When Diversity Meets Feedback

If you’ve picked up a book about raising organizational performance in the past five years, you’ve almost certainly read about the benefits of developing a culture of candid feedback. Kim Scott, a former Google executive, popularized the term “radical candor” in her 2017 book by that name, arguing that even “obnoxiously aggressive” feedback was better than “ruinous empathy” (keeping feedback that could otherwise help colleagues to yourself).

The hedge fund billionaire and Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio went a step further in his book Principles, describing a culture of “radical transparency,” in which employees rate and give feedback about one another’s contributions to meetings on publicly shared documents as the meetings actually take place. And in his 2020 book No Rules Rules (which I coauthored), Reed Hastings, Netflix’s founder and executive chairman, lists candid feedback as one of the top three ingredients of an innovative organization. A popular motto at Netflix is “Only say about someone what you will say to their face.” If an employee comes to the boss to complain about another employee, the boss is to respond, “What did your colleague say when you gave them that feedback?”

Most employees also recognize the benefits of frank and honest feedback, and they say they want more of it. In a 2019 survey by Zenger Folkman, 94% of 2,700 respondents said they believed corrective feedback improved their performance when it was presented well, while nearly two-thirds agreed with the statement “My performance and possibilities for success in my career would have increased substantially if I had been given more feedback.” The survey’s authors conclude that feedback—done right—can truly be a gift to individuals and organizations.

But there’s another movement in business that has increasingly gained steam: diversity, equity, and inclusion. Bolstered by the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, DEI is perhaps the most overarching organizational culture trend of the decade. Today every single Fortune 100 company cites DEI as a key priority on its website.

At first glance, DEI seems compatible with a culture of honest feedback. The more diverse the workforce, the more beneficial it is to hear everyone’s opinions, and the more we all succeed. When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, in 2014, he declared that he would work to turn what had become a know-it-all culture into a learn-it-all culture. While know-it-alls are focused on raising their status by showing off their expertise and hiding their weaknesses, learn-it-alls have the courage and humility to listen openly to constructive criticism and are eager to hear the opinions of teammates who have diverse viewpoints.

When it comes to sharing feedback and advice, diversity often leads to complications, which, if not understood and managed, can create bad feelings.

Unfortunately, a learn-it-all culture doesn’t arise naturally. And when it comes to sharing feedback and advice, diversity often leads to complications, which, if not understood and managed, can create an environment rife with bad feelings, defensiveness, and ruptured relationships. That’s because the vast majority of people aren’t ready to receive criticism unless they feel safe with the person providing it. Do the people assessing your work really mean to help you, or are they surreptitiously trying to embarrass you, take your job, or usurp your power?

Diversity in the workplace, in fact, increases the likelihood that people will interpret feedback as an act of hostility. That means that people must be careful about how they provide it. Of course, diversity at work today encompasses many types of differences, from race and sexual orientation to religious and ethnic background. In the following pages I’ll focus on how people can improve the way they deliver feedback across three specific types of diversity: cultures, genders, and generations. I’ll also describe strategies for fostering a climate in which candor and diversity can coexist. I’ll conclude by looking at how organizational practices can make frequent and regular feedback a standard part of working life.

[ 1 ] Feedback Across Cultures: Upgrade, Downgrade, or Wrap Positives Around Negatives

In today’s interconnected, virtual world you might have a strategy meeting with a colleague in India at 9 AM, attend a financial presentation in Stockholm at 10, and run a program for new managers across South America at noon. If you’re on a team that emphasizes candid feedback, at any moment of the day you may find yourself giving criticism to—or receiving it from—people from a wide variety of cultures and countries.

The risk of upsetting people in these situations is high. That’s because what’s considered a constructive way to offer feedback in one culture is often perceived as destructive in another. It isn’t easy for outsiders to understand the nuances around feedback in other cultures. For example, people across the world most often stereotype American culture as exceedingly direct. In some aspects this stereotype is true. Americans tend to place a high value on clear, simple communication and on actions like recapping key points and confirming decisions in writing. This approach certainly feels straightforward to many. But the story changes when it comes to negative feedback, whether in a critical performance review or an evaluation of a colleague’s less-than-ideal presentation.

In those situations Americans tend to place an especially strong emphasis on preserving the self-esteem of the feedback recipient, leading to common American practices such as giving three positives for every negative, catching people doing things right, and using superlatives to accentuate the positive, even when the negative is the key point. (“Overall it was excellent. To this part you might want to make some small tweaks.”) This is downright confusing for people in countries where managers are much more likely to tell it like it is (the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Israel, Russia, and France—where I live—to name just a few).

A case in point is Olga, a Ukrainian human resource executive who attended my course at INSEAD. “In my culture if there is a problem, we say it clearly,” Olga explained. “We don’t perceive it as demotivating or unkind to say to a colleague, ‘This is not OK,’ or ‘This behavior must change.’ We don’t talk about what we liked and appreciated before getting to the point or start the conversation by talking about the weather. We jump to the issue at hand.”

Olga hadn’t given cultural differences a lot of thought until she moved from Ukraine to West Virginia. In her job there, she says, “My colleague Cathy was responsible for payroll. Each month when the paychecks went out, there were mistakes. It was causing frustration, so I invited her into my office and said, ‘Cathy, this absolutely cannot continue. Your mistakes are creating big headaches.’”

In less-direct cultures the explicitness of the American approach to feedback is likely to be perceived as inappropriately blunt.

Later, when the seasonal-employee manager emailed Olga privately to complain (“Unbelievable! Cathy got the amounts wrong yet again”), Olga replied all, copying Cathy so that she could see the manager’s comments herself and responding, “You are right. This is completely unacceptable, and it won’t happen again.” To Olga’s surprise, her boss stopped by to correct her behavior, which he referred to as “indelicate.” He informed her that Cathy had been so upset, she had asked to change jobs. He explained that Olga should not be critical of someone’s work when other people are copied on the communication. He also suggested she use “might” and “should” rather than “must” and “can’t.” For Olga, this was a cultural eye-opener.

The complexity doesn’t stop there. Americans may be masters at wrapping positives around negatives, but in some less-direct cultures the explicitness of the American approach is still likely to be perceived as inappropriately blunt. Take Jethro, a soft-spoken but forthright American working in Silicon Valley. With little understanding of cultural differences, he soon found himself in trouble for giving feedback (by video) to coworkers in Thailand using methods common in the United States. HR in Bangkok responded by complaining that he was bullying his Thai colleagues.

Jethro describes the situation like this: “I’d thought carefully about how to provide the feedback. My comments (both verbal and then in writing) were specific, explaining what actions had led to positive results and which had been problematic, and then outlining clearly what my colleagues needed to do differently to improve client satisfaction.”

The head of HR in Thailand had some feedback of her own, however. “The American tendency to give feedback by explicitly stating ‘the area in need of improvement’ already feels aggressive to a Thai recipient,” she told Jethro. “To make things worse, Americans frequently end discussions by recapping key points in writing, which makes us feel that you don’t trust us to do as we say or are trying to get us in trouble."

She explained that Jethro would have more success if instead of detailing what his Thai colleagues had done wrong, he praised what was good clearly and left out what was bad. If he was specific about the things that had worked well, he didn’t need to comment on the negative aspects at all; the Thai employees would understand that he was not happy with what he hadn’t mentioned. For example, when commenting on a presentation he’d just seen, he might say, “I especially liked the examples you gave in the presentation last week.” He wouldn’t need to say, “The examples from this morning’s presentation were not very good.” It would be implied clearly enough.

Jethro learned the same lesson Olga did: “I saw clearly that what is normal and appropriate feedback in my culture may come off as completely inappropriate somewhere else,” he reflects.

One way to gauge what feedback works best in another culture is to listen carefully to the words chosen by your counterparts. People from more-direct cultures tend to use what linguists call “upgraders” when providing criticism. These are words that make criticism feel stronger—like “absolutely,” totally,” or “completely.” For example, “This is absolutely inappropriate” or “This is totally unprofessional.” By contrast, more-indirect cultures use more “downgraders” when giving negative feedback. These are words that soften the criticism, such as “kind of,” “a little,” and “maybe.”

Another type of downgrader is a deliberate understatement—for example, saying, “We are not quite there yet,” when you really mean “This is nowhere close to complete,” or saying, “This is just my opinion,” when you really mean “I’m certain this is obvious to everyone.”

With a little awareness you can notice when you’re using upgraders and downgraders and when those around you are and make slight adjustments to get the desired results. When it comes to providing feedback internationally, the message is not “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” but “Do unto others as they would have done unto themselves.”

[ 2 ] Feedback Across Genders: Give the Gift of Power First

Cultural differences represent only a small part of diversity in the workplace. Gender differences add to the complexity. As a woman at a business school where over three-quarters of the faculty members are men, I began thinking early on about how gender affects when and how we share our opinions.

Research shows that leaders who are women, much more than their male counterparts, are expected to be warm and nice (traditionally seen as female traits) as well as competent and tough (traits traditionally expected from men and leaders). This line is difficult to walk, and women who provide frank negative feedback risk being perceived as combative. One 2020 study conducted at Stanford University demonstrated that while women and men are equally likely to be described as having technical ability, women are significantly more likely to be described as aggressive. That’s why women who provide candid feedback risk being perceived as on the attack.

The dynamics are just as complicated but completely different for men. In 2008 an essay by Rebecca Solnit inspired the term “mansplaining,” which describes situations in which a man explains something to a woman who knows more about it than he does. “Manvising” hasn’t made it into our lexicon yet, but most women find the phenomenon equally familiar. The term describes moments when men give women advice that they have neither asked for nor want. Solnit herself provided this very simple illustration in an article she wrote in 2022: “A few years ago, a friend of mine got married, and when I pulled up to the rustic wedding site, a man I didn’t know positioned himself behind my car to make dramatic hand signals. I didn’t need or ask for help, but he was giving it, and I’m sure he thought the credit for my success in parking my small car in this very easy spot was at least partly his.”

While providing advice can indeed be generous and kind, it also creates the impression that you’re putting yourself above the person you’re giving it to.

Solnit’s implication is that this man provided unsolicited advice because he thought that his skills were superior to hers since he was a man. That could have been his thinking, but research reveals that men are as likely to give unsolicited advice to other men as they are to women. Research also reveals that women give considerable amounts of advice to other women. It’s with cross-gender feedback that the discrepancy becomes clear: One research project showed that men are five times as likely to give unrequested advice to women as women are to give it to men.

That’s a problem because while providing advice can indeed be generous and kind, it also creates the impression that you’re putting yourself above the person you’re giving it to. In my own research I’ve interviewed dozens of men and women about this phenomenon. I’ve found that although most men don’t believe they’re guilty of manvising, well over 90% of women report that they have recently received unsolicited advice from their male colleagues.

One of my interviewees, a software industry marketing VP I’ll call Cassandra, provided an example. At an all-hands meeting attended by 2,000 colleagues, she had to give two presentations about a major project she was leading. In the first she presented the results of nine months of work. She was anxious because the reception she got could make or break the project. Despite her fears, she felt she’d aced the presentation and, elated, made her way to the speakers’ lounge to wait for the second presentation. There she bumped into her colleague Miles, who had spoken earlier that morning.

Here’s what happened next: “I was pleased to relax and have a chat,” Cassandra recalls. “After a few friendly exchanges, Miles surprised me with feedback: ‘Your presentation was 90% perfect. The audience was eating it up! I do think you spoke a little too fast, which made you sound nervous. Also, maybe your mouth was too close to the mic because your voice somehow sounded tinny.’ Although Miles’s feedback in retrospect was actionable and meant to help before I went back onstage, I felt like he had hijacked my self-confidence. I had been feeling great about what I’d accomplished, and now I felt like an inexperienced child receiving coaching from a teacher. I noticed my body physically shifting back in my chair to get as far away from Miles as possible.”

As Cassandra’s story demonstrates, even when feedback is provided with a genuine desire to help, it clearly gives the person dispensing it emotional power over the person on the receiving end. One study has found that when people get spontaneous feedback, their heart rate jumps to a level that indicates moderate or extreme duress. It’s no wonder that when one person offers feedback to another, the recipient’s composure is shaken.

Research also shows that the act of providing advice makes people feel more powerful. One study asked 94 library employees how often they gave advice during their workday. The more advice someone gave, the more powerful that individual reported feeling. In another study the same researchers asked 188 students to read and respond to a written account of a student struggling to choose a major. Both the act of dispensing the advice and later being told that the student had read the advice increased the subjects’ feeling of power.

All this makes cross-gender feedback tricky. A member of the majority (a male colleague, for example) who provides feedback to someone from an underrepresented group (like a woman in a management position) is likely to come off as belittling—even when sincerely trying to help.

History isn’t destiny, however. Using what I call the “three A’s of feedback,” you can teach your workforce how to offer advice in a way that gets the useful input out there while still balancing the power dynamics. The first A is that feedback must be intended to assist. (It should always be provided with the genuine intention of helping your counterpart succeed and never be given just to get frustration off your chest.) The second is that it must be actionable. If it’s not crystal clear from your input what your counterpart can do to improve, then keep it to yourself.

The third A is to ask for feedback before you provide it. This is especially important with cross-gender interactions. Unless someone has specifically requested your advice (in which case jump in and give it), solicit suggestions about your own work before you offer anyone your insights. If Miles had started his discussion with Cassandra by saying, “I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about my presentation this morning,” he would have put her in a position of power before turning the tables, which would have led her to treat his advice as valuable help rather than an attempt to assert dominance.

[ 3 ] Feedback Across Generations: Create an Explicit Team Culture

Generational diversity in the workplace has increased significantly over the past decades, as people are living longer, healthier lives and retiring later. In today’s organizations people might be collaborating with colleagues from four generations all at once—something unheard of a few decades ago.

I started to become interested in age diversity at work 25 years ago in my first management role. I had hired a woman who was exactly the same age as my mother to join my team. A pharmacist by training, Carole was elegant and worldly and was taking on her first job after spending 18 years raising children. I still remember how awkward I felt when she began having difficulty with a client and I had to give her corrective guidance. The age difference hadn’t seemed a problem when things were going well, but I couldn’t figure out how to avoid coming off as obnoxious when I outlined which behaviors she needed to change.

The experience I was having is sometimes referred to as status incongruence. This basically means that the status accorded your role in society doesn’t match the part you’re playing in the current context. One research project with 8,000 employees in Germany showed that when younger managers supervise older workers, status incongruence has a measurable negative impact on employees’ happiness. It’s not just that I feel strange treating my elder as my subordinate. As the researchers of this study concluded, the role reversal constantly suggests to the older subordinate that that person has somehow “failed to keep pace.”

To complicate the challenge further, each succeeding generation has developed its own ideas about who should give feedback to whom, how formal or spontaneous that feedback should be, and how much praise versus criticism should be articulated. One member may expect that feedback will be given annually from boss to subordinate, for instance, and another that real-time feedback will be given in all directions. Here are a few of the key differences:

Baby Boomers (now in their late fifties and sixties and seventies) were the first to get graded in school on “works well with others.” They were also the first to have work discussions about interpersonal effectiveness and emotional intelligence and saw feedback as a way to improve both. Though previous generations were more likely to hint at what should be done differently than to state feedback outright, Boomers introduced the annual performance review. According to the generational researcher Lynne Lancaster (coauthor of When Generations Collide), they learned that feedback should be formal and documented and given in annual meetings between boss and subordinate.

Each generation has its own ideas about who should give feedback to whom and how much praise versus criticism should be articulated.

Gen Xers (in their forties to mid fifties) grew up with rising divorce rates and two-income families. Left to fend for themselves at home, these “latchkey kids” learned to get along without an authority figure. Do-it-yourselfers, they relied on notes from Mom explaining how to cook pasta. They tend to be considerably less formal than their Boomer colleagues and don’t want to wait all year to know how they’re doing. They are the first generation to begin giving upward feedback to the boss. And according to Lancaster, they’re more likely to want feedback instantaneously.

Millennials, or Generation Y (in their late twenties and thirties), were raised when child-rearing psychology focused on building self-esteem. A product of helicopter parenting and the philosophy that “every child gets a trophy,” they’re sometimes referred to sarcastically as the “snowflake generation” (because they’re sensitive and easily crushed). But according to the generational expert Neil Howe (who coauthored Generations), this stereotype is misleading. Millennials do have high self-esteem, he says, but their self-confidence seems to be correlated with emotional resilience.

Research conducted in 2019 showed that when it comes to accepting feedback, Millennials are less sensitive than their older colleagues are. Though members of this generation expect and appreciate frequent and copious praise, don’t expect them to wilt when the criticism is tough.

Zoomers (in their teens to mid twenties) were the first generation to grow up surrounded by social media. With YouTube channels and TikTok platforms they came of age in a world of constant informal feedback. Zoomers learned to post something on social media in the morning and watch reactions come in all day long. They are more likely to expect to give and receive frequent, real-time feedback in all directions (subordinate to boss, peer to peer, and so on).

The cross-generational tensions these differences engender are captured nicely by the experience of Richard, a business writer in his late fifties who works in a major media group. Recently he attended a session where all the members of his department took turns giving one another feedback on their current projects. First a couple of other senior colleagues gave Richard both praise and tips for improving his work. Then it was Connor’s turn.

A talented writer in his mid twenties, Connor was less flattering. “This is all right,” he told Richard, “but you completely left your personality out. Your audience wants to feel that you’re with them, but your individual voice is absent.” Richard took it badly. “Something about getting feedback from this kid who has decades less experience than me felt very uncomfortable,” he recalls. “My immediate reaction was to reject his comments. I wasn’t ready to listen to what he was saying, let alone collaborate with him again.”

Not only was Connor decades younger than Richard, leading to status incongruence, but in Richard’s Baby Boomer generation, feedback from someone who is not your boss is infrequent and inappropriate. Richard left the meeting shaking his head at this inexperienced kid telling him his writing was missing a clear voice.

If you’re leading a multigenerational team, the best way to deal with diverse expectations about feedback is often to outline explicit norms for how and when it should be given. That creates a common platform on which all can converge.

Despite the discomfort Richard felt when receiving criticism from Connor, he understood that Connor was behaving in line with the culture of the team. This pushed him to stop and reflect. “After I got home, I started to think about the feedback I’d received,” Richard says. “It became clear that Connor’s had been the most valuable. The guys who come from my generation have a similar perspective to my own, but Connor’s different perspective pushed me to see how to make my writing richer. He was right. My experience as a journalist had taught me to leave myself out of my writing, and in this case it made the piece feel sterile. The fact that Connor comes from a generation where people self-disclose more openly made it easier for him to pinpoint what my writing was lacking. I went back to it with new eyes and wrote something infinitely better.”

[ ~ ] Getting Everyone in the Feedback Loop

Most recent research has focused on the benefits of real-time feedback. See the problem, correct the problem. That’s OK if you’re the boss passing feedback on to your staff. But if you’re younger and less experienced (or working on any highly diverse team), stopping colleagues in the hall to tell them how they could do their jobs better is likely to put your teammates on the defensive, make you a bunch of enemies, and maybe even stunt your career.

There is one mechanism that effectively surfaces all the diverse feedback learn-it-alls need to thrive. If you build regular loops for feedback into collaborations, your team will recognize it not as a sign of condescension or malevolence but as an integral part of the job. This involves setting aside specific moments for mutual exchanges: I know I’m expected to listen openly as you give me actionable feedback about what you think I’ve done well and what I could do to improve. Then I will do the same for you. Just like brushing our teeth, we do it regularly, to keep team performance high.

In setting up any loop, you need to clarify how much positive versus constructive feedback each teammate should supply. You can, for example, have people structure their feedback as one thing they feel that the other person is doing well and one thing the other person could do to up his or her performance. Alternatively, you can use a “start, stop, continue” structure, describing one thing to start doing, one thing to stop doing, and one thing to continue.

Given the maturity and cohesion of your team, you may institute loops that are more or less public. Here are three possible approaches:

One-to-one chats. If your team members have never given one another feedback, a good initial step is to ask your immediate reports to meet individually with each of their team members in the coming month to share feedback, following the ground rules just described. The feedback remains between the two teammates.

“Speed-dating” sessions. If team relationships are closer, you may be ready to share a little more openly. Ask participants to prepare rapid-fire feedback for one another. Send them off in pairs for six minutes of discussion, with each giving feedback for three minutes. Then have everyone move on to another colleague. At the end of the meeting have all team members report back to the group on one helpful piece of feedback they received that they will act on.

Live 360-degree feedback circles. If you have a mature team with strong relationships, get members together over a meal and take turns. If I’m up first, the person to my left gives me feedback (in front of the group). I listen and say thank you. Then the person to the left of that team member gives me feedback. Once we’ve completed the circle, we move on to the next recipient. At the end each person reports one key takeaway from the feedback received.

Exchanging feedback in front of a team requires courage but offers clear advantages. It stops members from whispering behind one another’s backs and encourages the entire team to see feedback as a normal and healthy way to achieve success. One person who experienced a 360-degree circle told me, “Getting publicly ripped apart sounds like torture. Each time I go to a live 360, I’m nervous. But after you get started, you see it’ll be fine. Because everyone is watching, people are careful to be generous and supportive with the single intention of helping you succeed. No one wants to embarrass or attack you. Everyone gets a lot of tough advice, so you’re not singled out. When your turn comes, it might be difficult to hear what people have to say, but this is one of the greatest developmental gifts of your life.”

. . .

Once you have the right feedback loops in place, you’re on your way to building a team full of learn-it-alls who thrive on diverse perspectives. If your group is made up of people from a variety of cultures, genders, and generations, getting your employees to give feedback to one another frequently and openly allows each to get myriad ideas for how to improve, pushes the team toward excellence, exposes blind spots, and promotes greater cohesion. That’s how you can make sure DEI and radical candor converge rather than collide.

Copyright 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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