Why Feedback May be Destroying Your Company's Culture

How to improve our employees’ performance is probably one of the most asked questions within the business environment, and feedback remains as one of the most popular answers. Some very successful companies peg their accomplishments to a culture where candor appreciations of reality are essential. For example, Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar has won 15 Academy Awards. On average, their movies make over 600 million dollars per film, and almost all of their movies have been on the list of the highest profit movies around the world.

In this company, leaders allow their employees to communicate their ideas, and they promote honesty; they manage to enhance creativity encouraging their employees to brain trust what they think could work well for the company. Accepting honest appreciations from their managers and coworkers about their work allows people to improve and think outside the box to achieve better results. If we think about it, this practice is beneficial because by promoting this type of culture, the company spurs a continuous improvement sentiment where people can make mistakes and can learn from them before releasing any product.

According to Pixar’s founder, Ed Catmull, his company’s success lies in its capability to give and receive honest feedback. Empowering their employees to learn and to explore different perspectives is the best way to achieve Pixar’s goals. Candor, trust, and empathy are key elements to give useful feedback (Catmull, Wallace, 2014).

There are many other examples of companies that have achieved remarkable success by promoting this type of culture. We can think about Netflix. This company encourages “harsh feedback” and promotes “radical transparency” among its employees. For Ray Dalio, the founder of the investment management firm, Bridgewater, honest feedback is critical to developing his employees. In Bridgewater, they encourage their employees to go beyond their opinions and to put their ideas out there, and stress tests them, so they can raise their probabilities of being right and learn from other's perspectives, get past their ego, and identify their blind spots. However, Knowing how to give and receive feedback is essential for this type of culture to succeed.

According to Buckingham and Goodall (2019), critical feedback can damage the company’s culture. If we think about it, the main goal of giving feedback is to help people to do better, but how can we effectively achieve that. Empathy may be one of the best ways to influence people because when people feel appreciate they trust us. When we think about offering feedback, we automatically believe that it means telling people what we think of their performance, but that is no what we say about creating a candor environment. The idea is to speak to our employees the things that work very well and to give them tools to realize what they need to change to excel.

Honest feedback can be an excellent tool, but it has to be objective. According to Buckingham and Goodall (2019), telling people what we think they should change hinders their potential and their opportunities to learn. The main idea is to help them to see by themselves the things that they did well and the things they have to improve. Therefore, instead of telling people what they have to change, we may try telling them how we feel when they did certain things. For example, think about an employee’s presentation. We can start by saying he or she which parts of the performance were the best and why you feel those were your favorite. On the flip side, when it comes to telling them the part of the presentation that was not that exciting, you can ask questions. For example, how do you feel about this part? Do you think you can change something? How can you make this part more versatile?

If we want to accomplish remarkable results by promoting a culture where feedback is the core of our environment, we need to learn how to influence people’s behavior effectively, and the best way of accomplishing these goals is by encouraging our employees to learn and give them a way to see by themselves the things that they can improve. For feedback to work, it has to be part of our normal processes, it needs to be objective, and focus on positive elements that can help us to persuade our employees to improve specific characteristics of their work that need to be polished.

In conclusion, we must create an environment where people feel free to make mistakes and have as many ideas as possible to solve them. The primary purpose is to help them to focus on their positive sides and to help them to see what is not working well. Useful feedback means to be able to persuade people to change the things that are not that impressive about their job or performance, and a great way to achieve this is by asking them questions instead of telling them what we think about them or their work. As always empathy is crucial when it comes to managing people.

References

E. Catmull, A. Wallace. (April 08, 2014). Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration.

M. Buckingham and A. Goodall. (March 01, 2019). The Feedback Fallacy. Retrieve from: https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy. Harvard Bussiness Review.