At work or at home, giving feedback may be one of the most difficult challenges we face.
On the one hand, you have to be honest; on the other hand, you don’t
want to alienate the other person. You tread a fine line between
maintaining cordiality and successfully getting your point across.
Creating Trust
We all know the critical need for a positive atmosphere in our
personal relationships, but the same is true at work: It breeds trust.
As I've seen again and again in research I conducted for my book The Happiness Track (link is external), positive workplace culture is essential for employee engagement and productivity. Empathy
at work creates psychological safety, which research by Amy Edmondson
of Harvard demonstrates is created when managers are inclusive and
humble, and encourage staff to speak up or ask for help. Psychological
safety improves learning and performance outcomes. More importantly,
feeling safe in the workplace helps encourage the spirit of
experimentation that’s so critical for innovation. (For the book on the impact of positive workplaces, see Adam Grant's bestseller Give & Take (link is external)).
By using this kind of positive, open, and supportive feedback style,
you end up establishing trust. Just as you'll find you are especially
sensitive to signs of trustworthiness in your romantic partner or
friends, employees are especially sensitive to signs of trust in their
managers. Our brains respond more positively to empathic bosses,
as neuroimaging research confirms. In turn, employees who feel
greater trust show improved performance.
Maintaining a Positive Tone
Positive relationships at work can even lower health-care
costs by improving employee health: Having positive workplace
relationships strengthens your immune system and lowers your heart rate
and blood pressure. Similarly, being in a healthy marriage or romantic relationship can boost our physical and psychological well-being.
Leaders and managers, in particular, influence their employee’s
well-being more than they even know. A 3,000-person study found that a
leader’s behavior and personality even influence their employees’ heart health. It’s no wonder that employees prefer higher happiness at work to higher pay — and that the happiness they seek is characterized by positive, supportive relationships.
åçDespite this need for a positive culture both at home and in the workplace, there is no doubt that giving critical feedback is essential. The question is how to deliver it.
Most advice in this area focuses on what to say — for example, give
more praise than criticism, and listen more than you talk. Those
are important tips, but our nonverbal communication is just as important as the words we use.
The Key: Body Language
Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly reading each others’
facial expressions and body language. Imagine that you are the person
walking into someone’s office to receive feedback, or that you are in an
interview. By definition, your boss or the interviewer is in the
position of power. You are probably paying close attention to their
facial expression and nonverbal cues to get an idea of where they are
coming from and how they are responding to you. Here are the nonverbal
cues to which we pay the most attention:
1. Facial expression. We deduce how someone is
feeling from their facial expression. Someone’s smile activates the
smile muscles in your own face, while their frown activates your frown
muscles, according to research by Ulf Dimberg. We internally register
what another person is feeling by experiencing it in our own body.
Smiling is so important to social interactions that we can discern
whether someone is smiling even if we can’t see them. Your smile is thus
something to think about, even if you are delivering feedback over the
phone. Smile appropriately to project warmth and goodwill.
2. Eye contact. Research shows the eyes really are
the windows to the soul: You can predictably tell someone’s emotions
from their gaze. Eye contact is the crucial first step for resonance, a
term psychologists use to describe a person’s ability to read someone
else’s emotions. It’s also important for creating a feeling of
connection. Make and maintain eye contact when you’re giving someone
feedback.
3. Voice. From infancy, we are acutely aware of the
voices of people we consider important, and the way we feel about
another person shifts the way we speak. The tone of our voice, more than
the words themselves, can give away how we feel. In fact, new research
shows that we can often predict someone’s emotions from their voice.
4. Posture. The way a person sits — slumped or
sitting tall, arms open or crossed — transmits a message. When we walk
into a room and find someone sitting with their arms crossed, we feel
less connected to them. Having your chest open, arms uncrossed, making
sure to keep nodding, smiling, and vocalizing (saying things like “mhmm”
and “yes” in response to the other party) will help. Make sure you take
on a non-dominant stance; after all, your role is already powerful. The
best way for the other party to hear you is if you are not domineering.
5. Breath. Research shows that the emotions we feel
change the way that we breathe. You have probably noticed that when
you’re stressed or angry, you breathe quickly and shallowly, and
when tired or exasperated, you are more likely to sigh. Similarly, when
we are with someone who sighs a lot, we may feel that they are annoyed
at us. Before the conversation, try to take some deep, calming breaths.
When you exhale, your heart rate and blood pressure decrease, so focus
on breathing out longer than you breathe in. Doing this for a couple of
minutes before a meeting will help you start the meeting from a place of
calm. That calmness will also help your interlocutor feel more at ease.
6. Attention. Our mind wanders 50 percent of the
time, research suggests. Moreover, given our busy schedules and the
messages and emails that are popping onto our screens throughout the
day, we sometimes are not present with the people in front of us — we’re
still processing something that happened earlier, or we’re thinking
about an article we just read or a phone conversation we just had. And
the people you are talking to can tell. Because you are not fully
present, you are less likely to hear them and respond to them
skillfully, let alone understand where they are coming from.
7. Authenticity. Despite all this advice, it’s
critical that you be authentic, or your efforts will backfire. Just
think of how you feel when you’re around someone who seems to be
something they are not: We often walk away feeling uncomfortable or
manipulated. Our blood pressure rises in the face of
inauthenticity, according to research by James Gross at Stanford
University.
8. Empathy. Rather than seeing the
feedback situation as “work” or something you need to just get through,
see the conversation as an opportunity to connect with another person,
who has their own needs and pain. Everyone, at some point, goes through
tough times, sad times, painful times. By remembering the human
experiences we all share, you will find that you are able to bring
kindness and compassion into the conversation. If you are giving
feedback, you will probe into what has prompted your employee to act a
certain way, and you will find the right words to encourage a different
type of behavior. Research shows that employees feel greater loyalty and
are inspired to work harder for managers who are compassionate and
kind.
Empathy is not just for obvious moments; it’s for all the moments we don’t see as well. We often don’t know what causes unwanted on-the-job behavior like missed deadlines or short tempers. The employee in question could be a sleep-deprived new parent, going through a divorce, or dealing with a family illness.
If we are dealing with a person we find difficult or who did something that seems wrong, we tend to point the finger at their personality, thinking they are disorganized, unethical, or lazy. When we make a mistake, however, we usually blame the situation (we were tired, overworked, or stressed, which led us to say or do the wrong thing). That is what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. We simply forget that in most cases our erroneous behavior is due to situational factors.
If you’re able to keep in mind that there’s a whole dimension to your employees that you don’t know about, it will be easier to be empathic when you’re giving feedback.
Emma Seppala, Ph.D., is the Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and author of The Happiness Track (link is external) (now available in paperback!) She is also founder of Fulfillment Daily (link is external). Follow her on Twitter @emmaseppala (link is external) or her website. (link is external)
A version of this article first appeared on Harvard Business Review. (link is external)
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