In my role as a leadership coach, I consistently hear my clients say that they crave negative feedback from their managers in order to improve in their jobs, grow their careers, and achieve better business results. However, when it comes to soliciting negative feedback, they find that their managers would rather dismiss, deny, or delay it rather than speak directly, truthfully, and immediately about what isn’t working and what needs to change.
That makes sense when you consider what may be at risk when giving (and receiving) negative feedback. In her article, “How to Give Negative Feedback When Your Organization Is ‘Nice,’” my colleague Jennifer Porter cites barriers to giving negative feedback that include hurt feelings; a desire to maintain professionalism (rather than having things get “messy”); a lack of role models for giving negative feedback; the prospect of an emotional outburst; and not wanting to jeopardize the “nice” culture.1
Additional research from University of California professors Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman, and Purdue University professor Kipling D. Williams, shows that negative feedback can be experienced as a form a social rejection (“You’re telling me I’m not good enough and that I don’t belong here” is one frequent interpretation), and that social rejection hurts emotionally and physically.2 Few managers want to cause their direct reports pain and potentially risk an emotional outburst, loss of commitment, or even retaliation.
Nevertheless, when people don’t receive useful negative feedback, they can’t grow. According to authors Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman in their article, “Your Employees Want the Negative Feedback You Hate to Give,” when asked what was most helpful in their careers, 72% of respondents attributed performance improvement to getting negative feedback from their managers.3 The same study also showed that managers were reluctant to give negative feedback.
Bill Gates agrees: “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”4
So what do you do if you know that negative feedback is what you need to succeed—and nobody’s talking? Stop asking for negative feedback (you’ve already tried that, right?) and try one of these creative approaches instead:
Managers should be able to give negative feedback, but even if they don’t, you need to learn how to solicit it so that you get the information you need to grow in your job and career.
DEBORAH GRAYSON RIEGEL is a principal at The Boda Group, a leadership and team development firm. She also teaches management communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
1.Jennifer Porter, “How to Give Negative Feedback When Your Organization Is ‘Nice,’” Harvard Business Review, March 14, 1016; Amy Jen Su, “How to Give Negative Feedback to People Who Cry, Yell, or Get Defensive,” Harvard Business Review, September 21, 2016.
2.Naomi I. Eisenberger, Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams, “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion,” Science 302, no. 5643 (October 2003): 290–292.
3.Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, “Your Employees Want the Negative Feedback You Hate to Give,” Harvard Business Review, January 15, 2014.
4.Jana Kasperkevic, “Bill Gates: Good Feedback Is the Key to Improvement,” Inc., May 17, 2013.
5.Adam Grant, “Wondering” (blog), January 2018, http://www.adamgrant.net/wondering.
Reprinted from hbr.org, originally published
March 5, 2018 (product #H046U4).
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