August 2004:  What's positive feedback buying you?

Key Content 
Action Challenge:  Make your praise more powerful
Resources
Note from Pam

"If you learn from [praise for smarts or star quality] that success means you're a good or able person, then you also seem to learn that failure means you are a bad or inept person. 
For high-achievers especially... keep the emphasis on seeking challenges, applying effort, and searching for strategies." 
-- Carol S. Dweck, Professor of Psychology, Columbia University 

Why do we give positive feedback to people who work for and with us?
Let's figure two primary reasons:
1. To build relationships by expressing warmth, inclusion, and personal regard
2. To strengthen or sustain performance by highlighting what's working, communicating what's important, and reinforcing the satisfaction of accomplishment.

We'll focus here on this second purpose -- praise designed to strengthen performance. So, how's it working for you?  Are those "You're the best!"s    generating higher performance?

Some very good research says... probably not. In fact, when you consistently  commend their smarts or star quality, you're likely to dampen performance. In brief, here's how how that "doom loop" works:
- "Person praise" (e.g., "you're a natural" " you're great at this" "smartest person on the team") reinforces a belief that intelligence/talent is fairly fixed, rather than believing it can be developed.
- This belief that smarts are fixed makes people look even more to external cues to confirm that they're really that hot. In particular, they tend to 
  a. reduce effort ("if you have to work hard, you're couldn't be that smart")
  b. select challenges that aren't really a stretch
  c. focus on looking good rather than learning.
- Since they seek fewer stretch assignments and less constructive feedback, they learn less. Predictably, this leads to lower performance.
- Furthermore, when they have a failure experience, they take it as a condemnation of their worth and find it much harder to bounce back and persist.

Basically, believing that "star quality" is what matters -- rather than risk-taking, learning, and effort -- leaves people vulnerable to weak performance and low resilience. And, the research shows that, at least for children and young adults (and perhaps older adults - no research yet), these beliefs are significantly influenced by the kind of praise they receive, even over a short period of time.

Action Challenge:  Make your praise more powerful

So, what can you do to express your admiration for and commitment to high performance, while encouraging continued learning and resilience?

• Lighten up your focus on "star quality"
  When you call someone a "star", a "born" leader, a "natural", not only do you de-motivate everyone else (so I'm a born mediocre?), but you run a big risk of focusing your "star" on looking good rather than performing well.
  

• Praise their strategies, effort, and focus on learning
  The research is clear and compelling: giving positive feedback about things people can control -- in particular, their strategies, effort, and willingness to learn -- yields higher performance than praising their commendable qualities or even stellar outcomes.
  

• Help people increase their own powers of observation
  Remember when we told managers to "Catch people doing something right"? Sounded great, except today your people are somewhere else, catching them is a fairly random (or gamed) process, and you may not even know what "right" looks like for their function and role. Instead, coach them to read their environment and examine their own strategies more acutely.
  

• Adjust to the person
  Forget about the Golden Rule; rather, do unto others as they want to be done unto. Research we're doing with 256 leaders across industries confirms that people of different personality types, regardless of level, significantly differ in how they regard feedback, especially in public.
  

• Hear them describe the end-state and performance standards 
  Many managers rely on positive feedback to tell their teams that they're on track. How much more helpful to discuss expectations up front. And, how much more valuable for your experienced team members to offer their perspective on what they'll deliver, rather than just listening to your vision.
  

• Connect with their own motivation
  The distinctive motivation of your individual team members will always be more powerful than your finest attaboys.
  "What has intrigued me most in my 30 years of research is the power of motivation. Motivation is often more important than your initial ability in determining whether you succeed in the long run. In fact, many creative geniuses were not born that way. They were often fairly ordinary people who became extraordinarily motivated."  -- Carol S. Dweck

Resources

This completes a series of IdeaShape newsletters on feedback:
"Giving Feedback: Where's Your Missing Link?"
"Word to the Wise: Receiving Feedback with Uncommon Grace
"How to Make the Most of 360 Feedback"

Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development
by Carol S. Dweck, 2000
-- A fascinating (and readable) book summarizing social psychology research on how people's beliefs about themselves affect their learning, effort, and performance. Ample evidence that much of what we do to praise achievement and encourage self-esteem in children and young adults actually decreases motivation and performance.

The Inner Game of Work, by Tim Gallwey, 2000.
-- Great lessons on value of helping people increase their own powers of observation, and the ineffectiveness of just giving orders and praising outcomes

"Feedback about Feedback: Contrasts between the Social Science
and Engineering Views," by Fred Nickols, 1995
-- Terrific article on the engineering origins of feedback. All feedback can be positive when it sharpens your observations about cause and effect.

You can receive occasional updates on the research on Emotional Intelligence and Personality Type in Leaders that I'm doing with Sharon L. Richmond and Julie M. Brown. Send a blank email to lead-research-list@ideashape.com or track this Leadership Research page on my site.  Within a few months, written summary findings will be available on the research referenced above.

Note from Pam

Got kids?
Dweck's research findings hold true with kids as young as 3. See her book above (get it, it's great) or this brief article on praising children. My husband is having too much fun catching my vacuous exclamations of "Good job!" to our son. "Now are you commending his strategies or his effort?" he grins. Grrr!

You receive this newsletter every month or so with ideas and resources you can use to shape your success. Some of these ideas may strike you as obvious... I invite you to step back and look at how this is actually working in your life. Others may seem far out... I invite you to consider how much choice you actually have. If you'd like to get in touch about any of this, email me. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Warm regards,
Pam

(c) Pam Fox Rollin, IdeaShape, www.ideashape.com
Bring out the best in your leaders.
IdeaShape coaches and consults with 
- Executives leading complex change
- Functional experts stepping into larger leadership roles
- Teams seeking better communication and higher performance

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