Leadership d’excellence: what feedback actually helps people improve in Berne?

Within SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ “Leadership d’excellence” programme, feedback deserves to be examined as an intervention in work, not merely as an interpersonal skill. The management question is precise: how can feedback help someone correct a task without shifting their attention towards judgements about them as a person?

What the literature establishes

Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi (1996, Psychological Bulletin) show in a meta-analysis that feedback interventions improve performance on average, but that some make it worse. Their theory proposes that effectiveness depends partly on where feedback directs attention: towards the task, the motivation to perform it, or the self. More frequent feedback is therefore not, in itself, more useful feedback.

The mechanism: making the next action clear

John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007, Review of Educational Research) organise their review around three questions: what is the goal, how is progress going, and what comes next? They distinguish feedback about tasks, processes, self-regulation and the person, with the latter generally being less useful for learning. For management, this suggests linking an observable gap to a way of working, rather than offering only an overall judgement.

The premature conclusion

One might conclude that replacing personal judgements with detailed instructions is enough. This overlooks the possibility that a correction solves the immediate problem without helping the recipient recognise the same problem in another situation. A reasonable approach is to make the success criterion explicit and ask the person concerned to formulate the next action, without presenting this practice as a guarantee of performance. (our executive and employee training programmes)

The limits of the evidence and of routine practice

The meta-analysis brings together heterogeneous tasks and contexts; it does not offer a recipe directly validated for every occupation. The second review concerns teaching and learning: transferring it to the workplace is a hypothesis to test, not local evidence. Counting feedback conversations or measuring employee satisfaction is therefore not sufficient, on its own, to establish that feedback improves work.

A practical check in Berne

One proposed application for “Leadership d’excellence” is to monitor a category of recurring tasks for four weeks in a Berne-based team: case processing in the federal administration, approval of public health communications, resolution of telecoms tickets, or component inspection in precision manufacturing. For each feedback intervention, record the expected criterion, the observed gap and the agreed action without sensitive personal data, then check whether the same gap reappears in the next comparable task. The indicator is the proportion of subsequent tasks showing that gap among those actually checked, compared with an initial period of equal length while documenting changes in difficulty or workload. This comparison does not prove causality, but it makes a more useful question than feedback frequency verifiable: does the reported problem recur less often? To go further: explore the Executive Leadership training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

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