Feedback: do managers overestimate the clarity of their message?
After a conversation, a manager may believe an expectation has been clearly expressed, while the employee takes away only a general assessment. The managerial question is specific: how can we check whether feedback has conveyed a work criterion rather than an intention known only to its author?
What the literature establishes
Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky and Victoria Husted Medvec (1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that people overestimate others' ability to perceive their internal states. This “illusion of transparency” includes situations in which people believe their emotions are more apparent than observers actually find them. The study does not examine feedback conversations, but it encourages a distinction between what a speaker experiences and what the other person can actually observe.
The knowledge that makes a message seem obvious
Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber (1989, Journal of Political Economy) examine another difficulty: people who possess information struggle to set it aside when anticipating the judgements of less-informed people. Their economic experiments document this “curse of knowledge”. Applied to feedback, the mechanism suggests a hypothesis: a manager who knows the expected standard may believe that a phrase such as “be more thorough” is enough to communicate it.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that longer feedback must be clearer. These studies compare neither the length of managerial conversations nor the effectiveness of different formulations. The reasonable avenue is instead to make the criterion observable and check understanding: providing more explanations does not guarantee a shared expectation. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to conclude
Both articles rely on experimental situations that differ from everyday reporting relationships; they do not establish how frequently these gaps occur in Lugano businesses. In practice, a nod of agreement cannot, on its own, distinguish understanding from agreement or caution towards a superior. Asking someone to restate the message provides additional information without proving that the requested change will be feasible or lasting.
A practical check in Lugano
As part of SHR's “L'art du feedback” programme, managers in a bank, a fashion business, a trading company or an Italian-speaking family SME in Lugano could try an exercise: before each conversation selected for the trial, write down an expected behaviour and the criterion by which it can be recognised. Over two weeks, close these conversations by asking employees, in their working language, to restate the expected action and its criterion, then compare their answers with the prepared note. Measure the proportion of conversations in which both elements are correctly restated before any clarification, keeping an anonymised record without client data so that the check is verifiable. The result indicates immediate understanding of the message, not employee agreement or future performance. To go further: explore the The Art of Feedback training in Lugano, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: The Art of Feedback in Lugano
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