Effective Feedback That Promotes Success Through Learning

The value of feedback in various contexts - be it in education, the workplace or personal development has traditionally been seen as a mechanism for fostering growth and enhancing performance. It provides individuals with insights into their strengths and weaknesses, guiding them toward better outcomes.

However, the assumption that all feedback is inherently valuable overlooks the complexities involved in how feedback is delivered, received, and processed.

The effectiveness of feedback hinges on its clarity, relevance, and the way it is communicated. An effort to adopt a more nuanced, personalized approach that prioritizes constructive, learning-friendly communication, is essential to maximizing the benefits of feedback, both in the workplace and in personal contexts.

Definition of Feedback

First of all, by “feedback”, we do not mean giving people instructions about what actions to take, or specific knowledge about how to perform a given job.

Giving feedback is about telling people what you think of their performance and how they should improve, whether it's giving an effective presentation, leading a team or developing a strategy.

The research is clear: telling people what we think of their performance doesn't help them thrive and excel and offering our critiques on how we think they should improve actually hinders learning.

Feedback can be potentially harmful and hinder learning

While feedback can prove extremely useful in a wide range of settings, from education and the workplace to personal life, it does have its limitations. Let's explore some of these limitations.

The first problem with feedback is that humans are unreliable evaluators of other humans. Over the past 40 years, study after study has shown that people lack the objectivity to hold in their heads a stable definition of an abstract quality, such as business acumen, strategic thinking or potential, and then accurately assess someone else against that definition. Evidence suggests that judging the performance of others often reflects more closely the characteristics of the evaluator than those of the recipient of the feedback. The rater’s personal biases, experiences and expectations can skew assessments. This creates a distorted view of a person's abilities and contribution, leading to potential misjudgments about their performance and potential.

Secondly, the neurosciences reveal that criticism triggers the brain's “fight or flight” response and inhibits learning. The brain perceives critical or punitive comments as a threat and narrows its activity, thus shutting down other brain areas so that it can focus only on the information most critical to its survival. Instead of promoting a growth mindset, this type of feedback favors a fixed mindset, one in which people are more concerned with avoiding failure than striving to improve.

Thirdly, the quest for excellence is idiosyncratic; it varies considerably from person to person, based on preferences, experiences and values. What constitutes excellence for one person may not have the same meaning for another. For example, in art, some people will value technical skills while others will emphasize emotional impact.

Because excellence differs from one individual to another, we can never help people achieve success by applying a standardized performance model of excellence, advising them on the points that don't fit the proposed model and then asking them to correct these. This type of approach will only lead to mediocre performance.

Feedback that fails to recognize the uniqueness of individual approaches and journeys, and overlooks the diversity of strengths, motivations and contexts, can stifle creativity and prevent true potential from expressing itself. Lastly, it proves ineffective in inspiring employees to achieve their highest levels of performance.

Feedback that cultivates people’s ‘idiosyncratic excellence’ promotes learning

Learning is less about adding something that doesn't exist, and more about recognizing, reinforcing and refining what already exists. From a neurological standpoint, we develop best in our areas of greater ability - our strengths are our areas of development.

Due to our genetic inheritance and the quirks of our early childhood environment, our brain's wiring is quite unique. Some areas of our brain have a tight network of synaptic connections, while others are far less dense, and these patterns differ from person to person.

According to brain science, people develop many more neurons and synaptic connections where they already have the most. In other words, each brain develops more where it's already strongest. In this sense, learning is all about building, little by little, the unique patterns that already exist within you.

Which means that learning has to start with discovering and understanding those patterns - yours, not someone else's.

Thus, learning happens every time we see a way to do something better by adding a new twist or expanding our own understanding. Learning rests on our grasp of what we do well, not what we do poorly, and certainly not on someone else's idea of what we do poorly.

However, it's when someone else recognizes something that works particularly well in us - something that represents excellence in us - that’s when we learn the most. Your boss, for example, catches you in a constructive conversation with a team member and says, “That's it! Yes, that!”, he offers you an opportunity for insight; he highlights a pattern that's already present in you for you to acknowledge, internalize, re-create and refine. This is learning. Your understanding of what excellence looks and feels like will become more vivid, your brain will become more receptive to new information and make connections with other data found in other areas of your brain, and you will learn, grow and improve.

Final thoughts

In summary, while feedback has the potential to be a powerful catalyst for improvement, the assumption that it is always useful is overly simplistic.

A recognition of its limitations and the adoption of a nuanced, personalized approach to feedback, which prioritizes constructive, learning-friendly communication, are essential to maximizing its benefits, both in the workplace and in personal contexts.