The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Fostering a robust feedback culture has a ripple effect, boosting the overall morale of the organisation.

- Vivek Mehra

The term feedback is perhaps one of the most commonly misunderstood word. Perhaps the most incorrect interpretation is thinking feedback = criticism. The line separating the two is a very thin one if we look at a classical dictionary definition of the two words.

Criticism is to express disapproval (of someone or something); to talk about the problems or faults (of someone or something)

Feedback is helpful information or criticism that is given to someone to say what can be done to improve a performance, product, service, etc.

Both of these have a common thread running through them. Both come from a process of evaluation and in itself there is not anything radically wrong (with evaluating). The problem arises when the evaluation comes from either a very narrow viewpoint or worse comes from a personal belief of superiority. The belief of ‘superiority’ does not mean that the person making the evaluation is a certified ‘superior’; it refers to the evaluator’s self-perception that he/ she is ‘superior’.

A junior employee, when asked for feedback on a manager might end up criticising instead of providing feedback. ‘My manager isn’t good at communicating.’ This is an example of criticism while the giver might vociferously defend that this is giving feedback. Here the giver is making the following assumptions:

That the manager is poor at this task because there is a benchmark that he/she is not achieving

That the manager is poor because people receiving the communication are correctly interpreting it and are yet unable to perform their jobs

That the entire team receives the same communication consistently, they interpret it consistently and arrive at the same conclusion that they cannot do their job

That the giver has complete clarity on how communication should be and the manager is not doing what the giver assumes should be done.