Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback

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

Research: Quantifying the Cost of Brexit Uncertainty

CEOs in the UK have been spending more than an hour and a half a week on Brexit planning, according to a recent study. CFOs have spent more than two hours. Together, UK executives in those two roles are devoting a combined 200 hours a year, on average, to Brexit preparation. For CEOs, that represents about a week and a half of Brexit planning in a year. But it’s still not clear what, exactly, they’re supposed to be planning for.

More than three years after the referendum, businesses still don’t know what the outcome of Brexit negotiations will be – which means they’re bracing for an impossibly wide range of possibilities, on everything from terms of trade with Europe to immigration rules to domestic regulation.

Economic theory predicts that when firms face a highly uncertain future, they have an incentive to delay investment and hiring and put off other decisions. And two new studies suggest that this is exactly what’s been happening in the UK over the past three years, resulting in substantial harm to its economy.

To measure the impact Brexit has had on the UK economy so far, economists from Stanford, the Bank of England, the University of Nottingham, and the London School of Economics asked more than 7,000 UK-based executives how Brexit has affected their companies. The survey included questions about how much time executives were spending preparing for Brexit, generating the estimates above. The researchers also asked executives how much uncertainty the Brexit vote had created for their businesses. They tallied the percentage of respondents that ranked Brexit as one of their top three sources of business uncertainty and used that figure to create a “Brexit uncertainty index.” In a previous analysis, they demonstrated that over the past three years Brexit uncertainty has only increased, not abated.

Their most recent working paper, published in August, links these survey answers to data on companies’ performance. The higher executives ranked Brexit as a source of uncertainty, the less their business had grown since the referendum. By comparing firm growth pre- and post-referendum, the researchers were able to estimate Brexit’s effects on firms, which are sizable, and use them to estimate the total impact the Brexit vote has had on the UK economy.

“Anticipation of Brexit is estimated to have gradually reduced investment by about 11% over the three years following the June 2016 vote,” the researchers write. They also estimate that productivity in the UK has decreased by between 2% and 5%. (They estimate that Brexit has had a negative effect on employment, too, but this effect was not statistically significant.)

These figures align with recent headlines. In late 2018, The Guardian reported that business investment in the UK was at its lowest point since the Great Recession and the economy shrank in the second quarter of 2019, which The Financial Times attributes partly to Brexit and its effect on investment.

Is political uncertainty truly to blame for all this? Or is it that leaving the EU will be so bad for the UK that businesses are pulling back in anticipation of it? Distinguishing between these two ideas is hard, both in theory and in practice. But one interesting attempt to do so comes from a study analyzing earnings call transcripts, which found that uncertainty has played the bigger role.

In forthcoming research, economist Tarek Hassan of Boston University and his colleagues looked at transcripts of 85,000 earnings calls from publicly listed companies between 2015 and 2019, to see how they were talking about Brexit. Mentions of Brexit on the calls were associated with lower sales, investment, employment, and profitability during that year. But this negative effect was particularly strong when mentions of Brexit were accompanied by words synonymous with risk and uncertainty, suggesting that the damage was caused not just by the prospect of less trade but also by the uncertainty itself.

Taken together, these studies show how policy uncertainty can significantly harm companies and economies. That has implications beyond Europe. Policy uncertainty has been rising globally according to the Economic Policy Uncertainty index, which tracks uncertainty using newspaper reports. That increase is driven by several factors, most notably the ongoing U.S.-China trade dispute, which is shaking up trade relationships around the world. In this sense, Brexit is “the canary in the coal mine for anti-trade movements,” says economist Nicholas Bloom, of Stanford University, and co-author on the first study.

It’s an important takeaway for both businesses and politicians. While pulling back from global trade can cause significant economic harm, including lower productivity and less immigration, the way this is carried out matters, too. If anti-trade movements run a chaotic and unpredictable process, the effects will be even worse.

Source: HBR SEPTEMBER 20, 2019

People & culture make the organization successful- Novartis HR Head

Ravneet Bhanot, Head, Human Resource, Novartis GDD India shared her thoughts on the significance of people and culture in an organization. The senior HR industry leader also shared how HR can bring new value to the business in times of disruption. Read the edited excerpts here.

In an exclusive conversation with People Matters, Ravneet Bhanot, Head, Human Resource, Novartis GDD India shared her thoughts on the significance of people and culture in an organization. The senior HR industry leader also shared how HR can bring new value to the business in times of disruption. Read the edited excerpts here.

How do you create a common culture in Novartis, an organization which is spread across the globe? 

The importance of culture can never be undermined especially for a pharma organization like ours that is at the forefront of innovating medicines to meet unmet medical needs of patients worldwide. Drug development takes a collective effort. It is, therefore, imperative that we have a common culture across all our functions, divisions and geographies that binds people together and drives them towards our common objective of developing breakthrough treatments.  Our cultural aspiration for everybody at Novartis is to be Inspired, Curious and Unbossed. 

We follow a three-pronged strategy to bring cultural aspiration to life. The first is shaping the organizational structures for effectiveness, efficiency, and agility and to reduce multiple layers and bring in more simplicity in the processes. Second is to hire, train and retain high quality, diverse talent capabilities that meet the demands of today and future. The third is to align the individual’s objectives with that of the organization’s because we strongly believe that personal transformation alone can lead to organizational transformation. 

What have been your core people strategy drivers?

Our strategy is based on two key pillars. One is People and Culture: Build a single consistent Novartis employee experience. We believe in creating and promoting #OneNovartis culture. We want to have an inclusive culture that leverages the diverse strengths that our associates bring across different teams and geographies. 

The second is more focused on the business - Organization and Talent. The business landscape evolves with the market. As HR, we need to have the foresight to prepare a workforce that is future-ready.  We need to have an organizational structure, operating model and workflow that can adapt to the rapid changes. We have made sure that all our divisions are more integrated and not operating in silos. As the business model evolves - we have to make sure that we are hiring people with the right mindset and capability. 

How can HR bring new value to the business in times of disruption?

The operating models of pharma are constantly evolving. HR has a crucial role to play in these disruptive times. We need to have the right organization model, capabilities and culture that enables science-based innovations and delivers positive outcomes. Creating an organizational structure is essential which is extremely agile. 

In addition, keeping in mind the emerging need for personalized medicine, we need to enable our associates to understand and embrace these disruptive technologies. HR plays an important role in defining the talent strategy to support long-term strategic business objectives based on future organizational talent needs and the dynamics of the external talent market. 

What steps is Novartis taking to build an environment that supports creativity, collaboration, the performance of their associates? 

To build a creative, collaborative and high performing organization, there are a few levers one must keep in mind. One is definitely culture- we want our associates to be inspired, curious and unbossed. And as I had mentioned earlier, in order to encourage continuous learning and enable our associates to stay ahead of the scientific advances being made across various fields, we have invested in platforms like LinkedIn Learning and Coursera so that our people can have all the learning opportunities they want at their fingertips. 

We reimagined our performance management system wherein we said that we do not want our people to focus on individual objectives in silos, but we really want them to move towards a collective objective. We encourage our people to be more collaborative and work together towards our common goal of improving and extending patients’ lives. As HR, we are making sure that the kind of people we are hiring in the organization are more aligned with the new culture that we are trying to inculcate. 

What are your key focus areas for the financial year 2019-20?

Our culture aspiration will also continue to be our focus in 2019-20. We aim to ensure that everybody at Novartis knows, applies, experiences and sustains our culture in their daily activities. 

To ignite this cultural transformation, we have started our efforts with our leaders. There is a strong correlation between the levels of active engagement in culture change by leaders and the willingness of associates to make a personal change. We want to develop leaders who are self-aware and be aligned with our cultural values and principles so that they act as role models for our associates.

Secondly, we want to activate teams and engage associates by creating awareness about our cultural values. Every quarter we are conducting a survey – ‘Our Voice’ to hear from our associates on what is working and what is not. We want to empower them to ‘fix one thing’ that could lead us closer to our cultural evolution.

Thirdly, we want to improve experiences. Our reimagined performance management system is designed to help us move from individual goals to team-based ones, enable spontaneous robust feedback – with the principle from “anyone, any time”, while building a strong coaching culture. We want our associates at all levels to be the catalyst for change in this year and beyond.

Source: People matters 24 Sep, 2019

The Strategy Behind TikTok’s Global Rise

Few tech startups have taken off as quickly as Beijing-based ByteDance, the creator of the highly popular 15-second video app, TikTok. In just two years, TikTok has emerged to rival companies like Netflix, YouTube, Snapchat, and Facebook with more than one billion downloads in 150 markets worldwide and 75 languages. On the app, homemade videos showcase everything from comedy to lip syncs to dog grooming tips that users create and share on their phones. The scrappy, goofy, fast-moving content has hooked young audiences around the world.

Since little translation is required, TikTok reaches well beyond other successful Chinese apps such as Tencent’s messaging app WeChat, which is ubiquitous in China but mostly used elsewhere among Chinese communities keeping in touch with people back home. Chinese entrepreneurs such as ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming are showing that they can succeed in an openly competitive market internationally rather than only in China where the Great Firewall regulates the internet and blocks access to several U.S. social media sites. His strategy of dual versions of Tik Tok – one for China’s internet censored market and another for the rest of the world – could be a new model for other digital content companies aiming for such global reach – including China-based digital startups with new ambitions to venture out beyond the home market. Their story may also hold lessons for American companies who have watched similar ventures into China meet serious constraints.

From the start, Zhang, a former Microsoft engineer and Chinese serial entrepreneur, had the goal of running a borderless company. Zhang, 36, is among a new generation of home-grown Chinese tech leaders with an international vision inspired by the early success of China’s tech pioneers of the late 1990s such as  Robin Li of Baidu, Jack Ma of Alibaba, and Pony Ma of Tencent. ByteDance has a valuation of $78 billion ─ one of China’s 86 “unicorns” in 2018. Its backers span top-notch venture capitalist firm Sequoia Capital China, Japanese tech conglomerate Softbank Group, U.S. private equity investor KKR, Chinese investment firm Hillhouse Capital and corporate venture unit SIG Asia.  As a privately financed digital content startup founded by a tech entrepreneur, ByteDance has a different relationship with the Chinese government and its grip on state-owned conglomerates. But in going global, the China-originated ByteDance could encounter heightened distrust and scrutiny especially as security concerns have enveloped Chinese telecom giant Huawei in readying the launch of its fifth generation, high-speed networks internationally.

In August 2012, five months after founding ByteDance, Zhang launched his first mobile app, Toutiao or Today’s Headlines, an AI-powered daily curated feed of news content personalized to users. In 2016, Zhang added to his product lineup by introducing a video sharing app, Douyin, for the Chinese market. He rolled out an overseas equivalent of the Douyin video app, dubbed TikTok, in 2017. That same year, ByteDance paid an estimated $900 million to acquire Musical.ly, a social video app based in Shanghai with more than 200 million users worldwide and a large following in the U.S. The deal combined TikTok’s AI fed streams and monetization track record with Musical.ly’s product innovation and grasp of users’ needs and tastes in the West.

After ByteDance folded the four-year-old Musical.ly into TikTok, and rebranded it to a single application under the TikTok name in August 2018, the combined app immediately gained some 30 million new users within three months. The app makes money through ads and from the sale of virtual goods such as emojis and stickers to fans.  An easy-to-use interface combining click-baity news and entertainment with powerful AI to precisely match users rather than recommend content based on their viewing habits and “likes” have fueled the app’s success.  The homegrown content has become prevalent, particularly among rural and poorer residents in China, India, and other emerging markets where access to other digital entertainment options has been limited. In China’s smaller cities and the countryside, where state-owned, stodgy media has dominated, the new ByteDance content apps are especially popular.

Zhang has also built upon China’s desire to make AI a priority in the race for global tech dominance. He describes a mission to “combine the power of AI with the growth of mobile internet to revolutionize the way people consume and receive information.”

Venture partner Connie Chan at Andreessen Horowitz in San Francisco wrote in her blog that the AI powered apps at ByteDance go to an extreme not common yet in the West. TikTok uses the app’s algorithms to decide which videos to show users, dictates their feed entirely, and learns their preferences the more one uses it. This is different from Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, which use AI to recommend posts rather than send feeds to users directly, she notes.

The company actively scouts for international content trends from an office in Los Angeles. Over the past few years, ByteDance snapped up Los Angeles–based Flipagram, a video and photo creation app set to music clips, and invested $50 million in Live.me, a livestreaming app in Los Angeles that is majority owned by Chinese mobile app developer Cheetah Mobile. Additionally, ByteDance acquired News Republic, a global mobile news aggregation service based in France, from Cheetah Mobile for $86.6 million. ByteDance attempted to buy a major stake in U.S. social news aggregator Reddit from Si Newhouse’s Advance Publications but lost that deal to Tencent, which swept in with a $300 million co investment in early 2019.

Facebook faces a serious global rival from China in TikTok. In 2018, TikTok ranked fourth worldwide as the top non-game app downloaded, at 663 million behind only Facebook at 711 million and its related apps WhatsApp and Messenger, SensorTower data shows. TikTok’s inroads in India and its young, mobile-savvy population is a big reason it’s soaring. About one-quarter of TikTok’s downloads come from India. TikTok added 188 million downloads in the first quarter of 2019, surpassing Facebook at 176 million, but trailing WhatsApp at 224 million and Messenger at 209 million.

In late 2018, Facebook launched its own short-format video version, Lasso, which is widely considered a knockoff of TikTok. Aimed at teens, Lasso can only be accessed through Facebook or Instagram, and so far is limited to U.S. access. Lasso was downloaded by 70,000 U.S. users within four months of its launch in November compared with nearly 40 million users for TikTok in the same time period, according to app analytics firm SensorTower.

TikTok’s rise has also brought a string of regulatory problems. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission slapped TikTok with a $5.7 million fine for failing to get parental consent before collecting names, email addresses, and personal information about children users under the age of 13.  In India, lawmakers briefly banned the app this past April from being downloaded on Apple and Android, for encouraging “cultural degradation” among youth. The ban was lifted a few weeks later when ByteDance lawyers successfully argued that its system screens offensive content and prevents nude videos to be shown, and is continually being upgraded to identify troublesome videos and develop more personalized content recommendations.

Despite regulatory and other challenges, ByteDance is building an empire of apps for a new generation and challenging the borders drawn around traditional digital content. If ByteDance can continue to fulfill its mission of becoming a borderless company with game changing technology, it may lead to the creation of other borderless companies and will influence other tech innovators from emerging markets to venture out too. Ultimately, this trend will create a fuller range of digital offerings globally for consumers and businesses.

Source: HBR SEPTEMBER 13, 2019