Leave them alone

We just won’t leave them alone.

Human resource practice maintains that giving feedback is essential. Feedback boosts employee performance. As a job characteristic, feedback makes an employee feel that his work is valued. There is a perception that the company has genuine concern for his growth.

For a very long time, managers are compelled to give feedback “constantly, directly, and critically.” When performance is measured according to following of instructions or strict adherence to procedure, feedback is easy and simple. However, work of these nature is becoming extinct and irrelevant. These are now relegated to and better performed by machines. Employees are now expected to take more initiative, to be more creative, and to acquire more skills. Feedback now is “telling people what we think of their performance and how they should do it better.” The key phrase is: “what we think.”

It is popular belief that we have blindspots. We have weaknesses that only other people can see. We do not see that our presentation, despite our effort, is lethargic. We tend to be overconfident of our performance. To correct this, we need people to do us a favor by pointing these out bluntly to us.

Learning is likened to filling up a container. Every new skill we learn is an addition to this container of learning. Depending on our nature of work and the industry we’re in, there are skills that are perceived to be essential to our performance. To be ahead of the pack, managers need to be aware of the latest management trends. In the academe, teachers need to learn online learning platforms. If we do not know, it is because nobody told us. Feedback is needed to make us aware of these learning gaps.

Excellence is a perennial buzzword. We study people who are perceived as excellent in their field. We distill, identify, and define what makes a person excellent. We believe that the excellence of one person can be transferred from one person to another. In most organizations, stories and myths are created around the founder or the benefactor. For lesser organizations, a popular business celebrity is often used a pre-defined standard. 

Feedback is founded on these beliefs. And these are false. 

In “The Feedback Fallacy,” research shows that “telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think of they should improve hinder learning.”

Humans are unreliable evaluators of other humans. Evaluations are inherently subjective. The results are only reflections of the evaluator’s opinions of what performance should be. They are only reactions to the performance based on the evaluator’s experiences. The use of a rubric or quantitative measure legitimizes this bias. 

When we point out a person’s inadequacy, we believe that we are helping him. Ideally, a person acknowledges this and is expected to learn to fill this gap. The end is to achieve or accelerate performance. However, research points out that pointing out a person’s inadequacy will not enhance learning. Focusing people on their shortcomings impairs it. Learning happens when “we see how we might do better by adding some new nuance or expansion to our own understanding.” People learn most “when somebody pays attention to what’s working in us and ask us to cultivate it intelligently.” Asking people to get out of their comfort zones would put them automatically on survival mode. It does not work.

While we know excellence when we see one, it is difficult to identify what it is. It is often inseparable with the one demonstrating it. Every person has his own unique version of excellence. It can be cultivated; but is fake and unnatural, if imitated. We can “never help another person succeed by holding his performance against a prefabricated model of excellence, giving his feedback on where he misses the model, and telling him to plug the gaps.” 

When we rate a performance as poor, we are in reality saying that the performance does not fit our idea of a good performance. When we tell people that they need to learn something to get ahead, we are actually saying that it worked for us, and it’ll work for them too. When we use a person as a standard or role model, we are saying that this is only one way to excellence, even if we are also not sure what it is.

Feedbacks are self-centered. According to the Harvard Business Review article, “Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not on what we’re doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly.” 

Let’s leave them alone.

Real Carpio So lectures at Management and Organization Department of the Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business of De La Salle University. He is an entrepreneur and a management consultant. He welcomes comments at [email protected]. Archives can be accessed at realwalksonwater.wordpress.com. The views expressed above are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DLSU, its faculty, and its administrators.