The Feedback Dilemma: Why Leaders Struggle and Then Fail to Give Effective Feedback

A lot of employees around the world consistently complain that they do not get enough feedback from their managers.

But before jumping into blaming the managers immediately, let me share with you a real-life story that might explain why managers do not give enough feedback to their employees.

But before we begin, let me ask you a question and I want you to be patient with me as I have a point that I would love to make.

Do you have any kids?

And if yes, how do you give feedback to your kid?

Any person who has a kid cares about giving feedback to this kid to help him or her develop. But how do you- as a parent- do that?

First, you need to find something to give feedback about. But how are you going to find this thing?

By asking your kid questions and based on his answer you will provide feedback?

Not really, because anyone who has a kid knows how it goes. You meet your kid after school and ask ‘’how was your day?’’, and you will most probably hear something like ‘’fine’’ unless there is something major that the kid wants to share with you like a conflict at school or how he or she did at an exam.

After your kid says ‘’fine’’, you will most probably try to ask more questions to try to get more answers, and most of the time you will fail.

Something like ‘’Did you learn something new today?’’ will be answered shortly again with a ‘’Yes’’ or a ‘’No’’ and with some extra words in the best-case scenario.

So, how do you find something to give feedback about?

Maybe you will wait for feedback from the school teacher?

Yes, but the feedback from the teacher is usually not something consistent that you receive daily or weekly (unless there is a severe problem), and you cannot wait until you have the parents meeting every several months.

So, you reach this conclusion. To be able to give consistent feedback to your kid and guide him or her to grow, you need to be around him or her as much as possible.

Besides asking your kid questions daily, you need to see him or her in action. You need to see how he or she plays, trains, communicates with other kids, communicates with grown-up people, and how he or she does the homework.

Only then, you will be able to give consistent feedback to him and hopefully, you will be able to give the right feedback and the right advice.

Now, I want you to keep the same story but replace the characters, and instead of the father, son/or daughter relationship, I want you to think about the relationship between the manager and the team member and ask yourself ‘’how is the manager capable of giving effective feedback consistently that can help this team member grow personally and professionally, especially if he or she is not around all the time?’’

Let us face the reality, our hierarchies, and organizational structures (not to mention the workload of the manager) do not allow a manager of a team to be around his team members most of the time to find incidents to give feedback about.

And because of this, the manager will be only capable of giving feedback if he is involved with his team member because both of them are attending an escalation meeting or a customer meeting for example, or if the manager was in copy in an email and he witnessed how his team member reacted.

And again, you will find that the main problem will be to find feedback to give or a topic that the manager can discuss with his employees in the first place. Like the story of the son or the daughter that I mentioned previously.

And to find something, the manager usually tries to get information from his or her team members in the 1 to 1 meetings by asking something like what the father asks his son ‘’how was your day?’’

And usually, the team member is programmed to answer ‘’fine’’, but then with a small nudge from the manager maybe he or she will be encouraged to speak for a few minutes more.

After a while, the manager will ask about the projects and the employee will explain how the work is going and that’s all. And usually, the manager finishes this meeting with no opportunity to provide powerful feedback.

So, the problem remains the same, how can the manager find something to talk about?

‘’Ah, let us send a 360-degree feedback questionnaire to some of the people who are working with my team member to provide me with some input that I can use to give feedback’’, says the manager.

And this is exactly similar to the parent waiting for feedback from the teacher in the parents' meeting every several months.

But this is not enough for a lot of reasons:

a- In a lot of cases, gathering feedback from the people who were required to provide the 360-degree feedback is painful and involves a lot of reminders and follow-ups because people are busy and to them, filling out the questionnaire is not their top priority.

This becomes even more challenging the higher you go up the career ladder and if you send senior leaders to provide feedback. Because their schedule is tight.

So usually, it can take a lot of time to gather feedback from most of the people who received the 360-degree feedback request.

And then, in a lot of cases, until the manager receives feedback from most people, he or she finds themselves already busy, and hence they delay analyzing it and accordingly, deliver the results of the 360-degree feedback even later to the employee.

b- And because a lot of people are tight and under pressure, the answers that they provide may be not accurate enough or they can be a little bit biased.

For example, since usually a lot of leaders use 360-degree feedback to obtain feedback about employees only 1 time per year, the person providing feedback can be influenced to provide information that is on top of his or her mind because it happened just weeks ago and hence forget other crucial information that happened 7 or 8 months ago.

In this condition, the evaluation will not be so helpful. Think about it for a moment, if you are dealing with someone for a year, and someone asks you to share your opinion about this person, what will be the first thing that comes to your head? The last several interactions between both of you? Or the ones that happened 10 months ago?

On top of that, we are humans. If you do not like someone in your first meeting together, there is a big chance that you will still not like this person 1 year later. And the same if you like someone.

And accordingly, you can be biased, and your feedback will not be objective even if you document your feedback with clear incidents and context.

c- Finally, If you rely on 360-degree feedback to provide feedback to your employee, then this means that you can provide him or her feedback only 1 or 2 times per year. And this is very low and not timely.

For feedback to be effective, it has to be timely. And this is the reason for one of the employees’ problems which is the ‘’look busy’’ syndrome.

When your employees discover that they can’t get timely feedback that can help them grow, they will search for a way to evaluate themselves.

And in a lot of cases, they evaluate themselves based on how busy they seem even if they are not truly busy, and even if they are doing something meaningless.

They are doing this because they got the message loud and clear ‘’If I pretend that I am busy most of the time, then I will look cool and important, and I will be perceived positively.’’

So the question changes from ‘’Am I growing consistently in my job?’’ to ‘’Do other people perceive that I am busy and accordingly important here?’’

So, what is the solution?

The solution starts with acknowledging some inner psychological barriers that block the manager from giving effective feedback. Let me share with you 3 of these barriers:

1- The performance barrier: in this barrier, the manager says to himself ‘’My team member is hungry, motivated, and ambitious, he or she doesn’t need my feedback.’’ And of course, this is not correct.

Even the most ambitious and high-performing employees long to hear feedback that can help them improve even if they know their path or what they are doing.

2- The position barrier: This barrier happens a lot at the top of the hierarchy. For example, you are a vice-president and one of your direct reports is a director, so you feel shy to give him or her feedback to grow.

3- The age barrier: or in other words when a manager says to himself ‘’My team member is not young, he doesn’t need feedback.’’

As a leader, you need to get over these psychological barriers.

And let me tell you this to help you. Your team member is expecting more feedback from you regardless of whether this team member is an employee at the beginning of his or her career or a Vice president.

I worked with people from over 15 countries around the world in the past 8 years only, and I also worked with ambitious people in their 20s and even in their 50s, and almost all of them regardless of nationality, age, or where they were in the hierarchy were hungry for consistent feedback that helps them develop.

To finalize this point, here is something that I want you to think about. Ever wondered why it is easier to give feedback to your team member regarding something that someone else complained about?

For example, when you go to your team member to deliver the outcome of the 360-degree feedback, ever wondered why you are not so concerned, or why you do not think a lot?

Because you feel ‘’It is not me, it is them who are saying so.’’ So, you do not think a lot about how to frame something and you do not think a lot about the age, position, or performance barriers.

Now comes a more interesting point. To provide feedback, you need context. You need incidents and information that you can use to give effective feedback. For this to happen you have mainly 3 options:

- Option 1: you have to be skilled in asking revealing questions and hence you can get more information from your team members.

Asking him or her the same questions each week and expecting deep answers will rarely work (And speaking about questions. if you need questions that can trigger deep discussions ask me for my list…I learned with time what questions may work and what may not. And I created my favorite classification of questions. For example, questions that break the ice, questions that help you understand the identity and background of your employee, or questions that make you learn their deepest desires or goals...etc. Based on what type you need; send me a message and I can share with you some of my most successful questions).

- Option 2: or you have to find more ways to be involved ‘’without being directly involved’’ with your team members (if you do this in the wrong way, you can be perceived as if you are micromanaging them. So be careful).

- Option 3: or you have to find another way that encourages your team members to consistently share with you deep insights that you can build upon. For example, you can use the Checklist approach that I wrote about in my previous article ''Empowering Managers to Drive Organizational Growth: A Simplified Checklist Approach’’. You can check it here.

You also need to be able to give REAL constructive feedback. Going to your team member and saying something like ‘’you have to be more confident’’ or ‘’you have to think about the big picture’’ or ‘’you have to be more proactive’’ will rarely get any results for a lot of reasons.

First, Big-picture thinking, confidence, and being proactive are very general terms. And because they are general terms each person interprets them differently. A lot of misunderstandings can happen between what you mean and what your team members understand.

Second, you have to provide context and give concrete examples.

If you just tell me ‘’you need to be more confident’’ I will ask myself what exactly encouraged you to give me this advice or have this impression about me, and I will keep wondering and creating stories in my mind.

And trust me, the worst thing that can ever happen at any corporation is to let your team members start creating stories in their minds and building assumptions in such situations.

Because guess what? Most of the time, these assumptions will be negative and will make the situation and your relationship with your team members worse.

Third, you have to tell me what to do to improve.

Again, coming to ‘’confidence’’. If you tell me ‘’Be more confident’’ I will say to myself ’’And what should I do exactly?’’.

If you are managing people, you should give them more than that. But to give them more than that, you have to be honest with yourself.

So, ask yourself ‘’Do I know how to give them more than that?’’

Remember, asking your employee to be more confident, to think more about the big picture, or to stop being involved where their involvement is not required, means that they need to change their behavior.

So ask yourself ‘’ Do I, as a leader, know how to help my employees change their behaviors?’’ And be honest with yourself.

And if you discover that you do not know how, then please do not go to the human resources department and ask them for a training that your team member can attend, because it will not work.

In one of my previous articles named ‘’The Importance of embracing change: Lessons in Leadership from failed change initiatives’’, I wrote If you want to change anything inside any company, you need to change human behavior. You need people to do X instead of Y so that you achieve something new.

But when it comes to changing human behavior, most people do not know what to do and where to start.

If changing human behavior is easy and common sense, then anyone can lose weight, stop smoking, stop drinking, stop being impulsive, or stop dealing aggressively with other people...etc. But we all know that changing behavior is hard. Very hard.

So either you invest a considerable amount of time learning, applying, making mistakes, correcting yourself, and trying to reach the right formula or ask for the ‘’right type’’ of external help from outside the company.

The idea of ‘’let’s just do it’’  without spending effort, time, and money to learn how to change human behavior, or the idea of just attending training, a seminar, or an online course for 2-5 days and thinking that this is enough and that you are ready (like unfortunately how we do it when we appoint people to new managerial roles) will rarely work.

And if you doubt what I say let me tell you this.

If changing behavior is easy and can happen via attending a training or a seminar, then anyone who wants to be good at public speaking will attend public speaking training and will transform his or her speaking skills, or anyone who wants to lose weight will attend a weight loss seminar and then they will get back in shape. And of course, I know as well as you know that this does not happen most of the time.

Think about it. Companies invest tons of money on trainings. We have training in areas such as public speaking, presentation skills, strategic thinking, leadership, creative thinking, and more. And I am sure you attended some of them.

So, let me ask you, did you change your behavior after attending them? And if yes for how long?

Did your colleagues become super creative thinkers after attending the creative thinking training?

Did you become more strategic after attending the strategic thinking training?

The retention to execution rates after attending these trainings are very very low and almost none.

Because trainings and seminars are only intended to give you insights and not to change your behavior. And we all know that there is a difference between knowing something and doing it.

And even if you decide to change your behavior in one specific area, you will face a lot of inertia from the environment around you which will make it easier for you to revert to your old behaviors.

So again, do not think that you will attend a course and then you will be great at changing human behavior, and will know how to change the behavior of your employee, or that the problem of your employee or anything that you asked him or her to change will happen via just attending a training.

So please keep all that we discussed today in your mind BEFORE giving feedback to your employee.

The idea is not just to ‘’throw to them’’ feedback to check a box and feel comfortable deep inside of you, the idea is to ask yourself ‘’am I doing it in the right way that can help my employee build on this feedback and accordingly improve?’’

Because this is the essence of giving feedback in the first place.