Giving feedback is notoriously difficult to do, especially if it’s constructive feedback, as we fear how the other person may respond to it. Research from Harvard Business School suggests our fears may be overblown.

“People often have opportunities to provide others with constructive feedback that could be immediately helpful, whether that’s letting someone know of a typo in their presentation before a client presentation, or telling a job candidate about a stained shirt before an interview,” the researchers say. “Overall, our research found that people consistently underestimate others’ desire for feedback, which can have harmful results for would-be feedback recipients.”

Helping us learn

Constructive feedback obviously has many advantages in terms of helping us to learn and generally improve our performance. The authors explain that previous studies have shown that people say they want this kind of feedback, but despite appearing to want it ourselves, we’re generally reluctant to give it to others. Indeed, in one experiment, just over 2% of participants told a tester that they had a smudge on their face during the experiment.

“Feedback is key to personal growth and improvement, and it can fix problems that are otherwise costly to the recipient,” the researchers explain. “The next time you hear someone mispronounce a word, see a stain on their shirt or notice a typo on their slide, we urge you to point it out to them — they probably want feedback more than you think.”

The authors believe this is often because we fear potentially negative outcomes, such as the recipient becoming upset or embarrassed. They suggest that another factor is that we underestimate just how valuable our feedback can be in helping the recipient, which in turn leads to us underestimating the desire for such feedback in other people.

Put to the test

The theory was tested across five experiments involving around 2,000 volunteers that were each designed to gauge how much we estimate the desire of others to receive constructive feedback. Across each of the experiments, people who were in a position to give feedback generally underestimated the desire of the recipient to receive it.

What’s more, the more important the feedback, the more likely people were to underestimate the importance of it to the recipient, which in turn made them less likely to give it. The perception gap was far less for less consequential feedback.

Pleasingly, however, a relatively simple intervention was sufficient to change matters, as when participants were asked to ponder how we would feel if we were in the recipients’ shoes. Would we want feedback ourselves? This simple process was enough to help the participants understand the value of feedback and therefore made them more inclined to give it.

“Even if you feel hesitant to give feedback, we recommend that you give it,” the authors conclude. “Take a second and imagine you’re in the other person’s shoes and ask yourself if you would want feedback if you were them. Most likely you would, and this realization can help empower you to give them feedback.”