THE LACK OF FEEDBACK

WHERE’S THE EMOTIONAL CLARITY?

You look at your opposite number on the negotiation team. He’s sitting across the big wooden conference room table from you, and you’re waiting for him to say something. Over the past four weeks, as the complicated negotiations have gone on, you’ve gotten to know him well. You know his tells, his nearly invisible body-language signs about what he’s really thinking underneath that impassive exterior.

Finally, he says it: “I think we should go ahead.” But something is nagging at you. You know his body language well enough now to pick up on subtle discomfort. You know that he’s not entirely satisfied with the deal. So instead of saying, “Great, welcome aboard,” you pause.

“Is there anything we haven’t talked about that is making you uncomfortable?” You know there is; you want to give him a chance to voice his reservations.

And so he does. Later on, when you’ve ironed out the problems that were indeed still there, just beneath the surface, he confesses that he had been about to put the deal on hold and let it quietly die. He had grown to like you in the month you had been negotiating together, and he was uncomfortable with sharing what seemed like minor problems. But added together, they had become one big deal killer. If you hadn’t given him the opening, he would have been ready to leave the table. Your reading of his body language saved the day.

What is that sensory feedback, and why is it so important to us humans?

There are two kinds of feedback: implicit and explicit. The implicit kind is illustrated by the example just above. It’s the sensory feedback that our unconscious minds give us 24-7, the sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes of our world of experience. In addition to the five senses that we’re all keenly aware of, neuroscientists debate a number of others, such as thermoception, proprioception, nociception, equilibrioception, mechanoreception, chemoreceptors of various kinds, hunger and thirst, and others we’re just learning about.¹

Explicit feedback is the running commentary that drives individuals, teams, and organizations to get things done from day to day. In the real world, the two kinds of feedback mix in a way that usually feels effortless. Our words are conveyed to other people—and theirs to us—with a welter of largely unconscious sensory data that automatically goes with the words. We smile, frown, draw back, lean in, laugh, and cry. Our senses are at work all the time, creating both context and emotional meaning for our daily lives.

Put us in the virtual world, and almost all these senses are deprived. Now, when the multichannel sensory system that is the brain is deprived of one or more of those senses, the neuroscientists tell us, it hates the vacuum. So, the brain fills the empty channels with assumptions, memories, and fake data. The result is, not surprisingly, all the misunderstandings we’re so familiar with in the virtual world. The email that conveys a sarcastic tone the sender didn’t intend. The phone conference that left everyone believing that the project was dead in the water. The videoconference that made you feel less comfortable about joining the team. Trolling. And so on.

Put us in the virtual world, in short, and we’re short-changed on the implicit feedback that is so important for getting us through our days. Remember, in evolutionary terms, we humans are fragile creatures and so have developed extraordinary prediction skills and pattern-recognition abilities. We put those two skills together to keep ourselves alive. Take away the data that allows us to predict and to recognize, and we feel lost, unsafe, and confused. That’s the virtual world in a nutshell.

But the issues go further. Explicit feedback relies on implicit feedback much more than most people realize. So, when we’re asked what we thought of that presentation, that meeting, or that town hall session, we can offer a mix of explicit and implicit feedback. The mix allows us to soften the harsh messages and toughen the soft ones. We may only say, “It was fine,” but our body language—the implicit feedback—conveys that we really thought the session was a disaster. Or the reverse. We can deliver some tough words but soften their impact with a touch or a smile that says, “It really wasn’t that bad.” And there are, of course, a whole host of shades of meaning possible in between.

The manager who is used to offering minimal explicit feedback because she conveys a strong connection to her team nonverbally may find herself struggling in the virtual world, where she suddenly has to articulate everything that she previously could leave unsaid. If she fails to do so, then she risks leaving her team confused about her intentions and their performance.

Take out the implicit feedback on which the explicit messages depend, and you get confusion and alienation. Let’s further explore the difficulties inherent in feedback in the virtual world. We’ve identified the basic problem: explicit feedback relies on implicit feedback to provide the emotional connections that make human relationships matter, that help people function effectively through the daily ups and downs of organizational life, and that help them endure.

Explicit feedback lacks the unconscious context of human emotional exchange

All too often online, feedback becomes trolling and rapidly descends into hate on all sides. Why is that? Why does this honorable form of human commentary from one person to another rarely work online?

Fundamentally, what has changed is the nature of trust. And as trust changes, so do the relationships, precisely because of how we are hardwired to form connections with people. Trust in the virtual world is much more fragile, though perhaps easier to establish initially. But the big difference comes when something threatens the trust.

And feedback depends on trust. In face-to-face relationships where there is trust, one party may do something to screw up, causing friction, anger, and even a bit of mistrust to creep in. But if the connection is strong enough, the feedback begins. The issue will get thrashed out, the perpetrator will apologize, and trust will be restored. Indeed, once restored, the trust may be stronger than ever.

How different it is in the virtual world! Once trust is threatened, it’s instantly broken, and it’s nearly impossible to reestablish it. People simply move on. Since trust was more fragile in the first place, it shatters with very little provocation.

Thus, virtual feedback has some obvious flaws. First of all, there’s much less of it because virtual feedback is simply harder to give than is face-to-face feedback. Second, virtual feedback is less robust and more likely to cause irreparable harm. And third, the resultant weaker feedback has much less meaning.

There’s less spontaneous virtual feedback because trust is more fragile. Why should I enter into the first half of a feedback loop if my trust in you is not very deep and liable to be eventually broken inadvertently even if it isn’t broken deliberately?

Lacking the unconscious stream of emotional information we receive automatically from other people face-to-face, online communication and feedback is much less robust, much less compelling, and indeed much less interesting than face-to-face feedback. But it still can sting.

Why does online feedback hurt so much? We humans are social beings; put us face-to-face, and we share mirror neurons that allow us to match each other’s emotions unconsciously and immediately.² We leak emotions to each other. We anticipate and mirror each other’s movements when we’re in sympathy or agreement with one another—when we’re on the same side. And we can mirror each other’s brain activity when we’re engaged in storytelling and listening—both halves of the communication conundrum.³

All of that leaking and sharing creates trust, intimacy, and connection. It creates receptivity and interest in the other person’s point of view.

We want to achieve this state of human communion; it’s a mistake to think that most humans prefer the solitary life that so much of modern virtual life imposes on us. We are most comfortable when we’re connected, sharing strong emotions and stories, and led by a strong, charismatic leader who is keeping us safe and together.

The virtual world, in contrast, is much less engaging. We humans are much less engaged in most forms of this world because the forms lack the emotional information we crave.

Negative virtual feedback hurts

Beyond trust or the lack of it, another demand has arisen concomitantly in the virtual face-to-face mix we live in today: authenticity. We live in an era when the demand for authenticity trumps a number of qualities that society used to deem more important. Authenticity has always had a measure of importance, but its stock has risen and fallen depending on the times. Right now, it beats out excellence, coolness, and artifice; to jump to the top of the charts or the best-seller list, you have to be ready to open up.

The demand for authenticity makes you more vulnerable to (and more exposed to) feedback. And online feedback is far more often of the trolling kind. The result is the naming and shaming, the Twitter wars, the instant celebrities whose lives are just as instantly ruined by hate-filled outpourings of online denizens who pounce virtually on those who put themselves out there.

And thus we become febrile inhabitants of a world that is deeply reflective of the ironies of our times: we crave feedback, and yet we fear it. It is both wonderful and soul-killing. We are insecure and immune. We have celebrities and politicians who are more loved and more hated than ever before.

We crave recognition and fear it at the same time. We are polarized. We are tribal. We are addicted to the feedback—the recognition, the likes, the retweets, the confirmation of the virtual world—and are terrified that it will turn on us and destroy us.

Trust in the virtual world is not only fragile, but also a weapon. And yet we need to trust, because we are one click away from identity theft, or trolling, or worse: oblivion.

Just try to deprive someone of their mobile phone. The very thought has given rise to a new social disease. As many as 66 percent of adults may suffer from it.⁴ For some, the anxiety is so severe that it can cause panic attacks. But almost everyone in modern society has this problem to some degree. What’s going on?

It’s called nomophobia—no-mobile-phone-phobia.⁵ Researchers have recently coined the term to describe the fear of being without your smartphone. If you’ve ever had a moment of panic when you checked your pocket or purse and your phone wasn’t where you thought it was, if the sight of a low-battery warning freaks you out, if you can’t imagine leaving the house without your phone, if you never turn it off, if you no longer know how to survive three minutes in a grocery store checkout line without checking your phone, you may have nomophobia.

Caglar Yildirim and Ana-Paula Correia, researchers from Iowa State University, have identified four main components of nomophobia: “not being able to communicate, losing connectedness, not being able to access information, and giving up convenience.”⁶ The inability to communicate with friends and loved ones is the most obvious and understandable reason to worry about being without a smartphone. But the phobia goes beyond just concern about staying connected. The questionnaire the researchers used to “diagnose” nomophobia also asked people to respond to statements like “Being unable to get the news on my smartphone would make me nervous” and “I would be nervous because I would be disconnected from my online identity.”

Think about that. Our social media personas have become so central to our lives that the idea of being disconnected from them makes us nervous. Psychologists say that loneliness and insecurity contribute to this problem.⁷ It makes sense—in the age of the smartphone, you never have to be truly alone. You can always text or tweet or post on Facebook and instantly feel the warmth of human connection.

Or the terror of trolling. That’s the Catch-22 of the virtual world and the need for, and dread of, feedback.

But there’s even more going on here. Relying on our smartphones is actually reshaping our brains. Research shows that when we can easily get information from an external source, we gradually lose our ability to remember that information. Think about it. How many phone numbers do you know by heart? If you wanted to know the name of the actor who played that guy in that movie about the train, would you rack your brain, ask a friend, debate it for twenty minutes—or just google it?

If your phone has become part of your brain, it’s no wonder you feel anxious to be without it. And this problem is only going to grow. Younger people are already more likely to suffer from nomophobia than are older generations. More than three-quarters of people aged eighteen to twenty-four have nomophobia, compared with 66 percent for older folks.⁸ One survey found that 92 percent of teenagers never turn off their phones.⁹ And when teens were separated from their phones, their blood pressure rose, and they didn’t perform as well on simple cognitive tests of things like memory and attention as they did when they had their phones.

These young people need to have their phones with them just to feel normal. Is this the digital mastery we thought we were going to achieve in the digital era?

Without emotional subtext, we become less competent

Digital confusion, not digital competence, reigns supreme today. How many times have you unintentionally started a virtual war with a colleague or friend over a minor misunderstanding of tone and have it quickly escalate into a full-blown snit? You were moving fast, you forgot to mention that your colleague actually had a week to complete the project, and—while you did your best to repair the damage—you looked thoughtless at best.

At the heart of this sort of miscommunication and many others like it is a lack of quick, effortless, face-to-face feedback. In person, the twitch of an eyebrow or a quizzical smile is all it takes to signal that your attempt at humor fell flat. But in the virtual world, timely feedback is usually missing. By the time you get feedback, it’s because the other party is furious, hurt, or ready to cancel the sale.

Further, the pressure to move quickly can often mean we lose track of important details in the rush to answer an email or move a project along. Details get lost, implications that normally could be conveyed with a tone of voice go unheard, and resentments flair.

Let’s go back to first principles. A successful communication is not a monologue; it’s a conversation. And a conversation is always two-way. There’s always a feedback loop, at minimum. To put it another way, if participants don’t have the sense that others are listening to them, then they won’t feel part of the communication and it won’t succeed.

The realities of twenty-first-century work life, especially post-2008, means that many of us have more virtual meetings throughout our work lives than we have face-to-face ones. This difference represents a huge shift in organizational life—and human behavior—in less than a generation. Of course, the purveyors of the high-tech equipment that makes these meetings possible tout the benefits—efficiency, speed, savings on travel, and so on. These are undeniable.

But virtual meetings will never replace the need for humans to exchange emotional and unconscious nonverbal information through face-to-face exchanges. Virtual communication can make do, but that’s all, and it won’t work for difficult conversations, important transactions, highly emotional discussions, and most other kinds of important feedback—any time strong human emotions are involved.

Virtual meetings are second-best: trust is hard, and feedback is either lacking or hurtful

Think about why an online organization like Amazon has such high trust ratings, whereas many others do not. Amazon puts a ferocious amount of effort into ensuring that you always have a good, transparent transaction when you go on the site. And shopping is just about the easiest form of human interaction.

But for everything else, I wonder if we are changing something basic about how we form relationships. Will the next generations be able to invest in online connections the same way that everyone now invests in “real” face-to-face relationships?

If most of your relationships are virtual, their fragility may make you less able to get through the bumps and shocks that every (face-to-face) relationship naturally endures. If you take the pattern of commitment from the virtual world, your understanding of the meaning of relationship will be attenuated and weak. What will trust and feedback look like then?

Today, you need to sharpen your communication skills. You need to become a much more effective communicator by entering each conversation, virtual or digital, with a clear picture of your goals for the interaction and what you need from the other person. You also have to know how to get reliable, regular feedback by verbally asking someone to check your progress whenever you cannot obtain unconscious feedback from face-to-face contact.

Here are a few basic rules for mastering the digital version of feedback—information that, in the face-to-face world, is such a simple mix of explicit and implicit reactions.

Virtual feedback should be appropriate to the effort, to the occasion, and to the recipient. Tact is important, but so is honesty. Every year when the TV program American Idol aired, the show began with hilarious outtakes of truly terrible singers stomping off in fury after one or another of the judges told them, gently or bluntly, that they were indeed terrible. Often, it was clear from the comments of all concerned that no one had ever given these painfully bad singers any honest feedback before. As a result, they had been permitted to nurse hopeless dreams of stardom, often for years, until the contestants were brought up short by reality in the form of national television humiliation. They were furious, hurt, and sometimes in denial, but there was no question about the appropriateness of the feedback. They had set themselves up for it; judgment was what they were there for. Indeed, that was the inescapable point of the show.

Virtual feedback should be honest, but it doesn’t need to be cruel. Teachers and other early influencers often bear the responsibility of giving feedback to no-hopers, or people aspiring to something that the teachers feel is unattainable. And for the most part, the influencers are doing the underachievers and the rest of the world a favor directing them into other lines of work. But occasionally, one of those no-hopers turns out to be a Twyla Tharp or a Picasso or a Steve Jobs. For all those future geniuses, as well as the rest of us, it’s important to leaven clarity with kindness.

Virtual feedback should be both authoritative and humble. Again, for the future geniuses who have repeatedly proven the early critics wrong, those giving feedback should be aware of their own shortcomings as artists, business geniuses, or chess players themselves. If you do offer feedback, have some basis for your judgment, some real claim to expertise. And you should also understand the limits of that expertise and weigh your words accordingly.

Virtual feedback should be specific and focused on the relevant object, performance, or creation. If you perceive work to be slapdash, say so, and explain how it falls short, but don’t conclude that the creator is lazy. A failed artistic performance doesn’t entitle you to judge the character of the performer. And general comments are far less useful—and far more damaging—than specific ones. Don’t say, “This seems off to me.” Rather, do the hard work of perceiving and then saying, “The brush strokes in the upper part of the painting seem to me to be conveying a sense of urgency that’s lacking in the lower part.” Or something like that.

Virtual feedback should never be more about the giver than the recipient. Go to a writer’s meet-up group, and you’ll hear mystery writers telling nonfiction writers that their work needs more suspense. Inevitably, feedback takes the form all too often of talking to oneself—the feedback really concerns what the giver knows at some deep level to be the problem with his or her own work. If you’re going to offer feedback, you have to have enough security, distance, and impartiality to deliver an opinion that is truly helpful. If the receiver feels seen, then this recognition goes a long way to mitigating the painful feelings surrounding the criticism.

Virtual feedback is an obligation that the previous generation or class owes the next one. If humans don’t improve, they merely reinvent the art or business wheel, and when they do that, they doom themselves or their organizations to the rubbish heap of history. Both the business world and the art world are ruthlessly competitive. We all need to bring our best games to the match.

Feedback should be offered in generosity and received in humility. Both giving and receiving feedback involve vulnerability and risk. The participants need to respect and honor each other. If the participants lack these qualities of generosity and humility, then the feedback process is generally either useless or destructive.

Those seven guidelines summarize what feedback should be. As you have no doubt experienced, the reality often falls short in the face-to-face world. In the virtual world, lacking the support of implicit feedback, explicit feedback is often devastating for the recipient.

Practical fixes

The virtual triage list

A triage list for communications feedback will help prevent the all-too-frequent misunderstandings in the virtual world. Use this list to create the feedback habit for audioconferences, video connections, and so on.

The emoji summary

Begin a virtual communication (e.g., an audioconference or a videoconference) by sending out one of several emoji, or symbols, agreed on in advance by your team, to indicate your emotional state at the start of the communication. Have the entire team check in this way. (There’s a reason why emoji and emoticons have flourished in the virtual world—precisely because they add back the missing emotional elements. You need to learn to make this practice deliberate and habitual.) Green, yellow, and red, for example, could mean, respectively, “all good,” “it’s not a great day; I’m a little stressed,” and “all hell is breaking loose,” or “something serious is wrong on my end.”

Then finish your virtual meeting by reporting green, yellow, and red again. If necessary, follow up for clarification.

The feedback cheat sheet

Review the following list often, ideally before you give feedback each time, to make sure you are offering your opinion effectively.

CHAPTER SUMMARY