University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
The Feedback Fix
Book

The Feedback Fix

Dump the Past, Embrace the Future, and Lead the Way to Change

Joe Hirsch
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2017
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Eye Opening
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Anyone who has suffered through excruciating performance evaluations knows that giving and receiving feedback can be a fruitless experience, if not downright counterproductive. As an alternative, leadership and communication consultant Joe Hirsch introduces “feedforward,” a future-oriented approach. He explores six ways to fix traditional feedback. Citing numerous case studies, including data from multinational companies, state schools, leadership training facilities and new areas of research, he shows that feedforward is a life skill that is crucial to business, education, parenting, and more.

Summary

Traditional past-oriented feedback is counterproductive to enhancing performance.

The traditional feedback model is outmoded. It may have worked well when businesses could measure an employee’s output, but now that some 70% of employees work in service- and knowledge-based jobs, output is impossible to gauge. In business, feedback tends to be infrequent, subjective, arbitrary, time-consuming and past-oriented. According to a Columbia University study, individuals absorb only 30% of the feedback they receive, and dismiss or ignore the remainder. In education, an emphasis on grading fosters an apathetic attitude toward learning. After all, students can’t improve their grades retrospectively. Nevertheless, the traditional feedback approach is overwhelmingly popular in education and business.

Traditional feedback requires a huge investment of time. Consulting firm Deloitte, a multinational with more than 250,000 employees, calculated that it spends some two million hours annually on performance management. Yet top-down evaluations fail to encourage career development or enhanced engagement. They focus on weaknesses rather than presenting solutions&#...

About the Author

Joe Hirsch is an educator and speaker. His research has featured in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Inc., and other major outlets.

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