The first is that other people are more aware than you are of your weaknesses, and that the best way to help you, therefore, is for them to show you what you cannot see for yourself.

Logic: 

People need to tell you where you stand, if they don’t tell you, you will never know and this will be bad.

Challenge & Flaws: 

The feedback is more the person who is conveying them, rather than the subject – it leads to systemic error (example below). Our evaluations are deeply colored by our own understanding of what we’re rating others on, our own sense of what good looks like for a particular competency, our harshness or leniency as raters, and our own inherent and unconscious biases.

This phenomenon is called the idiosyncratic Rater Effect, and it’s large (more than half of your rating of someone else reflects your characteristics, not hers) and resilient (no training can lessen it). In other words, the research shows that feedback is more distortion than truth.

Example: 

Consider colour blindness. If we ask a colour-blind person to rate the redness of a particular rose, we won’t trust his feedback—we know that he is incapable of seeing, let alone “rating,” red. His error isn’t random; it’s predictable and explainable, and it stems from a flaw in his measurement system; hence, it’s systematic. If we then decide to ask seven more colour-blind people to rate the redness of our rose, their errors will be equally systematic, and averaging their ratings won’t get us any closer to determining the actual redness of the rose. In fact, it’s worse than this. Adding up all the inaccurate redness ratings—“gray,” “pretty gray,” “whitish gray,” “muddy brown,” and so on—and averaging them leads us further away both from learning anything reliable about the individuals’ personal experiences of the rose and from the actual truth of how red our rose really is.

What the research has revealed is that we’re all colour-blind when it comes to abstract attributes, such as strategic thinking, potential, and political savvy. Our inability to rate others on them is predictable and explainable—it is systematic. We cannot remove the error by adding more data inputs and averaging them out, and doing that actually makes the error bigger.

What I learned out of this one specifically: 

The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that of their own feelings and experiences. We may not be able to tell someone where they stands, but we can tell him where they stands with us. Those are our truths, not theirs. This is a humbler claim, but at least it’s accurate.

2. Theory of process of learning: 

The belief you lack certain skills and you need to acquire so you colleague should team them to you.

Logic: 

If you’re in sales, if you don’t know how to mirror and match the prospect, how will succeed in your job. So you need feedback to develop these skills you’re missing.

Challenge & Flaws: 

Focusing people on their shortcomings doesn’t enable learning; it impairs it. I think it has a deeper issue that we think that this information is the magic ingredient that will accelerate someone’s learning. Learning is less a function of adding something that isn’t there than it is of recognizing, reinforcing, and refining what already is.

There a lot of organisational strategies which have been based on this such as ‘Playing to your strengths’ etc. There is actual brain science about it that people grow far more neurons and synaptic connections where they already have the most neurons and synaptic connections. In other words, each brain grows most where it’s already strongest. “Added connections are therefore more like new buds on a branch rather than new branches.” – Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University.

3. Theory of excellence: 

The belief that great performance is universal, analysable and describable and that once defined, it can be transferred from one person to another, regardless of who that individual is.

Logic: 

We want to tell you what ‘excellence’ is in our company, then we will strive to remedy your shortcomings. Once we point at someone who is demonstrating those traits, you need to do more closely hew it.

Challenge & Flaws: 

Excellence in any endeavor is almost impossible to define, and yet getting there, for each of us, is relatively easy. Excellence is also not the opposite of failure. But in virtually all aspects of human endeavour, people assume that it is and that if they study what leads to pathological functioning and do the reverse—or replace what they found missing—they can create optimal functioning. That assumption is flawed.

Why? Eradicating depression will get you no closer to joy. Divorce is mute on the topic of happy marriage. Similarly, exit interviews with employees who leave tell you nothing about why others stay. If you study failure, you’ll learn a lot about failure but nothing about how to achieve excellence. Excellence has its own pattern.

Example: 

Watch an NBA game, and you may think to yourself, “Yes, most of them are tall and athletic, but boy, not only does each player have a different role on the team, but even the players in the same role on the same team seem to do it differently.” Examine something as specific and as limited as the free throws awarded after fouls, and you’ll learn that not only do the top two free-throw shooters in history have utterly different styles, but one of them, Rick Barry—the best ever on the day he retired (look him up)—didn’t even throw overhand.

Collective Fallacy Basis: 

All three theories have a common element i.e. Self-Centeredness. Self-centeredness; they take our own expertise and what we are sure is our colleagues’ inexpertise as givens; they assume that my way is necessarily your way. But as it turns out, in extrapolating from what creates our own performance to what might create performance in others, we overreach.

Epidemic & modern day challenge: 

Research reveals that none of these theories is true. The more we depend on these theories without fixing the inadequacy, and the more technology we base on them, the less learning and productivity we will get from others.

No wonder – related real world perils show that 40% of the high potential employees (HiPos) are – false HiPos – they are not doing well in the future and at least one in two leaders disappointing, derailing, or failing to drive high levels of engagement and team performance. That statement has its own merits and concerns so we will look to isolate that from the topic at hands, instead of solving a paradox by increasing complexity of it by adding a non-linear variables such as office politics on top of it. Read the related research memoranda here

Conclusion:

If you’ve made it thus far, usually at this point, I start thinking is there a ‘closing argument’ to this debate or a prolonged catharsis/monologue on the topic. So here it goes:

a) Excellence is an outcome, so take note of it. When a prospect leans into a sales pitch, a project runs smoothly, or an angry customer suddenly calms down. Then turn to the team member who created the outcome and say, “That! Yes, that!” By doing this, you’ll stop the flow of work for a moment and pull your colleague’s attention back toward something she just did that really worked”.

b) But at best, this fetish with feedback is good only for correcting mistakes—in the rare cases where the right steps are known and can be evaluated objectively. And at worst, it’s toxic, because what we want from our people—and from ourselves—is not, for the most part, tidy adherence to a procedure agreed upon in advance or, for that matter, the ability to expose one another’s flaws. It’s that people contribute their own unique and growing talents to a common good, when that good is ever-evolving, when we are, for all the right reasons, making it up as we go along. Feedback has nothing to offer to that.

c) The idiosyncratic rates effect creates flocks of ‘disengaged’ employees in white-collar/professional organisations. Primarily, as the raters are usually self-absorbed leaders & functional bosses who are continually unhappy about their stalled progression and bittersweet about unachieved high points of his own career. Instead of objectively evaluating the subject who is seeking guidance, they subliminally and subconsciously project their own experience on a different reality, individual and context.