Managerial feedback: where does it direct attention?
SHR's “Leadership d'excellence” programme provides a framework for a precise question: how can feedback help people improve their work rather than defend their self-image? In Lausanne, this question matters at the interface between research and medtech, as well as in international sport teams and scale-ups across the Lake Geneva region.
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 impair it. Their theory proposes that the effect depends in part on where feedback shifts attention: task operations, motivation to perform the task, or concerns about the self. Feedback is therefore not useful simply because it conveys accurate information.
The mechanism: linking feedback to a usable goal
Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham (2002, American Psychologist) review goal-setting research and highlight the role of feedback in assessing progress towards a goal. Feedback becomes actionable when people can understand the gap and adjust their effort or strategy, subject notably to their skills and commitment to the goal. For managers, this suggests linking an observation to an expected outcome rather than multiplying general assessments.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that all feedback simply needs to be more specific and more frequent. Yet these studies establish neither a universal rule about frequency nor the consistent superiority of any particular wording. On a new and complex task, specifying the expected result more precisely does not replace learning a strategy for achieving it. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot prescribe
The interventions and tasks covered in this research are heterogeneous; their average effect is not a recipe for a particular managerial conversation. The goal-setting review does not directly test a feedback protocol in Lausanne organisations. Feedback that is well received must also be distinguished from feedback that works: immediate satisfaction does not prove that subsequent work improves.
A practical check in Lausanne
As a proposed exercise within “Leadership d'excellence”, a Lausanne team could track its feedback on a recurring deliverable for four weeks: medtech documentation, a research output at a higher education institution, preparations for an international sporting event, or a product release at a Lake Geneva scale-up. For each instance of feedback, record the expected criterion, the observed gap and the agreed adjustment, without judging personality. Then measure the proportion of recorded gaps corrected in the next version, keeping acceptance criteria unchanged and comparing it with an equally long preceding period. This comparison would not by itself demonstrate a causal effect of training, but would make a more useful question than feedback volume verifiable: is feedback followed by observable corrections? To go further: explore the Executive Leadership training in Lausanne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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