Being open to feedback is critical to Deep Growth and doing our best work
Anne owns a successful food catering business. She is confident in her ability to deliver excellent food and wow her clients every time. Even so, she always makes a point to find out what her clients value about her service and how she can do even better. Anne uses client feedback and her own insights to routinely adjust tactics. By employing this feedback loop at every event, Anne has put her business on a path of continuous improvement.
The process of learning to be a better version of ourselves often involves receiving feedback. The problem is that we rarely get this critical information. And when we do, it may not be delivered in a way that we can act upon.
Interestingly, most people would welcome more feedback at work. Research shows that millennials—who now make up more than 50% of the global workforce—value opportunities for learning and development over pay or flexible work schedule. Research by Gallup and others ties regular performance feedback to higher employee engagement and higher employee engagement to better organizational performance.
Ultimately, a large component of satisfaction and success at work is in this feedback loop. That’s where we learn how to make better decisions and spot innovative ideas. Feedback can boost self-confidence and self-efficacy, which, in turn, improves overall well-being.
On the other hand, when feedback is perceived as critical, it can trigger deep feelings of inadequacy, rejection, anxiety, and defensiveness in the recipient.
As a therapist and coach, I help people learn how to give and receive effective feedback using the Deep Growth™ approach. At its core, the method is a way of uncovering what is holding you back to gain clarity and work toward success.
Here, I will explain why giving feedback can be fraught with problems, how to deliver feedback in an effective way, and what a culture of continuous feedback can do for your organization. But first, let’s look at the psychology behind feedback.
Feedback Leads to Better Self-Management
Learning is a process that occurs in relation to other people, says Albert Bandura, a psychologist who developed social cognitive theory. He explains that we adapt our behavior based on feedback from the environment. As we adjust, we observe the results and adapt further. This dynamic is called self-regulation. While self-regulation does require introspection, the process is not meant to be done in isolation. Instead, psychological growth is based on our interaction with the world. And feedback is an important part of that interaction.
Since, feedback is used to monitor and adjust our own actions to achieve better results, the leader’s job, then, is less about telling others what to do and more about offering team members the information necessary to make good decisions themselves.
Performance feedback is a core feature of a deliberately developmental organization—a term that refers to an organization in which the process of work leads not only to better business outcomes but also to less reactive and more thoughtful, focused people. The key to effective feedback is that it should be ongoing and it must reach beyond a person’s actions, drilling down to reach the reasoning and assumptions that produce those actions.
Anne runs a small but mighty, deliberately developmental organization. She doesn’t take a top-down approach, harping on “poor performance” by individual team members. Instead, she encourages her team members to make good decisions and take actions on the fly. After an event, she undertakes debriefings with her team members. Together, they reflect on ways to incorporate improvement into future events.
Anne wasn’t always this receptive to feedback. Let’s take a look at the obstacles she faced and overcame.
Obstacles to Feedback
Lack of capacity
Collecting, analyzing, and communicating feedback is resource-intensive. Moreover, a lack of capacity—time, money, and emotional bandwidth—makes it difficult to act on this feedback. So, even if someone is receptive to feedback, they might not necessarily make changes because they lack the capacity to do so.
That’s where Anne and her catering business were just a few years ago. The business was new and Anne was too busy hustling to stop and look around. When clients expressed dissatisfaction with an aspect of her service, she simply shut down. Eventually, she recognized the problem. She was overcommitted and out of capacity. Therefore, she decided to make some changes: she cut back on events and charged more for her services. After scaling back, she felt refreshed and able to act on the feedback.
Negative interpretation bias
Research has discovered a connection between depression, ADHD, anxiety disorders, and autism and a greater likelihood of interpreting ambiguous information negatively. This phenomenon, called negative interpretation bias, describes how someone can take a neutral statement like, “I’d like to chat after the meeting,” and perceive it to mean, “I’m going to fire you after the meeting,” rather than, “I’m going to promote you after the meeting.”
Anne, like nearly 20% of U.S. adults, deals with an anxiety disorder. Typically, she keeps her anxiety under control with the use of medication and daily journaling. But when she’s stressed, her symptoms flare up. That’s when she has to deal with her own negative interpretation bias. In the past, she would perceive neutral, or even positive, client comments as critical. To avoid any feedback, she would hide at events and keep away from clients.
Emotional dysregulation
Not everyone is able to accept criticism of their hard work. For many people, criticism can bring up past experiences of rejection, abandonment, and other traumatic events. Those feelings can trigger well-worn mental habits such as catastrophizing, aggression, rumination, anxiety, self-aggrandizing, avoidance or isolation. These responses are symptoms of emotional dysregulation.
After losing her tech job, Anne felt socially adrift, doubtful of her abilities, and struggling to move forward. She’d always loved to cook for big groups and, after successfully catering a friend’s wedding, decided to give the business a try.
Outwardly, Anne exuded confidence, but inwardly she still struggled with negative feelings about losing her job. She interpreted negative feedback as a worst-case scenario. She would start catastrophizing—believing that the bottom was about to fall out.
Lack of capacity, negative interpretation bias, and emotional dysregulation are three significant obstacles to receiving and processing feedback. Now, let’s turn to the challenges of giving feedback.
The Challenges of Giving Feedback
Lack of time and other resources can make regular communication with team members, clients, and other stakeholders difficult. Additionally, a tendency toward negative interpretation or emotional dysregulation can cause the person giving the feedback to hold back to protect the receiver from distress.
Giving feedback is an ongoing process, not an event. Many organizations give feedback during an annual or semiannual review process. Organizations that use these performance reviews as the main channel for feedback have lower employee engagement and higher rates of turnover. Relegating feedback to the annual review can cost an organization money.
The power-over paradigm can inhibit open, two-way communication. For the most part, the boss or manager wields power over others on the team. Offering critical feedback when one controls someone’s salary or upward mobility can be fraught with challenges—for both the giver and the receiver.
Not knowing what kind of feedback is needed. A manager may provide broad feedback when laser-focused insights are more useful. They might offer feedback that’s counterproductive at one stage of a project. Or, they may “lead with the positives” and never get to constructive criticism.
How to Create a Culture of Feedback
Once Anne realized that her struggle to accept feedback was holding her company back, she committed to change. That’s when she started practicing the concepts of Deep Growth in her business.
Anne implemented an approach called “fast feedback,” which involves frequent, focused, and future-oriented performance conversations. She started with frequent check-ins with her clients. In the weeks before an event, she’d email regular updates. Right after the event, she’d send a short feedback form and a more comprehensive one a week later.
When we ask for specific feedback, we reduce the potential for mishaps. We ask for the exact feedback we need at each step of the process so we can use it in the next step. For example, clients would provide specific feedback on a proposed menu or logistics. Anne also kept her feedback requests future-oriented by having her clients focus on their ideal experience.
With the client feedback process in place, Anne turned toward her team. Using that framework—frequent, focused, and future-oriented—Anne instituted post-event debriefs for the team. There, they would discuss: What went well? What could be improved next time? They loved what they were learning and the feeling of positive recognition that flowed from the meetings, even when things went wrong.
After every meeting, the team felt more confident. They knew they had what it takes to make decisions in a crisis or motivate themselves after a hiccup. This confidence and self-efficacy started to spill over into their personal lives, too.
Anne’s team was practicing the Deep Growth method. Whether you lead a small team in a large organization, work by yourself in a microbusiness, or manage a small business, you can create a positive culture of feedback.
Where to Start
A good place to start is with these two questions posed by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey:
- What if your organization did everything within its power to create the conditions for individuals to overcome their internal barriers to change, to take stock of and transcend their own blind spots, and to see errors and weaknesses as prime opportunities for personal growth?
- What would it look like to “do work” in a way that enabled organizations and their employees to be partners in each other’s growth and flourishing?
A business with people actively engaged in growth through continuous feedback is resilient, agile, and inventive. It’s not mired in fear or bogged down by past missteps. That business is ready to take on the challenges of the future. And, importantly, it’s a business that is responsive to its employees and stakeholders.
Work isn’t our only tool for personal development, and it can’t be the sole measure of personal success. Yet, it is an essential piece of the puzzle. When we “do work” in a way that is conducive to flourishing, not harried productivity, we cultivate a more creative and humane work environment.
Creating processes in which giving and receiving feedback are handled with curiosity and grace goes a long way toward Deep Growth.
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