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Future-focused feedback, which involves goal-setting and planning for future performance, can be more effective than past-focused feedback

Research from Humanly Possible, Inc., University of Chicago, and Victoria University of Wellington

📋 Introduction

Paper Title: The future of feedback: Motivating performance improvement through future-focused feedback
Year of Publication: 2020
Journal: PLoS ONE
Authors: Jackie Gnepp (Humanly Possible, Inc.), Joshua Klayman (University of Chicago), Ian O. Williamson (Victoria University of Wellington), Sema Barlas (University of Chicago)

Why this matters

Knowing how to give feedback that motivates employees to do better is important for leaders who want to help their team members grow and make the organization successful.

Findings

This study helps explain why feedback often doesn't lead to the improvements we want, and how to give feedback that works better. The key points are:

When people get feedback, they tend to take more credit for successes and make more excuses for failures compared to the person giving the feedback. This leads to disagreeing with and ignoring negative feedback.
Talking about the feedback can actually make people disagree more rather than come to a shared understanding.
People are more likely to accept feedback and try to improve if the conversation focuses on future actions they can take rather than analyzing past problems.

In simpler terms: Focus feedback on how the person can do better in the future instead of dwelling on what went wrong in the past. This makes them more open to the feedback and motivated to act on it.

Why this happens

People who give feedback and those who get it often see things differently. Feedback givers usually think the person's performance is because of their skills and effort. But the person getting the feedback often makes excuses to protect their ego, especially if the feedback is negative.

Talking too much about what happened in the past can make the person getting feedback feel bad about themselves. Then they get defensive and refuse to listen to criticism.

But if you focus the feedback on the future instead, it works better. It gets the person thinking of ways to improve and motivates them. They stop worrying about being judged for past mistakes. Instead, they work together with you to solve problems and reach goals. This makes them more willing to accept the feedback and make positive changes.

Simply put: Don't dwell on the past, focus on the future. Make feedback about improvement, not judgment. Work together to find solutions, and the person will be more open to change.

💡Our recommendation

To maximize the effectiveness of performance feedback, leaders should focus the conversation on future-oriented actions and improvement strategies.

This doesn't mean that you do not address past incidents and events. However, over-indexing on the past without focussing on the future may result in less productive outcomes, and less alignment and buy-in for future efforts.