You just gave a great
first pitch to a major client and landed an invitation to pitch to their senior
leaders. Now you want a second opinion on your presentation to see if there’s
anything you can improve. What do you do?
Conventional wisdom says
you should ask your colleagues for feedback. However, research suggests
that feedback often has no (or even a negative) impact on our performance. This
is because the feedback we receive is often too vague —
it fails to highlight what we can
improve on or how to
improve.
Our latest research suggests
a better approach. Across four experiments — including a field experiment
conducted in an executive education classroom — we found that people received
more effective input when they asked for advice rather than
feedback.
In one study, we asked
200 people to offer input on a job application letter for a tutoring position,
written by one of their peers. Some people were asked to provide this input in
the form of “feedback,” while others were asked to provide “advice.” Those who
provided feedback tended to give vague, generally praising comments. For
example, one reviewer who was asked to give feedback made the following
comment: “This person seems to meet quite a few of the requirements. They have
experience with kids, and the proper skills to teach someone else. Overall,
they seem like a reasonable applicant.”
However, when asked to
give advice on the same application letter, people offered more critical and
actionable input. One reviewer noted more specific action items: “I would add
in your previous experience tutoring or similar interactions with children.
Describe your tutoring style and why you chose it. Add what your ultimate end
goal would be for an average 7 year old.”
In fact, compared to
those asked to give feedback, those asked to provide “advice” suggested 34%
more areas of improvement and 56% more ways to improve.
In another study, we
asked 194 full-time employees in the U.S. to describe a colleague’s performance
on a recent work task. These tasks ranged from “putting labels on items” to
“creating new marketing strategies.” Then, we asked employees to give feedback or
advice on the work performance they just described. Once again, those who were
asked to provide feedback gave less critical and actionable input (e.g. one
wrote, “They gave a very good performance without any complaints related to his
work”) than those asked to provide advice (e.g. one wrote, “In the future, I
suggest checking in with our executive officers more frequently. During the
event, please walk around, and be present to make sure people see you”).
We further replicated
these findings in a field experiment using instructor evaluations. In an
end-of-course evaluation, we asked 70+ executive education students from around
the world to provide either feedback or advice to their instructors. Again,
advice more frequently contained detailed explanations of what worked and what
didn’t, such as: “I loved the cases. But I would have preferred concentrating
more time on learning specific tools that would help improve the negotiation
skills of the participants.” Feedback, in contrast, often included generalities,
such as “This faculty’s content and style of teaching was very good.”
Why is asking for advice
more effective than asking for feedback? As it turns out, feedback is often
associated with evaluation. At school, we receive feedback with letter grades. When
we enter the workforce, we receive feedback with our performance evaluations.
Because of this link between feedback and evaluation, when people are asked to
provide feedback, they often focus on judging others’ performance; they think
more about how others performed in the past. This makes it harder to imagine
someone’s future and possibly better performance. As a result, feedback givers
end up providing less critical and actionable input.
In contrast, when asked
to provide advice, people focus less on evaluation and more on possible future
actions. Whereas the past is unchangeable, the future is full of possibilities.
So, if you ask someone for advice, they will be more likely to think forward to
future opportunities to improve rather than backwards to the things you have
done, which you can no longer change.
To document this effect,
we ran another study that was very similar to our first. In this experiment, we
again asked hundreds of people to provide feedback or advice on a peer’s job
application. But this time, we also asked feedback providers to shift their
focus toward “developing the writer.” When removed from an evaluation mindset,
by focusing more on developing the recipient, feedback providers were just as
critical and actionable in their input as advice providers.
Is asking for feedback
always a worse strategy than asking for advice? Not necessarily.
Sometimes soliciting
feedback may be more beneficial. People who are
novices in their field typically find critical and specific input less
motivating — in part because they don’t feel like they have the
basic skills necessary to improve. So for novices, it might be better to ask
for feedback, rather than advice, to receive less demotivating criticism and
more high-level encouragement.
Organizations are full of
opportunities to learn from peers, colleagues, and clients. Despite its
prevalence, asking for feedback is often an ineffective strategy for promoting
growth and learning. Our work suggests this is because when givers focus too
much on evaluating past actions, they fail to provide tangible recommendations
for future ones. How can we overcome this barrier? By asking our peers,
clients, colleagues, and bosses for advice instead.
Source: HBR SEPTEMBER 20, 2019
