Feedback: testing a diagnosis rather than confirming it
A manager convinced that an employee fails to anticipate problems can find many incidents consistent with that diagnosis. The managerial question is more demanding: how can feedback be prepared without selecting only the facts that confirm an existing belief?
What the literature establishes
Mark Snyder and William B. Swann (1978, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) showed experimentally that people asked to test a hypothesis about someone else favour questions likely to elicit answers consistent with it. The interview can therefore help produce the very material that appears to confirm the initial judgement. When preparing feedback, this suggests examining not only the facts collected, but also the questions used to obtain them.
The same evidence, different interpretations
Charles G. Lord, Lee Ross and Mark R. Lepper (1979, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) studied how people evaluated conflicting research findings on the deterrent effect of capital punishment. Participants tended to assess the quality of findings differently depending on their compatibility with their prior position. The mechanism relevant to management is a possibility, not a demonstrated equivalence: gathering contradictory evidence is insufficient if evidence that challenges the diagnosis is systematically discounted.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that managers should abandon all hypotheses before a feedback conversation. That would confuse a provisional diagnosis, needed to guide inquiry, with a verdict already reached. A cautious application of these findings would instead specify which observable fact would prompt a revision of the judgement, before selecting examples for the feedback. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these data do not demonstrate
These experiments measure neither the quality of workplace feedback conversations nor the effectiveness of management training in Sion. They therefore do not establish that searching for counterexamples alone improves performance. In practice, failing to find a counterexample does not amount to confirmation when the manager has observed only part of the work.
A practical check in Sion
Within SHR — Swiss Human Resources' « L'art du feedback » programme, one possible exercise would be to test this discipline for a month with teams working in and around Sion in hydropower, healthcare, winegrowing and Alpine tourism. Before each prepared feedback conversation, the manager would record the provisional diagnosis, an observation that could contradict it and the source consulted to look for it, without recording sensitive data. The measure would be the proportion of prepared feedback conversations with a documented search for contradictory evidence, out of all prepared feedback conversations during the period. This indicator would verify a preparation practice, not the accuracy of the judgement or a performance gain. To go further: explore the The Art of Feedback training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: The Art of Feedback in Sion
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