Why Employees Misinterpret Your Constructive Feedback

Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, and in this tip I'm going to show you a technique, a model for delivering constructive feedback that makes it so much easier for managers to give feedback, even CEOs to give feedback. And what you're going to find is that people get so much less defensive if you follow this approach. It's something I've written a lot about in a number of my books, and I'm going to walk you through it here. The model is called the FIRE model, and the way it works is this: in any conversation, especially difficult conversations, there are basically 4 layers. There are facts— that's objective reality. We could videotape it, see it, record it, etc. Then based on those facts, we have an interpretation. We try and give those facts some meaning. That's what our brain does. Our brain is not a fact engine. Our brain is an interpretation engine. Based on those interpretations we make, we have an emotional reaction. Happy, sad, glad, afraid, ashamed, whatever. And then based on those emotional reactions, we want something to happen. We have a desired end. So facts, interpretations, reactions, ends, altogether spells FIRE. Here's a simple way to think about how this works. Okay, facts would be, for example, if I look outside and I look at the sky, if the sky is 3/8 covered with clouds, that is known as scattered clouds. That is a meteorological fact. That is how weather people and pilots for example, measure cloud cover in the sky. So if it is 3/8 covered with clouds, it is scattered clouds. This is a representation of what that might look like. Now, most people don't walk around saying, oh, look, it's scattered clouds today. Most people look at the sky and they go, oh, it's partly sunny or it's partly cloudy. They have an interpretation. Now you'll notice those are very different interpretations. One's pretty positive. Hey, look, there's a bit of sun. The other's pretty negative. Oh, look, it's, you know, there's still some clouds out there. But that's our interpretation. And depending on how you grew up— if I grew up in Buffalo, New York, it was pretty gray there a lot of the time. Now I live in Atlanta where it's much sunnier, so my interpretations change depending on where I am and what mood I'm in. Based on that interpretation, then, if I think it's partly sunny, then I might be inclined to think my emotional reaction might be, well, it's great, the weather's awesome, yay, I want to, you know, be happy today. But if I look at the sky and I'm like, uh, it's partly cloudy, that's my interpretation, well, now I'm gonna say it stinks. And then based on that, I'm gonna have some desired end. I want something to happen. So if I look at the sky, it's 3/8 scattered clouds, 3/8 cloud cover. I look, my interpretation is that it's partly sunny out. Based on that, my emotional reaction is, wow, the weather's awesome. My desired end might be, I'm gonna go for a bike ride, or I'm gonna go for a run today because the weather's so nice out. All right, so this is how the brain processes information. Now, this is a little weird. Let me show you why this is so important for giving corrective and constructive feedback. Okay, imagine that a boss gives some feedback to an employee. We've got a VP of marketing who has just written a memo announcing a new product launch. The boss is the CEO. The CEO reads the memo that Pat wrote, looks at it, is not happy with it, and says to Pat the following: Pat, I asked you to work on the tone of this memo yesterday, did I not? And look at this, I caught 2 typos. Now, I count on you to get these things right, and I do not have time to worry about them myself. And it's like everything I said yesterday was just ignored, which makes me wonder what else it is you're missing. Not to mention, I'm getting pretty irritated by all of this. So you know what, for the next 2 months, even for small things, I don't care if it's an internal memo, I want to proofread everything before you send it out. Okay, now this is clearly not good feedback, but if we're being real here, feedback like this does get given. Hopefully not every day, but it does get given, and it's a good illustration. Now, if I'm Pat and I'm on the receiving end of that feedback, that blah worth of feedback, what's going through my head? In this case, I'm probably thinking things like, my boss doesn't trust me anymore, maybe I should, you know, polish up my LinkedIn profile, and maybe I got to get out on the job market. Uh, you know, why is the boss signaling me out like this? Doesn't everybody make mistakes? Or, you know, it's only 2 typos, I don't know what he's worried about. Or, you know, this is probably going to impact my job security, I don't know how I'm going to get ahead if the boss just doesn't trust me and doesn't think that I'm confident, doesn't have confidence in me to do any good work, blah blah blah blah blah. It goes on and on and on, right? And why wouldn't it? Interestingly, What is Pat not thinking about in this case? The typos. The one thing we actually wanted Pat to fix, Pat is not thinking about because of all of this other stuff that we've layered into our feedback. Now, if I go through this and I look at the feedback the boss gave, what are the facts here? Well, okay, the two typos are the facts. That's the only part of this really that is objective reality. Now, what are the interpretations the boss made when the boss gave this feedback? The boss interpreted those two typos to mean that Pat was ignoring and missing a bunch of other stuff. That's the boss's interpretation. What is— based on that interpretation, what is the boss's emotional reaction? The boss is getting pretty irritated by all of this. And then based on the boss's irritation, what does the boss want to have happen? Boss wants to micromanage the heck out of Pat, basically. The interesting thing about this is if the boss had simply walked up to Pat and said, hey Pat, I read the memo you sent yesterday, found two typos, what would Pat's reaction be in this case? Like, strip away everything else, strip away the interpretations, the reactions, and ends, and all the boss said was the facts. Pat, I caught 2 typos. What's Pat's reaction going to be? Pat's reaction is going to be, oh geez, I'm so sorry, how did I miss those? Let me jump on this immediately, let me fix this, blah blah blah. Pat's going to instantly jump onto the typos. By the way, we haven't even talked about what if the boss is wrong. What if the boss opened up the wrong version of the memo and then still went on this diatribe? Well, if the boss says, I caught 2 typos, and Pat says, which version of the memo did you look at? I looked at version 3. Oh, you didn't see version 4? Okay, that's the one where the typos were fixed. Oh, okay. Now, no fuss, no muss, we don't have any problem. But if I go through this whole diatribe here with all the interpretations, reactions, and ends, now I've got a major problem. So this is not all there is to giving feedback, but this is such a foundational, fundamental step. If you think about the FIRE model and you learn to speak factually rather than with interpretations, emotional reactions, and ends. By the way, what is social media? Where, where does social media want you to live? Social media wants you to live in emotional reactions and maybe to a certain extent interpretations. Where does social media not want you to live? Facts. General rule for giving feedback is do the opposite of what Twitter would ask you to do, which is think factually. If you start using this as a foundational piece of giving feedback. There's more to it, of course. We can add scripts, we can add a little preamble, we can make this nicer. But if you start with the FIRE model, focus on the facts, strip out everything else, all of a sudden we are having some deep coaching conversations with great feedback and nobody's getting defensive about it. If you like this kind of techniques, the science-based approach that we take here at Leadership IQ, We'd love to bring some training to your organization, whether it's online, on-site, custom programs, speeches, what have you. We'd love to chat with you about the kinds of work we do to help organizations really build the capabilities of their leaders, from the executives down to frontline supervisors. Reach out to us. You can hit the contact form on our website. You can reach out to Jill Sutherland, our Director of Client Services, and we'd love to hop on a call and chat with you.