Fixing the Feedback Problem

Using Perceptual IntelligenceTM to Build a “Radically Receptive” Culture

Meg Hourihan had a dilemma.

She was riding the subway when a well-dressed man stepped aboard. She immediately noticed his . . . ahem . . . wardrobe malfunction.

Meg wondered, Should I say something?  

But she kept quiet.

It bothered her enough post online: “How do you let someone know in public that their zipper is down?” ¹

StupidSexyFlanders replied, “Catch his eye, and then look directly at his crotch.” A second user replied:

Worst.

Advice.

Ever.

After volleys of debate and zip-up lines, most agreed, Best to keep quiet.
 

“Personally, I would never say a word to a strange man about an open fly.”

“It’s most polite to just stay silent. I know on the rare occasion I find myself out in public with my zipper down, when I discover it my first thought is ‘Whew, thank God nobody noticed!’ Occasionally I’ll notice a friend in the same situation, and then a few minutes later the problem is fixed. Then I’m glad I didn’t say anything.”

We all know it from personal history: feedback creates all sorts of embarrassment and drama. So we keep quiet.

My late father-in-law, Roger Morris, told me about a shuttle bus ride to a casino. He boarded and noticed an elderly woman stayed off for a smoke, then got on and sat across the aisle.

Roger had smoked fifty years but got emphysema and quit. Wanted to help. Kindly said, "Have you ever thought about quitting?"

She exploded. "Who the hell do you think you are?" Insults and cursing. Then they sat silent for the twenty-minute ride.

He said to me, "I'll never do that again."

These stories offer reasons for what experts call inadequate social feedback: a void of corrective communication in everyday interactions. People won’t say things that might be embarrassing or dangerous. If someone at work is abrasive, they won’t say. Except to everyone else, of course. If a boss is creating problems for workers, they won’t say. Could cost their job. There are consequences for saying things. So we reason, Best to keep quiet.

Once I was on a plane writing about inadequate social feedback, and honest to God, looked across the aisle at a guy with a foot of toilet paper on his shoe. Didn't say anything. Thought, eventually it'll fall off.

It’s all funny stuff, until it isn’t. A Deloitte study across a range of sectors showed 70 percent of employees “admit to remaining silent about issues that might compromise performance.” There’s a critical business issue. But most workers won’t say anything. They could help the business. But they keep quiet instead.

Leaders keep quiet too. Execs say their biggest challenge is their managers’ “lack of courage to have difficult performance discussions.”² Managers won’t say anything, problems persist, business suffers, good people leave.

It’s interesting how the execs describe their managers’ struggle as a “lack of courage” when it might be “abundance of intelligence.” Managers, after all, live in the trenches. They’ve seen the blowups, they’re keenly aware that feedback often creates more problems than it solves.

In their book, Thanks for the Feedback, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen write,
 

When asked to list their most difficult conversations, feedback always comes up. It doesn’t matter who they are, where they are, what they do, or why they brought us in. They describe just how tough it is to give honest feedback, even when they know it’s sorely needed. They tell us about performance problems that go unaddressed for years and explain that when they finally give the feedback, it rarely goes well. The coworker is upset and defensive, and ends up less motivated, not more. Given how hard it is to muster the courage and energy to give feedback in the first place, and the dispiriting results – well, who needs it?

Eventually, someone in the group will pipe up to observe that getting feedback is no easier. The feedback is unfair or off base. It’s poorly timed and even more poorly delivered. And it’s not clear why the giver thinks they are qualified to give an opinion; they may be the boss, but they don’t really understand what we do or the constraints we’re under. We are left feeling unappreciated, demotivated, and more than a little indignant. Who needs it?

Bottom line is, performance discussions don’t happen because managers believe it’s best to keep quiet. Feedback “rarely goes well.” The defensive response is the default response. Managers’ give feedback, and get a response loaded with fear, anger, avoidance, and attack. Instead of a culture that’s receptive to feedback, the culture is the opposite.
It’s one reason Cy Wakeman’s HR studies show the average worker in America spends two hours and twenty-six minutes a day embroiled in drama, which I define as dysfunctional thinking and relating. Conflict. Complaining. Persistent problems. Politics. Resentment. Leaders often feel incapable of correcting this dysfunction because the defensive response to feedback means more dysfunction.

These culture problems are expensive. When workers are unhappy and disengaged, Gallup research shows employers lose $9,000 a year per employee in productivity. And by the way, only a third of employees are engaged. For a thousand-worker company that’s a lot of unhappiness and about six million lost every year. The same Gallup research shows 48% of American workers, across all sectors and functions, are actively searching for a new job. When they leave, replacement costs run between $25,000 to $100,000.
Columbia Business Professor Jonathan Knee sums it up this way. “Corporate America sees feedback as scary. That's bad for the organization and bad for the development of the people.”

So, how do we fix this?

First and foremost, we’ve got to fix the receptivity problem, across the entire organization. There are two sides to feedback, giving and receiving. We should get better on both sides, but experts say the key player is the receiver, not the giver. ³

It’s counterintuitive. Most believe the giver is the problem. If they’d be nicer I might listen. If they’d be accurate and fair, I’d hear them out. By the way, feedback givers are unfair and inaccurate. They mischaracterize people and situations, misperceive motives, and mistreat people in a thousand ways. So we’re not talking about letting ourselves get duped and manipulated. We’re simply talking about an attitude that’s fundamentally receptive to feedback instead of the violently opposed.

Then think about this. If people only received feedback from great givers, they’d never receive, because there aren’t that many great givers. Even when givers are mature and caring and skilled, receivers can always find some imperfection – a bit of misinformation, a hint of injustice – as reason to dismiss feedback.

When receivers make others giving their excuse to stay in the dark, they stay in the dark forever. The crazy thing is, the receivers blame the givers for the receiver’s darkness. In this twisted logic the givers decide how ignorant and dysfunctional the receivers are.

Stone and Heen write, “The receivers are in control of what they do and don’t let in, how they make sense of what they’re hearing, and whether they choose to change….The focus should not be on teaching feedback givers to give. The focus – at work and at home – should be on feedback receivers, helping us all become more skillful learners.”⁴

Then, once we’ve focused on the receptivity side, we must believe that building a receptive culture is possible. I’ve been thinking about the receptivity problem for a while. I’ve found solutions. But most think there aren’t any solutions. It’s self-fulfilling prophesy. We believe we can’t build a receptive culture, so we never try, which means we never get a receptive culture, confirming our belief that we can’t build a receptive culture.

But there are organizations that have built receptive cultures. Feedback flows freely in all directions, without the defensive response, without the drama and the blowback. Workers give feedback to bosses, bosses give feedback to workers, peers give feedback to peers, without payback, without the anger and fear, without the avoiding and attacking. Truth abounds, everyone is receptive and mature, things improve.

As of this writing, one example is Netflix. Most business leaders know about the Netflix Culture Deck, first released in 2009. It’s currently at almost 21 million views. CEO Reed Hastings and HR Exec Patty McCord’s recent books describe how their culture of freedom and responsibility is “reinventing HR.” Netflix performance supports their claims. “Our IPO was at $1 about 20 years ago,” says Hastings. “Now we're about $500. We do attribute a lot of that to the culture.”

McCord writes, “One of the most important insights anyone in business can have is that it’s not cruel to tell people the truth respectfully and honestly.” In Netflix culture, receptivity helps people get better and helps the business get better. People appreciate this. Hastings writes, “With candor, high performers become outstanding performers. Frequent candid feedback exponentially magnifies the speed and effectiveness of your team.”

Hastings doesn’t just give feedback. More importantly, he receives it well. Recently a worker gave him some advice, impromptu, unsolicited. “In meetings, you tend to skip over topics,” the worker said, “or rush through them when you feel impatient.” His response? Most leaders get defensive, like smoker lady on the shuttle: “Who the hell do you think you are!” But instead, he replied, “It is so frustrating that I still do this. I will keep working on it.” He freely shares these sorts of conversations with the entire company, showing how he’s receptive, how he’s learning. Experts say “he receives more negative feedback than any other leader in the company.” He receives it. loves it. Learns from everyone. I call him “Radically Receptive,” a term I’ll explain shortly. There’s no question in everyone’s mind, Hastings is receptive to all forms of feedback, no matter how poorly delivered, no matter if it was asked for or not. As a result, he gets better, others get better, the company gets better.

The million-dollar question is, how do we build a receptive culture in our organization? For some leaders, it’s a billion-dollar question.
Let’s start with some building blocks, some foundational ideas.

I think it’s interesting how some leaders talk culture change but don’t invest the time and effort to change it. Or they’re sporadic, doing one thing, then another, never getting momentum. They don’t offer enough focused, consistent energy to get going.

Change experts often must cut off client engagements because the leaders are unwilling to make the process work. When leaders are too busy, under-resourced, or easily distracted, it’s a half-launched rocket. Liftoff, sputter, and boom.

But other leaders commit fully. They want lift-off and are willing to fuel the effort. They know that culture change takes a lot of time and consistent effort, and they’re committed to the process.

Certainly, there are ways to speed up the process, which we’ll see shortly, but half-baked efforts and unrealistic expectations mean failure and frustration. Any leader looking to build a “radically receptive” culture must be willing to fully commit to a long and expensive process, knowing that the investment is worth tenfold, even a hundredfold, in long-term returns.

Reed Hastings not only advocates for a culture of receptivity to feedback. He models it. He’s an inspired practitioner. He’s not like most leaders who want receptivity for others but not themselves. He’s deeply bought in.

Without leader buy-in, workers believe, This will blow over. Workers know it’s a fad, they’ve watched fads come and go. But when leaders commit fully, it signals workers, This is here to stay.

Even when leaders are willing to commit the time and effort required, and committed to start with themselves, they still must follow a careful, intelligent change process that fixes the root causes of the problem.

The defensive reaction to feedback runs deep. It must be rooted out. In its place, receptivity must be rooted in. To become receptive, leaders and workers must learn to deal with the stuff under the surface that’s creating the defensive response.

That requires a root-level approach to the change process I call Perceptual Intelligence^TM.  

Perceptual Intelligence^TM is a leadership philosophy that identifies and fixes the root causes of work-related emotions and behaviors. By fixing root causes, we make changes in work cultures that are faster, easier, extensive, and enduring.

It’s why I use the term, “Radically Receptive,” for one of our trainings. The word Radical is from the Latin word radic, which means, root. Radical means "proceeding from a root." When we fix the root causes of the defensive response to feedback, we can more easily change from hating feedback to loving it, from avoiding it to asking for it, from resenting it to appreciating it. We become “Radically Receptive” when we’ve done this deep work.  

Deep work is rare art, because root causes are invisible. American thinker, Henry David Thoreau described it this way: “For every thousand hacking at the branches of evil, there is one striking the root.” It’s more than commentary on good and evil, it’s two ways to solve problems: root-striking and branch-hacking. Root-striking is fixing the root cause, which is faster and easier. One cut at the root and the branches don’t grow back. Branch-hacking ignores root causes and works at the surface, tips and tactics that don’t get to the root of the problem. The branches grow back. It’s the harder and ineffective way to solve the problem.

If root-striking is easier and more effective, while branch-hacking is harder and less effective, why aren’t more people striking roots? Why does Thoreau suggest a thousand-to-one ratio?

Because roots are invisible. Root causes are hidden. The harder first problem is finding the root cause of the problem.

But once we’ve found the root cause, the next problem is faster and easier to solve, and the results are extensive and enduring. We find power to completely uproot the defensive response to feedback and build a culture of “Radical Receptivity” that means huge gains for everyone.  

Notes