Good feedback, bad feedback, and coaching

Characteristics of good feedback; feedback vs coaching; lessons from P&G

In two of the three companies I’ve worked, “receiving good feedback” is one of the things people are the least satisfied with according to employee surveys. Cycle after cycle, senior leaders see this result, and implement the standard responses: they

• make qualitative feedback a core component of employee evaluation

• encourage or remind people managers to give feedback in their 1–1s

• recommend the use of dedicated tools and forms

• suggest training or specific feedback-giving frameworks

Then the next cycle comes, satisfaction with feedback hasn’t budged, and the process repeats itself. Why?

Before I attempt to answer, let’s first review what I think the issues are.

First, the feedback people give is often of bad quality, and reminding them to give it more often does nothing to improve that (and in fact it can make the situation worse).

Second, and more important in my view, the very question of ‘do you receive quality feedback’ is misguided. What people are really trying to do (or should be trying to do) is to develop professionally: and become better at their jobs by honing the skills that will help them succeed. And feedback (the way it is commonly understood) is not a very important factor in such development.

Good feedback vs. bad feedback

Start with bad-quality feedback. I recently ran a workshop where I asked my colleagues to use Lego to show what makes for good and bad feedback. The most common responses highlighted the following contrasts:

• Good feedback is relevant, and the person giving it engages fully with the person receiving it and their work. Bad feedback is superficial, or irrelevant: the person giving it has not bothered to understand the problem the person receiving it is trying to solve, nor why they are approaching it the way they are.

• Good feedback is well-intentioned: the person giving it is doing so because they want to help. Bad feedback is often given by people who want to feel that they’ve said something, that they’ve contributed, or that they’ve done their duty to improve feedback culture (which is why encouraging people to give feedback more often isn’t always productive).

• Good feedback is a two-way conversation: the person giving it encourages the person receiving it to challenge and discuss the feedback itself. People who question the feedback they are given are often branded ‘defensive’ or are told that they don’t listen. This causes people to just nod politely and then ignore feedback with which they disagree. When this happens, the person giving the feedback never gets feedback on their feedback (so meta), so they never improve. Also, the person receiving feedback on a particular piece of work is usually the one best acquainted with that work; if they have done something that appears sub-optimal, there is often a good reason for it. Even if it does turn out there is a better way to do it, it is useful for the person giving feedback to understand the reasons the person receiving it did things the way they did — and the surest way to ensure such conversations take place is to make people feel secure to challenge feedback.

Feedback vs. Coaching

But even when feedback is good, it is far from sufficient by itself. Feedback can help recipients improve a particular piece of work, but it won’t necessarily help them become better managers (except indirectly and over time: smart people who receive the same feedback many times will learn to preempt it).

So, if you want your people to develop, you should focus on coaching more than you focus on feedback. By coaching I mean more hands-on guidance: helping the person receiving it understand how they can approach a particular problem in general, not only what can be improved in a particular instance.

The person coaching their colleague not only knows what ‘good’ looks like, but also how to produce ‘good’; this, and the fact that proper coaching takes much more time than feedback, means that coaching is an activity primarily (but definitely not exclusively) done by a manager to their direct reports, rather than by peers.

This sounds a little vague (much like bad feedback), so here are two concrete examples to help bring the distinction between feedback and coaching to life:

• In my first job, I was responsible for producing management reports tracking a business unit’s performance. My first attempts were pretty bad: in trying to ensure my reports captured every little technical detail, I failed to convey the big picture: people couldn’t immediately tell whether the business was doing well or badly, and for what reasons. Good feedback here would have been for someone to tell me this, and to show me a better reporting template, but good coaching (which is what my manager did) was to explain to me what made good reports ‘good’: that the people looking at the reports cared about business drivers, not technical financial reconciliations. That it was OK to sacrifice technical detail for the sake of clarity — as long as I could discuss the details if necessary. My manager asked me to create new reports, and every time they sat with me and explained the ways in which the updated versions were still not good enough, and they did this until I got it right. This was a lesson that I could apply in future roles.

• Later in my career, I was working in commercial operations: my job was to work with account managers to develop joint business plans with P&G’s retail partners. One of our retailers made excessive demands, that our sales director at the time seemed prepared to accept. I bluntly told him that it would be wrong to do so. Now, many people have given me feedback that I am too direct. I consider this feedback useless — I think being direct is a good thing, and it is a behavior that I try to role model — and so, if I respect the person giving the feedback I have a discussion with them, and if I don’t, I nod and ignore their feedback. But my manager at the time gave me advice and coached me in a genuinely useful way: she told me, “you should always be direct, but just speaking your mind is not enough. When you disagree with someone senior, do not just have a debate with them — build a coalition around you, find other people who agree with you, and have them advocate it on your behalf.” She showed me how to do this, and advocated on my behalf herself— this was truly helpful and refreshing.

Improving feedback and coaching in an org

The above seems obvious; everyone, including those who give bad feedback or do not coach people around them, could give this advice almost verbatim (and if they can’t, there are thousands of results for ‘how to give good feedback’ on google. So, back to the original question, why does satisfaction with feedback remain so stubbornly low?

First, giving good feedback and coaching are time-intensive. It takes time to really understand someone’s work so as to engage with it properly and give relevant feedback; it takes even more time to coach people. Unfortunately, people who take the time to do these things are not usually recognized: being a good coach pays dividends in the future, and its value is not immediately obvious, and so managers who do this are often undervalued. Very simplistically, if I have one hour and can choose to spend it on producing a very good piece of work, or on coaching someone I manage, I will get more recognition for the former, because its impact will be more immediately obvious.

Second, this is compounded by the fact that many companies lack the incentive to invest in feedback and coaching. If you work in a company with high employee turnover, you won’t reap the returns on good coaching: why spend ages helping someone become better at their job if they are going to leave before their improvement is reflected in their work in their current role? And conversely, why bother training someone, when you can just hire someone new with the skills you need?

Third, some of the attributes of good feedback and coaching require a (genuine, not projected) self-confidence that a lot of people lack. If you are insecure, you are unlikely to take kindly to people pushing back on your feedback; you are also more likely to want to feel like you’ve contributed, even when you don’t have much of value to add. This is hard to address! You cannot just tell everyone in a company ‘be less insecure’ and expect it to work.

Fourth, though giving good feedback seems easy (even if time intensive) on paper, it is a habit that needs to be cultivated. Most companies do not really train their employees to be good managers — the most common paradigm is that people are rewarded for their skill as individual contributors, and are sometimes suddenly given wide managerial responsibilities without prior training (this is especially true in companies that try to maintain flat hierarchies).

Finally, giving coaching and good feedback requires at least some level of familiarity or expertise with the work of the person receiving the feedback. It also suggests a common understanding in the org of what good looks like. In many companies, especially fast-moving ones, managers may not have done work similar to that that their reportees are doing, and are therefore not able to coach them properly.

All these cannot be fixed through training or reminders to give more regular feedback: instead, they require structural interventions so that

• People who are good at coaching their reportees and peers are recognised and celebrated; conversely, people who may be excellent ICs but not good at managing others do not progress to management.

• Organisations screen for leadership and ability to coach others, both at the hiring and promotion stages.

• Managers are familiar with the work their reportees are performing.

• Managers are incentivised to develop their people, and

• People are given management responsibility early in their career, so they can hone their coaching skills.

Lessons from P&G

I wrote that low-quality feedback has been an issue at two of the three companies I’ve worked at. The first, Procter & Gamble was very good at it, exactly because it was set up in such a way that it encouraged coaching.

Most importantly, P&G only hires at the entry-level, and promotes from within; it therefore has a very strong incentive to invest in developing its people. The promote-from-within system also reduces turnover (you are more likely to stay at a company if you know people can’t parachute above you in the management chain) and results in senior managers having done entry-level work, so that they know how to do their reportees work well (and can therefore coach them).

In addition, P&G:

• Specifically screens (or used to, when I was there!) for leadership and collaboration at interviews; people who join the company are therefore more likely to be good at coaching.

• Gives people management responsibility early — for example, managers in their second year can often manage and coach interns (this in itself results from the promote-from-within system: such a system requires a large pipeline of juniour people, and if you have a lot of juniour employees, someone needs to manage and coach them!)

• Manages people’s careers; unlike other companies, P&Gers do not get to bid for other roles in the company whenever they want — typically, they have to rotate through assignments that last two years. This means that managers themselves get a return on their coaching investment — you spend 6 months training someone and get 1.5 years of value from them.

P&G isn’t perfect either — what company is ?— : it also does not directly and specifically reward management ability. But it does do a stellar job of developing talent — it’s not a coincidence that P&G alumni are senior execs or CEOs in companies in virtually every field. The company has made a conscious choice to do this, which involves difficult trade-offs (P&Gers spend a lot of time on recruitment, L&D, and career planning— activities that are not seen as something owned by HR, but managed by everyone in the organisation).

Unless your company does the same (by which I don’t mean copy P&G’s model, but spend time to think of other structural interventions to give people the right incentives), then no matter how many feedback training sessions you run, you won’t see those survey results improving.

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