How does critical feedback affect your team’s success? Researchers Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall argue that many managers invest too much energy in correcting weaknesses. Instead, they encourage leaders to focus on developing employees’ strengths. Buckingham and Goodall are the authors of the book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World and the HBR article “The Feedback Fallacy” In this episode, they explain how to lead more effective conversations about performance by focusing on what your team members do best.
Key episode topics include leadership, giving feedback, managing people, performance indicators.
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HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR on Leadership, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you.
How does critical feedback play into your team’s success?
Researchers Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall argue that many managers put too much effort into correcting weaknesses in the people they manage. Instead, they advise leaders to focus on developing employees’ strengths.
Buckingham is a human performance researcher and creator of the assessments StrengthsFinder and StandOut. And Goodall is the former senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco Systems. They’re coauthors of the book Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to have better conversations about performance with your team. It originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in April 2019. Here it is.
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
Feedback. It’s something good leaders both provide to their employees and solicit from others so everyone can improve. It’s supposed to help us develop into better, more well-rounded workers and managers. And our performance review systems are structured around it to make sure we’re always paying and promoting the best people.
Our guests today say we’re doing this all wrong. They say the feedback that’s typically delivered in today’s corporate world isn’t doing us all that much good. They think that constructive criticism actually prevents people from reaching their full potential. And they’d like us to reimagine employee development accordingly.
Marcus Buckingham is a head of research at the ADP Research Institute, and Ashley Goodall is the head of Cisco leadership and team intelligence. Together, they’re the authors of the book Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World and the HBR article “The Feedback Fallacy.” Marcus and Ashley, thanks so much for coming in.
MARCUS BUCKINGHAM: Our pleasure.
ASHLEY GOODALL: Thanks for having us.
ALISON BEARD: So, as someone who thrives on positive feedback myself, I really loved your premise, but I am struggling a bit with the practicality of it. You know, don’t bosses sometimes need to point out when their people aren’t performing well and push them to do better?
ASHLEY GOODALL: So, I think the first thing to say is yes, and then you have to understand what you get from that. So, if you help people fix their mistakes, you get fewer mistakes. Mistake-free isn’t the same as great, and it’s not the same as excellent.
So, the first thing to say is yes, we are not stepping out into the world and going everybody should start ignoring poor performance. But we’re saying two things. If you want to help people with poor performance, you need to focus on what step did they miss or what facts did they overlook.
And then the other thing that we’re saying is if you want to help create excellent performance, focus on what’s going well and how to turn that up. Which is to say that I think we tend to use, in the world of feedback, we tend to use our mistake fixing tools to be our excellence building tools, and then we’re sort of surprised when it turns out they don’t work that way.
MARCUS BUCKINGHAM: The thing that great leaders do is they absolutely pay attention to performance. They don’t ignore their people. One of the challenges in the world of work, of course, is that we don’t actually give people very much attention, we do the once a year performance review, and constant always on sort of feedback movement we’re in the middle of now is trying to fix that by giving people more ongoing attention.
The problem has become we then moved from constant ongoing attention, which is clearly a good thing, into a fetish with feedback on, as Ashley says, stuff that you need remediating on.
ALISON BEARD: I completely get that you need to focus on strengths and build strengths, but when you see a weakness – not necessarily mistakes, but someone’s a terrible communicator, or even a poor communicator, they could get a little bit better at it – isn’t it your job to work with them to build that weakness into a strength?
MARCUS BUCKINGHAM: No, no, that’s a waste of time. The best leaders seem to understand that each human is unique, and that the way in which they grow isn’t to turn weaknesses into strengths. That’s not what you see when you see performance in the world.
ALISON BEARD: What about making weaknesses not liabilities?
MARCUS BUCKINGHAM: If you want to go from -10 to 0, and you think that paying attention to what’s not working does that, go for gold. But there’s a whole different journey involved from going from 0 to excellent. The journey to excellence is going to be built out of what is currently really working with you.
It’s actually pretty easy to go stop that, or don’t do that. So much more challenging to take someone who you’ve seen something that works in them, whether you go that a strength by the way, whether you call that like something that’s working, that’s the only way you get to excellent performance.
ASHLEY GOODALL: And then there are a couple of things even with that -10 to 0 bit that I think are important. So, your example was communication skills, right? If we turn around and say we’ll do it like this, which is what a lot of that sort of feedback looks like, if I were you I would do it like this, or you need to be like this or – what you’re asking somebody to do is to be more like you.
And that’s a very hard thing for a brain to do. It’s annoying to all of us, because it would be easier if the world were all like us, if we wandered around in a forest of little clones of ourselves the whole time, because we wouldn’t have so much work to do to understand the other people. But the truth is that we’re all different.
And when you say to another human being essentially, do it my way, they can’t, it’s not that they don’t want to, or they don’t like being told that, they don’t know what your way is. They don’t know what it feels like, they don’t know what connections you make, they don’t know what triggers a particular move or a particular pivot that you might make.
The only thing you can ever say to a human being, outside as we said earlier, you missed a fact or you missed a step, is do it your way, but here’s where your way was working. In the example of communication skills, you can always say: here’s where I lost you. You can’t say: speak like this, even if it’s removing a liability. I mean that’s your assessment of how critical this thing is to the person. But it, it’s your assessment, it’s nothing more than that.
ALISON BEARD: Right.
MARCUS BUCKINGHAM: We had an experience of this in reading the audiobook for Nine Lies about Work. I’ve done, this is my ninth book, so I’ve read all my books. And therefore, I know an awful lot about reading an audiobook, I think to myself.
And I think, I want to help my colleague, Ashley, who has not read an audiobook before. So, I jump into the studio and I come out of my first day, and I say, listen, the thing you got to do is you’ve got to think about the fact that you’re reading a very sort of intimate experience, reading a book, and it’s an intimate experience on the receiving end. So, imagine you’re talking to the person who’s the producer like over coffee. And I’m loving my advice, I’m feeling I’m super helpful.
ASHLEY GOODALL: You were very happy. I even remember.
MARCUS BUCKINGHAM: So, it was like I’ve got it. This is what you should do, talk to her like you’re having coffee. So, he goes in, and he crushes it. And I’m like oh, did you take my advice? And he goes, no, not at all. Ashley is a pianist and he said the only time, I started off, it was a little odd, and then I suddenly realized I was sight reading. And what you do when you’re sight reading music is you’re always slightly out ahead, and when of course you’re reading a book, you’re slightly out ahead.
And the moment I realized this is really just sight reading, then it turned into a beautiful experience for me. Well, of the 1,002 things I could have told him beyond the whole talking to her through the glass as though you’re having coffee, 1,002 things, none of them would have been imagine you’re sight reading.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, so it sounds like you’re saying that managers can point out weaknesses or potential areas for growth, but only in sharing their own perceptions, and then leaving it open to the person about how to get from A to B?
ASHLEY GOODALL: Well, first thing, and it’s not that we’re saying, that what the data show is that everybody’s brain grows differently, point one. And point two, that you grow most in your areas where you’ve already got the most adapted connections. So, that’s what we know. Everybody’s brain is unique, but it also becomes more unique and more intensely unique over time.
So, from that perspective, we know too that a team leader is not a source of truth about what your weaknesses are or are not whether you have lots of strategic thinking or not. What a team leader owes a team member is their reaction only. And we know that the best sort of reaction is one that allows me to share with you my reaction about something that really worked. That’s what we know. Areas of growth aren’t weaknesses. Areas of growth are strengths.
ALISON BEARD: You all have a different definition of strengths than most people would, right? Could you share that with our listeners?
MARCUS BUCKINGHAM: A strength is an activity that st