Feedback Avoidance Loop

We used to have a toxic feedback and coaching pattern at our organization. It went something like this:

Someone would miss. We’d get frustrated and vent with each other as a leadership group. After sometimes hours of conversation about what might be causing the problem and how best to maneuver through it, we’d discover that no one had actually spoken with the person in question about their performance at all. Repeat.

It wasn’t uncommon for us to have five or six talks about a person before actually speaking with the person.

It wasn’t always intentional. Often each miss seemed so small and isolated that it didn’t feel worth the emotional labor of having a conversation, or it was annoying to have to speak on things that felt so obvious. “Why don’t they know this already?!”

So small thing after small thing piled up. Each noticed in the moment but never addressed. These small shifts off-course compound over time for both the employee and the employer.

The employee goes further and further in the wrong direction. The longer someone is off-course, the harder it is to bring someone back. Two or three degrees off-course for months or years requires a huge realignment. When you do address the problem at that point you’re not only addressing behavior, you’re creating a cultural dissonance and changing the reality of what work is.

“Oh, you’ve been doing that for two years? Yeah, we don’t do that here.”

“Actually we do. I’ve been doing it like this for two years.”

On the leadership end, avoiding feedback brews a deep-seated resentment of that person. If you have an employee that is having issues, and a 15-minute chunk of each of your meetings is spent talking about that employee, you probably aren’t going to like them very much or treat them as well as you should. You’re likely to discount them even more and perpetuate the cycle.

After enough time (it doesn’t take long) the misses are forgotten and replaced by these big sweeping feelings. I feel this person may be a bad fit for us. I feel like this person doesn’t care. I feel annoyed whenever I see this person.

Now, feelings do matter. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in the past five years is that trusting my gut is really, really important. But given enough time with no guidance or feedback, most people will fall into this category of being a resented employee.

So to fix the problem you have to start looking inward. Yes, we’ll all have employees that aren’t great fits, we’ll all make hiring mistakes, and have to let people go. But if you’re constantly surrounded by low-performing, unengaged people who you have no desire to be around, at some point that stops being their fault and starts being yours.