If we were asked whether we’d give constructive feedback to people we care about, I suspect most would answer in the affirmative. Research from Harvard Business School suggests otherwise, however, and suggests that even if we don’t stand to lose anything from offering feedback, we often choose to stay silent.

A big part of the problem is that we significantly underestimate just how much other people desire feedback and overestimate the possible negative consequences of giving feedback. What’s more, this misunderstanding endures even when we know the other person well.

Performance improvement

The findings chime with other studies showing much people generally want to improve their performance at work, and that feedback is crucial to this. Generally speaking, however, we don’t get that feedback, either in quantity or quality.

The researchers attempted to understand why this might be and pitched volunteers into a range of scenarios, such as having a stain on our shirt during a meeting through to interrupting colleagues. Participants were asked to rate both how much they wanted feedback in each scenario and also how much they thought the other person wanted it.

The results show that in each instance, we rate our desire for feedback far higher when we believe we’re the recipient than when we think we’re giving it. This gap grows larger the more consequential we believe the situation to be.

“People tend to focus on the discomfort of delivering feedback, and underestimate the value of the feedback to the other person, including how much they would appreciate the feedback, and how impactful it would be,” the researchers explain.

They then conducted a second experiment with people who knew each other well. Each person was assigned to provide feedback to the other, and the process revealed a consistent level of nervousness beforehand, with people generally negative about how the conversation would go. They also consistently said afterward, however, that it went better than they thought.

“The interactions went better than expected,” the researchers continue. “Even though it could be uncomfortable, people reported that they really wanted to hear the feedback and appreciated it when they got it.”

In a subsequent experiment, the researchers found that a good way to encourage us to give feedback is to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the person receiving the feedback.

“To try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, you could remember when feedback would have been very helpful for you, like when you were in your first job, or giving your first client presentation” they conclude.