The Feedback Challenge

Recent research suggests that feeling emotional hurt, being given critical feedback from your boss, having your ideas rejected by other respected colleagues, being made fun of, or being verbally abused all seem to have the same negative impact on our health.

It seems that both emotional pain and physical pain follow the same neuropathways in the brain and can lead to the same outcomes of depression, immune suppression, and fatigue. In "Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion," Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues at UCLA explain how they were able to use the latest technology, called functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), to peer into the inner workings of the brain while a team was involved in an exercise designed to provoke feelings of social isolation and rejection.

They studied what part of the brain was activated while a group of subjects played a computer game with other individuals they did not know. Two possibilities of being rejected were created—either actively or passively (they were told they could not continue because of some technical problems). Comparison of fMRI brain activity in the active exclusion group versus inclusion conditions revealed greater activity in the part of the brain that is associated with physical pain. Additionally, the subjects who were rejected also reported feeling psychological distress based on self-report measures.

Additional studies show that recall of past socially painful situations elicits greater pain than reliving a past physically painful event and has greater negative impact on cognitively demanding tasks.

All these studies illustrate that negative feedback certainly can be harmful to your health, and is likely to be highly disengaging. Some evidence also supports the idea that being socially rejected is equally damaging.

When we use 360-degree feedback assessments in coaching, we always include at least one or two open-ended questions at the end of the questionnaire that ask raters about perceived strengths to leverage and behaviors the leader can do more, less, or differently to become even more effective. Our own research and those of others suggests that feedback can be emotionally harmful if there is an overwhelming amount of perceived critical or negative feedback.

For example, in their 2004 article in the Journal of Applied Psychology, James W. Smither and Alan G. Walker analyzed the impact of upward feedback ratings and narrative comments for 176 managers during a one-year period. They found that those who received a small number of unfavorable behaviorally based comments improved more than other managers, but those who received a large number (relative to positive comments) significantly declined in performance more than other managers. This is one of the only studies we have seen that has found that qualitative 360 degree feedback might be disengaging and demoralizing to participants if the ratio of positive to negative feedback is low.

Over the years, we have run developmental assessment centers that always have at least one leaderless group exercise. We can easily observe the differences between groups that appear to function effectively and those who don’t based on the communications and interpersonal behavior of the group members—not how smart any individual is or the collective experience or technical expertise of the members.

Recent studies have established that teams with positive to negative interaction ratios greater than 3-to-1 are significantly more productive than teams that do not reach this ratio (things can worsen if the ratio goes higher than 13-to-1).

In a 2004 American Behavioral Scientist article, Marcial Losada and Emily Heaphy detailed their study, which brought 60 management teams into a simulated boardroom where they could hold meetings. Behind mirrors, researchers observed and coded every statement made by each individual on three scales:

• positive statements (support, optimism, appreciation) versus negative statements (disapproval, sarcasm, cynicism)
• self-focused statements (refer to the person speaking, the group present, or the company) versus other-focused statements (references to a person or group not part of the company)
• inquiry (questions aimed at exploring an idea) versus advocacy (arguments in favor of their own point of view).

Losada and Heaphy also measured something they called "connectivity," or how attuned or responsive the team members were to one another. Finally, they gathered data on three dependent variables: profitability, customer satisfaction, and evaluations by superiors, peers, and subordinates.

In the study, positive to negative ratio (P/N) was measured by counting the instances of positive feedback (for example, "That is a good idea") versus negative feedback (for example, "This is not what I expected; I am disappointed").

Overall, high-performance teams had a P/N ratio of 5.6, medium-performance teams a P/N ratio of 1.9, and low-performance teams a P/N ratio of 0.36 (more negative than positive feedback and interactions).

Gallup asked a random sample of 1,003 employees in the United States how much they agreed with two statements: "My supervisor focuses on my strengths/positive characteristics" and "My supervisor focuses on my weaknesses or negative characteristics." They also were asked whether they were engaged, not engaged, or actively disengaged with their work and jobs.

Employees who did not agree with either statement were characterized as "ignored" in their analyses. The findings suggest that no feedback might do more harm than negative or positive feedback.

In the group that reported their bosses gave them positive feedback in the form of focusing on what they did well (their strengths), only 1 percent were actively disengaged and 61 percent reported being fully engaged.

In the group that reported that their bosses tended to focus on the negative and provide ongoing critical feedback to them, 22 percent reported being actively disengaged and 45 percent reported being engaged.

And in the group that reported being largely ignored by their bosses (no positive or negative feedback), 40 percent reported being actively disengaged and only 2 percent reported being engaged. The most disengaged group of employees reported to bosses who seemed to ignore them and provide little or no feedback at all.

The findings of these studies are not surprising in suggesting the intuitive power of defining and leveraging the strengths of talent or in warning us about the obvious dangers of negative feedback as causing social stress and perceptions of bullying at work.

It would appear that in the case of feedback, less is more is not recommended and might have the most negative impact of all, followed by a large ratio of negative to positive feedback.

So, go and find those high potentials in your organization and tell them something positive, or at least something constructive, so they can continue to really shine.