CCL and found it useful.)

What are we to make of this debate? Is it time to seriously question the value of "constructive feedback?" Should we accept that we are unreliable raters and each have idiosyncratic routes to excellence? Or should we trust ourselves and our judgment in recognizing and addressing performance gaps and continue to build the muscle of giving and receiving tough feedback?

I think it's probably somewhere in the middle. Either way, I'm personally glad that the debate exists. When there are multiple convincing and conflicting answers to fundamental questions like "does constructive feedback work?" it forces us to look in the mirror and develop our own styles, philosophies, and points of view. No two managers are going to approach and deliver feedback in exactly the same way. Some managers will be extremely effective in delivering constructive feedback, and others will come off as insecure, mean, or inconsistent. Some might embrace a "strengths-based" approach holistically and skillfully, and others might embrace it as a strategy to avoid conflict or discomfort.

This debate about feedback isn't ending any time soon, so we shouldn't wait for any side to deliver the "death blow." The research is extremely useful, and it's equally useful to be able to hold conflicting viewpoints in mind.

Among management and leadership competencies, "giving and receiving feedback" is rather tactical anyway. I think that understanding ourselves and refining our own styles and points of view (to include questions of "how do I approach giving feedback?") is a better target for our work and attention. So is building empathy, and learning how to experiment and figure out what works for ourselves. If leaders and managers do that harder work on themselves, the feedback question will work itself out.