A recent post highlighted the fact that a proactive and consistent performance management regimen is a key pre-requisite to building and sustaining a high-performance culture of continuous improvement.

However, a recent Gallup study found that only 26% of the U.S. workforce strongly agreed that the feedback they get from managers or supervisors as part of their performance management effort actually helps them to improve their work! Clearly, and as most people agree, giving or gaining feedback can be difficult.

Further research indicates there are two primary reasons for the difficulty, which can be associated with both giving feedback or having “difficult conversations” with team members:

1. The feedback giver is too indirect, so others don’t recognize the importance or significance of what is being shared. In fact, in many cases the feedback shared has no impact at all and is quickly dismissed or forgotten, because the brain doesn’t recognize the input as worthwhile!
2. The feedback giver is too direct, thus causing others to become defensive; rather than listening to or giving consideration to the feedback they are distracted by what’s often called the rebuttal tendency, which means that instead of listening they are focused on how they will rebut whatever is being said. Even worse, when others react defensively it can cause the feedback giver (or seeker) to become defensive as well! Symptoms include loss of focus, sudden reliance on filler words (i.e., ah, uhm, etc.), and making potentially antagonistic remarks.
   
   A similar reaction to overly direct feedback is an “amygdala hijack.” It happens when a situation causes your amygdala (the section of our brains that reacts to emotional stimuli) to hijack control of your response to stress by disabling portions of the frontal lobes.

Fortunately, there is a simple formula for effectively giving feedback or for sharing difficult messages in a “brain-friendly” way, which will be the subject of our next post.