Corrective feedback: what actually helps people improve
Line managers regularly need to point out a gap without turning a correction into a judgement about the person. The useful question is specific: under what conditions does corrective feedback help improve task execution?
What the literature establishes
Avraham N. Kluger and Angelo DeNisi (1996, Psychological Bulletin) show in a meta-analysis that feedback interventions improve performance on average, but can also undermine it. Their theory proposes, among other things, that the effect depends on where feedback directs attention: towards the task, task motivation or concerns about the self. Extensive feedback is therefore not necessarily useful feedback.
The mechanism: making correction actionable
John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007, Review of Educational Research) distinguish feedback about the task, processes, self-regulation and the person in a review focused on learning. Their framework organises feedback around the intended goal, the current position and what should happen next. For managers, this suggests making the expected criterion, the observed gap and the next action explicit, rather than stopping at a general assessment.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that factual feedback automatically improves performance. These studies provide no such guarantee: identifying an error does not in itself supply the knowledge, resources or opportunity needed to correct it. Keeping the discussion focused on the work is a reasonable direction, not a recipe that applies regardless of context. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits of the evidence and of common practice
The meta-analysis brings together heterogeneous interventions and tasks, while the second review focuses primarily on education. Applying these findings to the management of professional teams therefore requires local verification, rather than treating an average effect as universal. Counting feedback conversations or collecting satisfaction ratings afterwards does not directly measure improvement in the work.
A practical check in Genève
Within SHR's « Management de proximité » programme, an application exercise could involve selecting a recurring task in Genève: document checks in private banking, approval of a briefing note in an international organisation, quality control in luxury watchmaking or verification of a commodity trading file. Across two comparable periods, before and after introducing feedback structured around the expected criterion, the gap and the next action, record the proportion of deliverables requiring rework for the same type of error. Keeping the assessment grid unchanged and retaining anonymised records, in accordance with confidentiality requirements, would make the calculation verifiable. The observed change would provide a local indicator for discussion, not causal proof if case complexity, workload or staffing had changed. To go further: explore the Frontline Management training in Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Frontline Management in Geneva
- frontline management
- Geneva
- research
- training geneva