Why Feedback Rarely Does What It’s Meant To

For years managers have been encouraged to candidly praise and criticize just about everything workers do. But it turns out that feedback does not help employees thrive. First, research shows that people can’t reliably rate the performance of others: More than 50% of your rating of someone reflects your characteristics, not hers. Second, neuroscience reveals that criticism provokes the brain’s “fight or flight” response and inhibits learning. Last, excellence looks different for each individual, so it can’t be defined in advance and transferred from one person to another. It’s also not the opposite of failure. Managers will never produce great performance by identifying what they think is failure and telling people how to correct it. Instead, when managers see a great outcome, they should turn to the person who created it, say, “Yes! That!,” and share their impression of why it was a success. Neuroscience shows that we grow most when people focus on our strengths. Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not what we’re doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly.