In significant contrast to industrial age workers, knowledge workers are rewarded and often succeed because of their mentoring and coaching expertise. Indeed, my blog, What the 21st century career looks like, emphasizes not only organizational needs for technical and analytical skills, but the competencies of persuasion, social perceptiveness, the capacity to bring the right people together on a project—and, coaching and mentoring skills. So if you want the most lucrative salary and the greatest growth and learning opportunity, you’ll involve yourself in coaching and mentoring. Feedback, of course, is the central competency of coaching.
But feedback can go very wrong and fail to achieve its fundamental objective. Why is that?
A recent web conversation among members of the Center for Evidence-Based Management alerted me to an intriguing study on feedback by Jodi Goodman and colleagues that deals with this very issue. But first, a little background.
Those who coach regularly are familiar with the cookbook statement on feedback that effectiveness is dependent on specific, timely, concrete input. As Goodman says, that means that effective feedback is immediate and includes information on the behaviors that were performed incorrectly and how to correct them.
However, as you become more focused on the feedback process, you soon recognize a real problem. When you give highly detailed, specific input, a certain proportion of people don’t seem to be able to apply the information to other contexts, demonstrating they haven’t truly learned from your feedback.
For all but the simplest of tasks, learning the correct actions typically requires some active search and processing about what will achieve the desired outcomes. And if the task is more complex, that increases the need for the mentee’s exploration of the different impacts of actions.
Goodman points out the double bind: If your feedback amounts to hand-holding (highly specific, concrete and timely input) throughout the performance, you’ll get the performance you want—yet inhibit the learning. That seems to go with hand-holding for most people. Alternatively, if you provide less frequent and specific feedback—no hand-holding—the result is often poorer practice, but better learning. That’s the result of searching for action impacts.
So the research shows clearly that hand-holding feedback won’t give you the learning you want for future projects. That doesn’t mean you should never do hand-holding, but it does seriously question the conventional wisdom about the value of specific, timely feedback.
Here are my conclusions:
- If you’ve got a tight deadline, do the hand-holding feedback so your mentee can meet the deadline. But realize the person is liable not to be able to repeat the actions in a different context. Learning probably did not take place.
- If your deadline is not tight, go for learning. Limit the amount of feedback you give, and turn the person loose to explore and search on their own. The person will learn, but may not achieve the level of performance you desire. You can refine the performance later.
- I’ve learned it’s important to provide the person similar opportunities in different context ASAP so that they may internalize the learning. Dedre Gentner of Northwestern has shown in numerous studies that behaviors need to be successful in several different contexts for learning to take place.
- I’ve also found that unless the person is clueless about a given task, it’s very important to emphasize that you don’t need to see them until they’ve exhausted their search and exploration. One of my friends, Eric Linner, an associate at Wold Architects of St Paul, is a master at insisting upon search and exploration—“do your homework”--before they come to him for help. The corporate culture, heavily oriented to learning and team work, has its answer in Eric--a straight-talking, poised, ex-marine who can be a bit scary to newcomers who don’t understand the ground rules. But employees quickly learn he’ll give them great feedback—if they’ve done their search homework before they come to him. Employees are immensely respectful and grateful to Eric for his learning orientation—in spite of his toughness. Indeed, I’d say that an architect that gets to work with Eric is very, very lucky.
So there’s a definite danger in over-generalizing about feedback, and it’s easy to go wrong. There are plenty of people out there who, when needing feedback, want all the details. They want hand-holding. I rarely succumb to those demands—largely because it’s not good for them. Typically, I’ll respond to that expectation, “That’s enough information to get you going. I’m quite certain you can figure out what to do. And if you get caught in a bind, come back and we’ll talk about it.”
There are also plenty of employees who—rightly—don’t need or want hand-holding, but desire just a little input. I thrive with that kind, because when they come back I’m liable to learn as much from them as they learned.
In sum, don’t over generalize about feedback. Too much or too little specificity can cause feedback to go wrong. It all depends . . . on the task deadlines and your objective for the mentee.
Jodi S. Goodman, Margarethe Hendrickx and Robert E. Wood, Feedback Specificity, Exploration, and Learning, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2004, Vol. 89, No. 2, 248–262.
Flickr Photo by Rolleh