Bowling and the Power of the Positive - Part 2

In my last post, I talked about the power of focusing on what is going right when giving performance feedback. Now this is typically contrary to how managers give feedback. Managers often feel it is their job to improve performance by pointing out what an employee is doing wrong and help them to correct behavior. After all, isn’t it their job to show employees how to do things right? It doesn’t even seem intuitively correct to point out what people are already doing right. If they are doing things right, then what is the role of the manager? So the question becomes, how do you give positive appreciative feedback in a way that improves employee performance?

One way is to start with a strength. The best way for me to explain this is to demonstrate using an example. I had the pleasure of having a presentation coach watch a presentation I was going to give to a large audience. Now I have been presenting for close to 20 years now and I think it is a strength area (if any readers have seen me speak, I hope I am not delusional here!).

She pointed out what I was doing well and asked me to do more of that. So instead of saying, “You didn’t smile enough.” She said “When you smile, it lights up the room. Do more of that.” The difference was, instead of me being worried that I wasn’t smiling enough, she made me feel like my smile was a strength and an asset – something wonderful – that I should share with my audiences. Quite a different feeling. She also found my transitions into new topics kind of boring. Now she could have said “Your transitions are so boring.” Instead, she said, “I have a great new technique for handling transitions that I think you’re going to love.” She demonstrated the technique and it was so far superior to what I was doing that I instantly incorporated it into my repertoire. She got me excited about using a new technique.

I walked away from that coaching session energized and feeling good about my presentation. The other thing is, I remembered the feedback even weeks later! This is an effective tool that is useful when wanting to improve performance in a certain task and take the person’s skills to a higher level.

We are so programmed to be deficit-based when managing people we can forget the power of the positive when giving performance feedback. This kind of feedback has a triple bottom-line benefit – it improves performance, energizes the person in a positive way and improves the person’s self efficacy which builds the confidence to try for higher level goals. And in this day and age, we could all use a little more positive!

Bowling and The Power of the Positive - Part 1

I have been studying happiness at work for many years now. One area I have been interested in recently is the performance review process. For most people I know, the review process is one in which your boss spends 5 minutes telling you how wonderful you are and that without you the team would die or certainly suffer some horrible disease, and then they spend the next 55 minutes telling you all the things you’ve done wrong. How do you feel when you walk out of the room? Like a truck hit you.

I recently spoke at a large conference and I asked my audience of approximately 150 people if I could see a show of hands for all of those who enjoyed the experience of their performance review meeting. One hand went up. Others yelled out things like ‘root canal’ from the audience. Now I’ve never had root canal, but I imagine this is not good. I wondered, is it possible to create a performance review process in which the person receiving the review actually feels energized from the experience? - They emerge from the manager’s office feeling elated, filled with self confidence and wanting to go out and conquer the world. Is this even possible? Turns out, it is.
Last month I had the pleasure of attending a lecture given by David Cooperrider, one of the founding fathers of Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative inquiry is a four-step process that allows organizations to identify what brings life to the organization, in other words, the positive core that makes the organization successful. These are typically strengths, structures and processes that create success in the organization. Workers at all levels contribute to this powerful change process and together, the organization redefines and creates new and improved business plans to meet the challenges of the future. Overall the process is designed to create and support a culture that emphasizes possibilities rather than problems. It is not an avoidance of problems, just a positive focus on strengths.

An appreciative performance review process would focus on what people were doing right and try to accentuate and focus on strengths rather than weaknesses. I reviewed some appreciative performance review documents and I found questions like: “Share examples of when you gave exemplary customer service and exceeded the expectations of a customer or colleague” and “Describe projects or programs that you are responsible for where you have been the driving force behind their success.” Cooperrider went so far as to say that some organizations actually perform 360 degree feedback from an appreciative stand point – instead of getting 6-12 critiques of what you could improve on, imagine getting 6-12 reports of when you were truly outstanding. What would motivate you more?

Now some would say this is Pollyannaish. After all, do we not want to correct behaviors that are acting as obstacles? Of course we do. But why does that have to be done at performance review time? Can these difficult discussions take place on the job? It is more effective to address poor behavior when the person has actually just performed the behavior. That way the situation is fresh and you can focus on the behavior, not the person as a whole. This preserves self esteem and deals directly with the offending behavior.

But does a positive appreciative approach improve performance? I wanted proof and I found it in what is known today as the famous ‘bowling study’.

In a fascinating research study, Dr Daniel Kirschenbaum from the University of Wisconsin took a group of bowlers and asked them to review their performance after each bowling session. He divided the groups into two groups. Group 1 reviewed only what they did well and were asked to remind themselves to engage more of the proper behavior. Group 2 was asked to review their performance and indicate what they had done poorly and remind themselves to avoid making the same mistakes in the following rounds.

Which group of bowlers do you think improved their bowling performance?

Amazingly, the bowlers who focused on what they did well showed as much as 100 percent improvement in bowling scores when compared to the other group! The mechanisms that may be at work here are the positive emotions that are evoked when one reflects on a success which fuels the person to try harder in the next round. It turns out we learn better, and are able to improve task performance when we focus on our successes rather than our failures.