We certainly know from the research that receiving performance-based feedback, meaningful performance-based feedback, is one of the four, absolutely main drivers of performance, of culture and of having a thriving employee and a thriving organisation.

And so many times when we start thinking about this concept of feedback, we know, we know it's important. We know we need to give it, we know we need to get it, but for some reason it's just, it's so difficult.

Sharon: That was Professor Anne Lytle making the point that feedback is an essential ingredient in thriving high performance workplaces. If only it were easier. Rewind your mind. Recall a time when someone attempted to give you constructive feedback?

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How was it? Did you feel hot under the collar? Did you become agitated, defensive, or dismissive? If so, you are not alone. Sheila Heen, co-author of Thanks for the Feedback makes the point that while feedback is meant to feel good, it can feel more like a colonoscopy. Why?

Because feedback lives at the intersection of two opposing human needs – the desire to grow and learn and the deep need to be good enough just as we are.

So how can we feel less conflicted during feedback conversations?

Our guest has helpful insights and practical advice drawing on neuroscience. She has taught, presented and consulted in organisations and universities around the world.

She served as a consultant to the United Nations and has advised the Hong Kong government in negotiation and conflict processes. Currently, Anne is the professor and director of leadership in the Business School at Monash University, Melbourne.

[00:02:00]

Today our conversation connects the dots between neuroscience and feedback.

Anne: I talk to many, many, many managers, practicing managers in my work, and one of the things that I find with them is that they say, well, I know I can give feedback on an objective task, something that's really clear, something that the other person probably can't really argue with or get that upset about.

But gosh, if I have to give somebody feedback about their style or about the method that they chose to communicate with a client or even about something personal, you know, the way that person might dress and whether that is or isn't as appropriate for the context with clients or customers as perhaps it should be... that those are the sorts of things that managers feel most inhibited of delivering feedback on.

[00:03:00]

And of course, the reason is, well, who am I? Who am I to give that feedback? Who am I to to tell this person that what they're doing is wrong? Because it is a subjective experience.

And so I think that that very often, you know, the lack of feedback is especially around this very subjective, not tangible kind of stuff. There's a lot of fear that I'm gonna do it wrongly or that I'm going to offend the other person.

And I'll give you a quick example. So I was working with a manager who has an employee who we might say is perhaps really verbose. This person when they are trying to make a point will literally go on and on and on.

The manager and everyone around that person see the behaviour and know that the behaviour's problematic, and the manager is really worried about giving that feedback. "Gosh, you know, the person is so well intentioned. They're very enthusiastic, they're very passionate. I don't wanna hurt their feelings."

[00:04:00]

"I don't  wanna make them feel like, you know, they're doing the wrong thing or make them feel disengaged."

And so there's a lot of real fear in delivering this feedback because of the potential reaction that they might get. And so then the response is, well, maybe it's better I don't say anything at all.

Then I risk the possibility that things are gonna get worse because of the delivery of the feedback.

Sharon: So in some ways it's a fear that we're not separating the behaviour from the person and the probability that people will take it very personally is high.

Anne: And look, it's really, really, really, really hard not to take feedback personally.

We have to become incredibly skilled as receivers of feedback in order to be able to take on a message and not feel threatened by that message.

Sharon:  We now understand a lot about the brain, and neuroscience has really afforded us some insights around how we can optimise the dynamics when delivering feedback.

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Can you introduce us to what's known as the SCARF model?

Anne: So the SCARF model, which was introduced by David Rock, is absolutely fascinating.

The SCARF model reflects five major domains of human social experience that will activate us into either Approach Mode, where they act as rewards or Avoid Mode where they act as threats.

And then when we ask what does SCARF actually stand for?

Well, first S is Status. What is my standing in the pecking order? My importance in relation to other people,

Certainty, the human desire to predict the future and to understand what's going to happen.

Autonomy, which is the fact that almost every person in the world would really like to have some choice and control over their environment and over what happens to them.

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Relatedness, again, the human desire to be connected and, and associated and, and feel a sense of belonging with others.

And the last but not least, Fairness, which is this innate sense of really wanting equitable treatment and rewards in comparison to others.

Sharon: Let's unpack how the status trigger can be activated in the feedback conversation.

Anne: What really is the, the status threat and feedback? The status threat is, wow, somebody else is telling me that not only have I done something wrong, but in the delivery of the feedback of their criticism towards me, that they increase their status. And they decrease mine.

So it's a double whammy. Not only do I feel worried or frustrated or afraid or obsessed that wow, I've, you know, I've done something wrong. And what does that mean about my place in the hierarchy and what does that mean about, you know, whether I'll be continuing on in this job?

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What does that mean about me continuing to get good clients, et cetera, et cetera. That those fears are really very, very salient. But then to add on to that, wow, now this person that just said this to me, now I feel like they've put me down. Now I feel like, you know, my position in relation to them has been jeopardised.

Sharon: So if we are mindful of this threat of someone's status, feeling diminished in the context of feedback, how can we craft that conversation to reduce the chances that people will feel threatened in this way?

Anne: There are actually a number of actions, both in general and in the moment that we can implement.

So first to in general, make people feel that their status is high and that they are valued. We need to give them some good stuff in addition to the criticism.

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So giving regular, and I'm not gonna call it praise, I'm going to call it confirming feedback. We might also call it positive feedback, but really confirming feedback is a term that says, I want to confirm the behaviour that you're engaging in right now and continue it.

So confirming feedback is not a compliment unless the compliment is related to the person's performance. So for example, saying to someone, oh, you look really nice today, is not a piece of confirming performance-based feedback. That's just giving someone a compliment unless of course, their appearance has to do directly with something that might have to do with a client or my personal presentation, you know, standing up in front of the media or some such thing.

So positive feedback is so, so critical because what we do in a sense is we build up the bank balance. Such that when we do go in to make a withdrawal that there's enough  status left there, that we don't take too much away relative to the the amount that that is already there.

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So that's really the first recommendation.

The second one, which is really hard for managers to do, is to take personal responsibility for part of the problem. Now, that may not always be appropriate, but pretty often, the person that you're giving critical feedback to is not the only person involved in the problem. And very often, maybe if you would've given them better instruction, maybe things would've turned out a little bit differently.

So if I'm able to go to someone and preface or frame my feedback with a comment like, look, I know that I could have behaved differently in this situation as well, but let me just try to give you a little bit of an idea of what your contribution was that I'd like us to talk about working on.

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So that way, immediately in that frame, I put my status down a little bit. I bring the other party's status up equal, equal to mine, and that increases the chance that the other person can actually hear what I have to say rather than go off into fight or flight mode and get hijacked.

Sharon: People can get challenged by even small amounts of change at work and in life generally.

Can we look at how the Certainty trigger plays out in feedback conversations?

Anne: Certainty is my capacity to predict what's going to happen in the future. And anytime someone criticises me, I don't know what the consequence of that is necessarily going to be. If you don't tell me directly in that moment what the consequence is.

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And so because, as human beings have this funny little habit of  catastrophising and ruminating and you know, jumping ahead three or four steps into the possibilities of what might happen later in the future as a result of of this issue, people's minds often go 20 steps forward and focus on negative potential outcomes.

So that's one of the reasons why when you're giving critical feedback to someone that being very, very, very clear about what's going to happen. It may be that I use a frame. Your job is absolutely secure. I need to tell you something about how you can improve your communication with our clients.

You don't need to worry. This is just something that will help you improve. You're not gonna lose your job, you're not gonna lose the clients. You're not going to be in some, you know, terrible situation in the future.

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That giving people that level of certainty is really important, especially when you know that the person that you are managing is probably somebody that worries about stuff.

Sharon: We all feel like we wanna have choice and control over our life and our jobs.

How does autonomy factor into feedback conversations?

Anne: Well, actually, autonomy is a fascinating aspect of feedback conversations because, by definition, when I'm giving someone feedback, and especially if inherent in that feedback, I might imply explicitly or implicitly a suggestion of how to do it differently. I'm automatically taking autonomy away from the other person.

So delivering feedback without taking away that autonomy is a very, very difficult skill. You know, and this is, this is really interesting when we think about this, this little fact in relation to a whole bunch of different contexts in our lives.

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So for example, when young children begin to develop this desire in this sense of autonomy as a reward or as a threat. You know, telling a child, for example, to go to bed, you know, can become a, you know, hour long battle.  Where if we're able to phrase and frame a request and, and kind of distract from this perception of lack of autonomy, we can kind of deliver the message that we want and potentially get the action that we want without the negativity.

So let me give you an example. One of the things. Is that my very skilled mother used to do when I was a child was rather than say, it is time to go to bed now, go get ready, she would say, oh, would you like to wear your yellow pyjamas tonight? Or would you rather wear your blue pyjamas tonight? And of course, silly me at that time didn't really get the trick.

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Well, I did after a while, but at least initially I didn't get the trick and it was then it became a game.

Oh, which pyjamas am I going to wear? Which book am I going to read? Or,  which thing am I going to do as my last activity before going to bed?

And managers can do exactly the same thing.

By giving choice or by offering different possibilities and then allowing choice of those different possibilities, we can take away that feeling that the person doesn't have autonomy and give them that feeling of choice.

Sharon: It also sounds like really key here is the coaching conversation. So you as the manager when you are, you know, discussing behaviour that needs to change, really providing a conversational frame where your team member can problem solve and come up with ideas for the potential best next steps as opposed to you necessarily dictating them.

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Anne: Absolutely. Coaching is a massive part of the delivery of critical feedback. A coaching orientation and coaching skills because if we are going to not threaten the person's autonomy we have to communicate in a way that is not directive in its nature.

And so asking pointed, meaningful directive questions, probing questions, and problem solving questions, which is really not that easy to do, help us to get people ultimately to figure out how to solve their own problems.

And when they do that, they have a sense of autonomy, a sense of achievement, which then ultimately means they're gonna be more committed to the action of what we had wanted them to do in the first place.

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So, for example, asking a question like, gee, what ideas do you have for how we might solve this issue or solve this problem? What are all of the different ways that you can think of? Can you tell me another alternative? You've come up with one thing, can you think of three others?

These are the sorts of questions we want to ask people, to potentially get them much more interested, involved, and feeling committed to the actions.

Sharon: A sense of safety and belonging is essential for all of us.

Explain how the SCARF principle of Relatedness can trigger either the reward or the threat circuitry in the brain during a difficult conversation.

Anne: Well, Naomi Eisenberger from UCLA did a fascinating research study where she found that when people felt excluded, when they were kind of pushed out of a conversation or pushed out of an activity,  you know, vis-a-vis other people, that FMRI studies showed that this social pain created activity in the same part of the brain as physical pain. It was the same centre.

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It's the same feeling. And so, social threats, loneliness, feeling excluded, all of these things, actually have a dramatic impact on the brain and as well on our emotional states, so they become huge threats.

So that being the case, it's pretty obvious that when I deliver a piece of critical feedback, one of the first things in my receiver's mind is, what does this mean?

What does this mean about the relationship? What does this mean about what my boss thinks about me? What does this mean? Do they respect me anymore? Do they value me anymore?  Or  do they think that I can still do the job? Oh, goodness gracious.

So, you know, we get this, this, this, again, this kind of automatic escalation of the possible negative consequences to the relationship of this critical feedback.

Sharon: The other dynamic in terms of relatedness is the, the existing relationship you have with. The giver of the feedback.

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If that's already been tainted by past experience, then that manager, for example, has a few extra hurdles to overcome, to build receptivity to the message. That person might already have a threat response because of a historic experience.

How do we overcome those imprints?

Anne: Well, look, some of the advice to improving relationship with your people is the same as reducing or mitigating status threats. So, for example, if especially maybe I haven't had the greatest history with, with one of my people, maybe I've been more critical in the past than I should have been.

My first step, which I should be working on literally every day, is to find opportunities that the person is doing something right and notice it and tell them. So giving them that confirming feedback, looking for opportunities to give confirming feedback on a regular basis will be your first step to not only mitigating status threats, but also to improving the relationship.

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It's another fact or reality that the research tells us that. Actually when people feel that their boss really cares about them, they perform better, they have fewer sick days, et cetera, et cetera. So finding ways as a boss to show your people that you care not only by giving them confirming feedback, but by being helpful, by being interested, by asking them questions about what's going on in their lives by, you know, staying after work when you see that they, you know, they might be struggling with something. By offering your assistance, by showing gratitude and expressing gratitude.

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All of these things will be steps to improve the relationship and again, build up that, you know, balance of positivity so that when it's time that I need to give, you know, a critical comment that, that it will be received in a much more positive light.

Sharon: The need for fairness is hardwired in the brain. How can we keep this in mind when it comes to giving feedback?

Anne: Well, fairness I think is even more critical in the delivery of feedback than many other things, and is also perhaps one of the most fundamental pre-programmed responses that we have. In fact, there are study after study with other creatures, other mammals especially,  whether they be chimpanzees, whether they be monkeys actually, whether they be dogs or whether they be birds, that all animals have some kind of sense of fairness.

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And if one is getting an outcome for the same action or effort that the other isn't getting, that there will be responses across many, many different sorts of species.

Now, feedback is a really interesting context to look at fairness, because very often when something's gone wrong, there are a number of people involved and there are a number of factors that have contributed to the situation.

And so if I give a criticism to someone and I haven't mentioned or taken into account or acknowledged the other factors or the other people, I'm going to automatically cue that sense of a fairness threat.

So, again, so important how we frame feedback.

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I would want to begin in the delivery of my feedback by saying things such as, look, I know there might be a whole host of other factors that contributed to this problem right now, I need to talk about your contribution and what we might do about that. Or, I know that there's a whole lot of other people that contributed to this issue. Right now I wanna focus on your contribution and think about what we might do. I might even say, look, I know that I also had a contribution to this issue.

So again, we find that there's some overlap in the strategy between mitigating a fairness threat, mitigating a status threat.

So we get double the bang for our buck is that we're able to, with very conscious, intelligent framing, decrease the chance that the other person is going to react negatively to the feedback that we give.

Sharon: What this all leads to when you overlay the SCARF model, the social threat reward model in the feedback conversation, Anne, is that preparation for the conversation is primary to success.

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Anne: Preparation is absolutely imperative to the delivery of effective feedback, and your preparation should be not only on thinking about what the issue is of the fault, you know, what was the mistake in the task or the delivery, or the presentation or whatever it might have been.

But then also to think very, very clearly and very carefully about the framing of the feedback. How am I going to present it, not only to prepare in the moment, but actually to consciously day-to-day undertake actions that actually help us to mitigate those threats before we even consider giving a piece of feedback.

Sharon: So the other dimension we need to consider is the emotional state. We know that emotions are contagious. So if for example, you are the boss and you need to deliver some corrective feedback, you need to be very mindful of what feeling state you are in when you are entering into that conversation.

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Can you just unpack that quite rich area briefly?

Anne: Oh, it's a fascinating area and your own emotional state and the state of your brain has a dramatic impact on how your people will receive your feedback. Because if you are escalated, if you are not in a good state, the way you deliver the feedback is of course going to be aroused and emotional and potentially escalatory.

Well, what we know in the, the concept process of emotional contagion is that the emotions of people of higher status are more contagious than the emotions for people of lower status. So because you're the boss and you might be in a bad state. That means almost automatically your people will catch your state.

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So if you are stressed out and kind of escalatory and you know, frenetic in the way that you communicate your feedback, well don't be surprised if the response that you get is certainly not a calm, cool, and collected one, because you are actually queuing that to happen in the other party.

Certainly it doesn't always work as easily in the other direction because we catch fear and anxiety easier than we catch positivity.

But if you are able to be calm and cool and collected and find some positive frames and have built up your reservoir of positivity in advance, you certainly increase the probability that the person will react in a more accepting way as opposed to a more escalatory way.

Sharon: Sometimes in the workplace we seek out feedback. Yet what we get doesn't necessarily match what we were seeking, especially, for example, when a manager gives us a quick, yeah, that was good or that was fine.

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What's your advice when it comes to eliciting meaningful feedback?

Anne: There are many, many feedback structures and many questions that we can ask, but here is an incredibly.

Simple method that I think is easy to remember and works incredibly well, and we just simply call this the stoplight model.

So if I want to get meaningful feedback, rather than saying something like, how am I doing? I can go to a person and say, look, I'd really like you to think about and answer for me three specific questions. 

I would like to know what is one thing in our working relationship that you would like me to stop doing that you think isn't working very well? 

What is one thing you would like me to continue doing that you think is in fact working reasonably well?

What is one thing that you would like me to try doing or to start doing that might be different from something I've ever done in the past?

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And when you give people that sort of very specific structure, you're much more likely to get a meaningful and a much more specific answer. 

And, of course the trick is that when I ask people for feedback, I actually have to do something about it so that they know if they deliver it again, that there's actually a chance I'm gonna implement what they've said.

And the more that we're able to engage in that reciprocity, the more virtuous the cycle becomes, that people then are very happy to give me feedback because they've seen the impact that their feedback has had on us.

Sharon: It's very clear now that feedback is a critical ingredient in creating a healthy and high performing organisation.

So what do we know about optimising this feedback friendly culture? What kind of ratio do we want between that confirming versus the corrective feedback?

Anne: Well, we actually have a significant amount of research that tells us. Very specifically what we need to do to create a positive, thriving performance based feedback culture.

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The first thing is about the emotions that people are experiencing at work, and Barbara Fredrickson actually discovered that in the workplace, a three to one ratio of positive felt emotion as compared to negative felt emotion was the minimum amount necessary to allow the possibility of thriving. Now interestingly, once it got up to the point of 11 to one, it all fell apart in a heap.

So in other words, you don't want to be positive all the time, you don't want to have positive emotions constantly. Of course, negative emotions are a part of life in a part of work. But if we can focus on really trying to get that three to one ratio right, we are much more likely to create a positive thriving culture.

The second thing that we should be doing if we wanna create a positive, thriving feedback culture is to think about what we  say.

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And of course what we say does impact on how we feel. But what we discovered in the research, and this is done by both John Gottman as well as confirmed by Barbara Fredrickson, is that when we have five times more speaking terms or comments that are based in positivity as opposed to criticisms when we have five times more confirming, constructive, positive, expressing gratitude sorts of comments that we actually are able to counterbalance the bad ones.

So that five to one ratio in trying to focus on finding opportunities to tell people they're doing something right five times more than we tell them they're doing something wrong.