MANAGING PEOPLE & TEAMS
Stop Asking For Feedback — Ask For Advice Instead
Studies Show That Advice Is a Better approach
It’s a wrap: the major pitch is finally over. The client walks away, shaking your hand, smiling as he waves goodbye. He promises that he will ‘drop another invitation for you to pitch again to his senior leaders’ and you’re elated.
You slump back on the chair, feeling a weight off your shoulders. You look across the table at your manager. Now, you want a second opinion on your presentation — there might be certain places where you can improve.
What do you do here?
If you’re asking for feedback: chances are, you’re better off not asking.
Conventional wisdom says that you need feedback.
Feedback is often framed as something that can give us a lot of benefits. It can uncover blind spots, build up confidence, shoot down arrogance and show us how we can improve. It is often seen as a form of guidance.
The problem is, many people aren’t good at giving feedback.
The inherent flaw in feedback is that it depends more on the giver than the receiver’s subject or performance. Most of us receive vague feedback that isn’t helpful to us in improving our performance.
Coupled with our own unconscious biases, the feedback we often receive will have different impressions in our head, which may reduce the already low effectiveness of feedback.
Sometimes, even our race comes into play, which leads to less critical feedback, according to a University of British Columbia study.
If feedback is already inherently flawed, what can we do to understand our strengths, weaknesses and blind spots from another person’s perspective?
Ask For Advice Instead, A HBS Study
A recent Harvard Business School study showed that instead of asking for feedback, asking for advice might be a better approach. A team of four conducted the study, running four experiments to test the differences between advice and feedback, as well as determining their effectiveness.
In one study, 200 people were offered to give input on a job application letter for a tutoring position. They were instructed differently on how to give the input: some were asked to give “feedback”, others were asked to give “advice”.
People who gave feedback tended to give vague, generally praising comments, the study noted. For instance, one of the comments cited by the study includes: “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.”
On the other hand, people who gave “advice” were more critical. Their input was actionable as well. For instance, one of the reviews cited by the study said: “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.”
Throughout the study, those who were asked to provide advice suggested 34% more areas of improvement and 56% more ways to improve, relative to those who were asked to provide feedback.
While the other studies were also similar, the study was conclusive in their finding: advice often gives actionable and critical input compared to feedback and it has its place.
However, it also notes that both advice and feedback have their place in professional and personal development.
For leaders, how can we know whether to give feedback or advice?
Give Feedback To Novices
Feedback is evaluative. From young, we received feedback in the forms of grades. At work, feedback is linked to performance reviews.
In this manner, we often relate feedback to past performance. We are more focused on judging a person’s performance, which makes it more difficult to imagine a person’s potential and future performance.
However, feedback is critical to professional development, especially for novices and less experienced employees:
- According to a University of California, Berkeley study, critical input is found to be demotivating for novices. With less experience than their peers, they are often unable to find ways to improve themselves, and thus it is easy for them to fail in being better at their job.
- Feedback is clear and quick, which can benefit first-timers. For instance, people who made their first presentation can benefit from simple feedback such as “you need to speak up”, “you need to bring more energy” or “you need to stop pacing around so much”. That way, they can work on their flaws one by one, before diving deeper into honing their strengths.
Giving feedback is a management strategy. It is important to note that making it positive, neutral or negative can have a considerable impact on the employee at the question. Positive feedback can make people relax. Negative feedback can demotivate people. Neutral feedback can come off as indifferent and unemotional.
Regardless of what a leader chooses to go with, leaders must recognize whether their feedback strategy is working or not and adjust accordingly. For instance, some people are inherently more sensitive, and thus will be affected by positive or negative feedback. Others who are less so will benefit greatly from objective comments instead.
Provide Advice For Veterans
Veterans are more aware of their strengths and weaknesses. The problem is, they are more profound and obvious, which can lead to them being ‘stuck’ — they are not able to improve greatly, and their flaws often mar their professional development journey.
Giving advice is more future-focused, which helps experienced employees a lot more:
- Instead of saying “the way you spoke was energetic and lively”, it can be framed as “your tone was energetic and lively, but there are points in time where, if you toned down and slowed your speech, you would have driven your points much deeper”
- Experienced employees often plateau in their career. Advice must be given to help give them a direction. Giving fuller and comprehensive guidance is instrumental in breaking bottlenecks.
Giving and soliciting for feedback and advice is an important part of workplace management. For leaders:
- Knowing how to frame them and what goes into the content of the feedback/advice is important. It can either create trust in the leadership, or it can push the employee away from the management.
- Understanding what to give and when to give them is also important. Giving critical input when an employee is going through a difficult time is insensitive, but giving simple feedback can seem dismissive to an enthusiastic talent.
- Before giving feedback, biases, and prejudices must be acknowledged and done away. In the current climate, we run the risk of offending someone unknowingly. Giving feedback to someone of different race and religion can inhibit the effectiveness of our feedback. Leaders must treat everyone equally.
Though feedback has its place, it is overly prevalent in organizations and it is proven to be an ineffective strategy for promoting growth and learning. When givers focus too much on past performance, they fail to give recommendations for future performance.
To counter that, all we need to do is simply focus on asking or giving advice instead.