Giving GREAT feedback: G is for growth-oriented

Welcome to CareerLark Blog! CareerLark is a Slack bot that helps you get micro-feedback from your coworkers so you can become your best professional self. This is part 1 of a 5-part series on how to give GREAT (Growth-oriented, Real, Empathetic, Ask, and Timely) feedback. Sign up here or follow us on twitter to get the rest.

FACT: It is just plain awkward to give constructive feedback.

We’ve all been there, whether telling a coworker about an annoyance that you want her to fix or having a conversation with your direct report on how he is not meeting expectations. We instinctively try to avoid these situations as much as possible.

FACT: People want more constructive feedback.

According to a study in Harvard Business Review, employees actually prefer constructive feedback over positive feedback.

We…asked [employees]…: Would they prefer praise/recognition or corrective feedback? And this time their replies did surprise us. A significantly larger number (57%) preferred corrective feedback; only 43% preferred praise/recognition. [HBR article]

But hold on before you go off talking to your coworkers. The big caveat here is that how the feedback is delivered is critical to improving performance.

That’s why we are here to share with you best practices of giving GREAT feedback, starting with G for growth-oriented. To give feedback successfully, it is critical to have an orientation of growth as demonstrated by Carol Dweck’s research on Growth Mindset.

What is Growth Mindset?

In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success — without effort. They’re wrong.

In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work — brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities. [Carol Dweck in Mindset]

Easy-peasy so far, seems like a simple concept that we all understand. What about when we apply it to the work setting?

…many managers do not believe in personal change. These fixed-mindset managers simply look for existing talent — they judge employees as competent or incompetent at the start and that’s that…when employees do improve, they may fail to take notice, remaining stuck in their initial impression. What’s more, they are far less likely to seek or accept critical feedback from their employees.

Managers with a growth mindset think it’s nice to have talent, but that’s just the starting point. These managers are more committed to their employees’ development, and to their own. They give a great deal more developmental coaching, they notice improvement in employees’ performance, and they welcome critiques from their employees. [Carol Dweck in Mindset]

We want to note that Dweck doesn’t mean that everyone is equally qualified. Clearly we all have our different strengths and areas of improvement. What she is saying is that wherever we are starting from we all have significant capacity to grow and be better.

Why is this important?

We know that getting helpful suggestions and constructive feedback is the real way to grow. Rationally we know this and welcome it; the dual reality is that we are also wired to viscerally view feedback as a threat. To quote David Rock in his book Your Brain at Work:

While there are many ‘techniques’ to improve the [feedback giving experience], people miss the basic reality of this approach: feedback creates a strong threat for people in most situations. The statement ‘let me tell you what others have been saying about you’ is one of the fastest, easiest, and most consistent ways of making someone deeply anxious.[David Rock in Your Brain at Work]

One way to work through this barrier is to reframe the entire situation as one where your coworker benefits from this feedback. In this situation, reframing means coming from a place of expecting that all of us can grow and expand, and that is the purpose of giving feedback.

From the receiving perspective, we can all also get into the mindset of receiving feedback as a gift and using it to better ourselves rather than getting defensive.

Practical ways to apply the growth orientation

1. Ask for helpful feedback on yourself. The best way to live the Growth Mindset is to practice it on yourself. If the thought of getting constructive feedback on yourself makes you cringe, this might mean that when you give feedback to others you are treating them in the fixed mindset.

Lucky for us, if you are looking to change your mindset from one to the other, there is ample evidence from Carol Dweck’s work that you are capable of embodying the Growth Mindset.

2. What is the framing of your message? Here are some constructive ways:

• I want to help you do better, and have some thoughts
• It’s important for me to work well with you so I want to share some feedback
• I know that you’re always looking to push yourself so I want to help with this feedback

3. It’s about the behavior or work product, not the person. Since we believe that every person is capable of improving and growing, the feedback becomes not about the person’s identity, but about a specific interaction or deliverable.

For example, between:

• “When you didn’t know the answer to those questions, it made you look like a slacker.”

vs.

• “You’re a slacker.”

we’re guessing that you would prefer to be told that you seemed like a slacker at one point vs. you are a slacker.

Let’s be real

The reality is that we all have a zillion things to get done on our plates while fighting 3 fires at once. This all sounds aspirational and nice in theory, but do we really have so much time to spend on giving feedback to others?

Yes — it takes time, mental energy, and effort to transform your thinking. Once you do though, you’ll find that you are actually solving your own problems by increasing your team’s productivity and having less frustrations in your workday. And who doesn’t want that??

Sign up here or follow us at @careerlark on Twitter to get the rest of GREAT feedback best practices. For more info on CareerLark, check out www.careerlark.com.