Don’t fix weaknesses, do leverage strengths

We falsely think that we are doing our jobs as managers by giving performance feedback—constructive or otherwise—to employees. Not so, according to Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in their article, “The Feedback Fallacy,” which appeared in the March-April 2019 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Neurons don’t lie

Feedback focuses employees on their shortcomings. Developmental areas, however, aren’t our shortcomings but rather our strengths. One study hooked up brain scans to two groups of students: One group was asked about their dreams, hopes, and ambitions and how they would go about achieving them, while the other group was asked about homework, what the students were doing wrong, and how they could fix mistakes.

Guess what? In the second group, a fight-or-fight response was triggered in their brains, their focus narrowed to survival mode, and they didn’t progress. By contrast, the other group actually grew new neurons as a result of neural plasticity. The authors tell us that true learning happens when you add some nuance to an existing thought pattern or an expansion on a person’s current understanding.

Excellence is unique to the person