How Law Firm Culture Affects Profitability

Written by

Gabriela Isturiz

Mar 21, 2014

Culture is often regarded as a “fluffy” aspect of the firm’s operations and is typically assigned to the Human Resource department as a feel-good, nice-to-have.

In our recent blog posts, we’ve been speaking to many CFO concerns, such as why the CFO should be involved in vendor selection. In this post, we’ll explore another topic that directly affects the firm’s profitability: culture.

What exactly is “law firm culture” anyway? Attorney and legal blogger, Jordan Furlong offers the following definition in his blog post titled, Vulture Culture:

Culture is what people at the firm actually do every day. In harsher terms, it’s what people get away with. Culture is what actually happens. A law firm’s culture is the daily manifestation of its performance expectations and behavioural norms — what is encouraged and what is tolerated. So it’s not a matter of law firms “ignoring” culture — every firm has a culture, and most firms’ cultures are remarkably and depressingly similar. It’s a matter of recognizing that the culture that a law firm develops and sustains has an impact on productivity, retention and morale — in many cases, a catastrophic one.

So, how would you describe the culture of your firm? How does your firm’s culture play out on a daily basis? How might your assessment of the culture differ from that of partners, attorneys and staff members?

Perhaps, most importantly, how is your firm’s culture affecting the profitability of your firm? There are triggers that are affected by law firm culture, which can ultimately contribute to profit or loss. We explore them in the following list:

#1 Talent Attraction

Do the best attorneys want to work at your firm? Better yet, are they knocking the door down in order to join the team? Law firm culture feeds your employer brand and can be a major decision point as to whether prospective employees pursue or accept an offer from your firm. In a recent article written on Lawyerist, David Parnell argues that candidates will challenge legal recruiters and other representatives of the firm on the firm’s culture, especially those candidates contemplating a lateral move. This makes sense. Candidates want reassurance that the environment is favorable to their productivity, job satisfaction and future career goals.

#2 Turnover

The cost of losing an attorney and having to hire a replacement can be extremely costly for the firm. Consider that the cost of hiring a new attorney could amount to 1.5x to 3.0x the cost of the attorney’s annual salary. These costs are not to be taken lightly.

These costs are magnified when several attorneys decide to move on. Law People suggests that the attrition rate for law firms could be as much as 20% per year. How often are you losing attorneys and what is contributing to their decision to move on?

#3 Productivity

Law firm culture has a direct impact on productivity. Positive, engaged attorneys are likely to maximize productivity throughout the day, while the opposite is true for attorneys who are disgruntled or have “checked out.” How would you describe the mood at your firm and how have you noticed it impacting productivity?

#4 Technology

How does your firm use and respond to technology? Is technology widely adopted and integrated into the daily functions that your attorneys carry out? On the other hand, is your firm a “technology dinosaur,” still limping along, relying on old tools while half-heartedly embracing the new ones? Believe it or not, the culture of your firm in regard to technology can have a powerful impact on attorney satisfaction. adoption and attitudes. If attorneys do not feel that they have the right tools to perform their job or that tasks are “more difficult than they have to be,” they are likely to become frustrated. This is especially true with Gen Y attorneys, which represent a significant portion of today’s attorneys.

#5 Client Retention

Renowned business author, Simon Sinek once said “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” The same rings true when it comes to law firms. If your attorneys don’t love your firm, how can you expect your clients to? And, if they don’t – let’s face it – there are plenty of other options out there. Loyal clients will love your firm, and the process of making them fall in love with you starts with your attorneys.

It is Better to Avoid a Toxic Employee than Hire a Superstar

By Nicole Torres

December 09, 2015

Superstar employees are the obsession of the corporate world. They’re highly sought after, given the most attention and the best opportunities, generously rewarded, and expressly reassured after setbacks. And while some question whether such special treatment is appropriate, it’s clear that this group has outsize influence: high-performers have been estimated to be four times as productive as average workers, and research has shown that they may generate 80% of a business’s profits and attract other star employees. They can comprise the top 3% to 20% of a company’s workforce.
But according to a recent working paper from Harvard Business School, there’s another group that can have an even greater effect on organizations: toxic workers. These are talented and productive people who engage in behavior that is harmful to an organization, say authors Dylan Minor, a visiting assistant professor at HBS, and Michael Housman, Chief Analytics Officer at Cornerstone OnDemand. They looked at otherwise skilled employees who ended up doing real damage — employees who had been fired for egregious company policy violations, such as sexual harassment, workplace violence, or fraud — and found that avoiding such people can save companies even more money than finding and retaining superstars.

The high cost of bad hires
Their data came from a company that sells job-testing software to large employers, and it combined three things: 1) job assessment scores that captured applicant traits like confidence in their skills, whether they care about others people’s needs more than their own, and their philosophy on following rules; 2) attrition data, which included hire dates, termination dates, reasons for termination, etc.; and 3) daily performance data. The dataset spanned 11 global
companies and 58,542 hourly workers. Minor and Housman found that roughly 1 in 20 workers was ultimately fired for toxic behavior.
They compared the cost of a toxic worker with the value of a superstar, which they define as a worker who is so productive that a firm would have to hire additional people or pay current employees more just to achieve the same output. They calculated that avoiding a toxic employee can save a company more than twice as much as bringing on a star performer – specifically, avoiding a toxic worker was worth about $12,500 in turnover costs, but even the top 1% of superstar employees only added about $5,300 to the bottom line.
The real difference could be even bigger, if you factor in other potential costs, such as litigation fees, regulatory fines, lower employee morale, and upset customers. One 2012 CareerBuilder survey found that 41% of the nearly 2,700 employers surveyed estimated that a bad hire could cost $25,000, while a quarter believed it was much higher—$50,000 or more.

Who is likely to be toxic?
The study also uncovered certain personality and behavioral traits predictive of such behavior.
Overconfident, self-centered, productive, and rule-following employees were more likely to be toxic workers. One standard deviation in skills confidence meant an approximately 15% greater chance of being fired for toxic behavior, while employees who were found to be more self-regarding (and less concerned about others’ needs) had a 22% greater likelihood. For workers who said that rules must always be followed, there was a 25% greater chance he or she would be terminated for actually breaking the rules. They also found that people exposed to other toxic workers on their teams had a 46% increased likelihood of similarly being fired for misconduct.
Overconfidence and narcissism have been associated with negative work outcomes before. What was more surprising was that people who believed rules should always be followed (compared to those who answered that you sometimes have to break the rules to accomplish something) were more likely to exhibit toxic behavior. The authors hypothesized that this may be due to applicants trying to tell recruiters what they want to hear. “It could be the case that those who claim the rules should be followed are more Machiavellian in nature, purporting to embrace whatever rules, characteristics, or beliefs that they believe are most likely to obtain them a job,” they wrote. “There is strong evidence that Machiavellianism leads to deviant behavior.”
The toxic employees in their sample were also more productive than the average worker, in that it took them less time to complete a task than it took their colleagues. The authors say this is consistent with other research that has found a potential trade-off when it comes to unethical workers — they may be corrupt, but they are high performers. And aside from performance, bad guys often win at work because they exhibit other valued traits, like charisma, curiosity, and high self-esteem. Still, they aren’t likely to help the organization in the long term. Minor and Housman note that although toxic workers may be faster than average employees, they don’t necessarily produce higher quality work.

Avoiding toxicity
“We often think of hiring and evaluation as one or two dimensions. We want someone who is highly productive in sales and has good customer service,” Minor told me over email. “However, there is a third dimension: the person’s corporate citizenship. If it is really poor, they are not going to be a good hire. Organizational productivity would likely even be greater if the manager hired the worker that was a bit less productive but had better corporate citizenship.”
The idea that a negative has a stronger impact than a positive has been established in fields like finance (losses have more of an impact than gains), psychology (people remember bad experiences more than good ones), and linguistics (we pay more attention to negative words than positive or neutral ones). If toxic workers have a stronger (corrosive) effect on a firm than even the highest performing non-toxic ones, then it seems fair to say that managers should give the former more thought.

https://hbr.org/2015/12/its-better-to-avoid-a-toxic-employee-than-hire-a-superstar

The Root Cause Of Every Merger’s Success Or Failure: Culture

George Bradt 

CONTRIBUTOR

Executive onboarding and BRAVE leadership examples worth following.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

When you merge cultures well, value is created. When you don’t, value is destroyed. While some will suggest other factors – silly things like objectives and strategies and implementation – they are all derivative. The game is won or lost on the field of cultural integration. Get that wrong and nothing else matters.

The fundamental premise of any merger is that the merging entities will be more valuable together than they are separately. It doesn’t matter if you define value as shareholder equity, impact on the world or basic happiness. A merger is supposed to be an exercise in value creation. Yet, 83% of mergers fail. The vast majority of leaders get something very wrong along the way.

I spoke with Wolff Olins’ strategy director Nick O’Flaherty about applying the findings from their recent leadership study to mergers and acquisitions. He started by asking if Verizon and AOL are merging and acquiring like it’s 1999. He worries that they could be and suggests three key lessons from the “worst merger in history.”

1. Clearly define the specific value that will be created from the merger. O’Flaherty told me that “AOL and Time Warner wanted something specific from each other – but the outcome of what that actually looked like for customers was never thought through, nor delivered.” And he questions whether Verizon and AOL are “poised to make the same mistakes again.” Specificity around how new value is created is key.
2. Fully integrate the two businesses.We’ve all seen organizations that acquire another organization and then run them as wholly owned, separate entities. You can’t possibly realize synergies out of separate organizations. Synergies must be created together by teams looking beyond themselves to new problems they can solve for others.
3. Ensure cultural compatibility. O’Flaherty pointed out the cultural clash that occurred between AOL and Time Warner may happen again. Verizon is all about engineering while AOL is “more creative, more salesy.” No way those two can come together well without some intensive therapy.

Wolff Olins’ recent leadership study backs up these points. It indicated a shift from a concentration on outputs like sales to inputs like creating and building culture. This is in line with the power of building winners over trying to win. The CEOs surveyed talked about the need to hold their reins looser with the new generation, about the need to be more comfortable with ambiguity as they let their employees take greater leadership roles.

The study suggests we’ve moved from “command and control” in the late 19th century to “motivation and delegation” in the late 20th century to “focus and liberation” in this century. The study quotes Keurig Green Mountain’s Brian Kelly’s bias to “small teams and fast sprints with a tolerance for messy processes.”

The key to a successful merger

The key to a successful merger is determining which culture to merge into which. Co-creating a brand new culture from scratch is a lot of hard work with a relatively low probability of success. The more straightforward and more likely to be successful approach is to pick one culture as the host culture and merge the other culture into it.

Vocus’ acquisition of iContact is a case in point. Successfully merging in iContact was so important that they built an entire new headquarters for iContact in the spirit of the Vocus headquarters.

Contrast that with Philip Morris/General Foods’ acquisition of Kraft. Even though Philip Morris/General Foods was doing the acquiring, they chose to merge the General Foods culture into Kraft.

Of course you have to define value creation and fully integrate the businesses. The point is that these are part of merging cultures, not separate efforts. Corporate culture is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage and the root cause of any merger’s failure or success. Make clear choices about the new, combined entity’s behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values and environment. Then insist on embracing those choices as a condition for staying on board.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2015/06/29/the-root-cause-of-every-mergers-success-or-failure-culture/#18f7b8992173

Developing Self-Awareness 
Understanding Yourself
It is wisdom to know others; It is enlightenment to know one’s self.
– LaoTzu,
Chinese philosopher

Have you ever worked with someone who was very self-aware?
This person considered the needs and feelings of others, took responsibility for her mistakes, was humble about her strengths, never said thoughtless things, and was aware of how her words and actions affected others.
Put simply, this person was great to work with!
Self-awareness is one of the most important qualities that you can have as a leader, and developing self-awareness is important in both your personal and professional life.
What is Self-Awareness?
Researchers Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund published the first major theory of selfawareness in the early 1970s. They said that selfawareness
is the ability to look inward, think deeply about your behavior, and consider how it aligns with your moral standards and values. They argued that when your behavior is out of alignment with your standards, you feel uncomfortable, unhappy and negative. By contrast, when your behavior and values are aligned,
you feel positive and selfconfident.
Self-awareness also gives you a deeper understanding of your own attitudes, opinions, and knowledge.
Self-awareness is sometimes confused with self-consciousness,but there’s an important difference between these. Self-consciousness is a hypersensitized
state of self-awareness; it’s the excessive preoccupation with your own manners, behavior, or appearance, and is often seen as negative. Self-awareness
is focused on the impact your behavior has on other people, and, as
such, is much more positive.
Self-awareness is one of the most important elements of emotional intelligence. It gives you the ability to understand and control your own emotions and actions, and it helps you understand how these affect the emotions and actions of others.
Why Self-Awareness is Important
Self-awareness brings benefits in both your personal and professional life.
First, research shows a strong link between selfawareness and highperformance
in managers. You’re simply more effective in a leadership role when you understand your internal state, as well as your team members’ emotions.
If you’re aware of your own strengths and weaknesses, you have the power to use your strengths intentionally, and to manage or eliminate your weaknesses. When you can admit what you don’t know – and you have the humility to ask for help when you need it – you increase your credibility with your team.
Knowing your strengths and weaknesses also has positive, longterm
benefits for your career, as well as for your long term health and happiness. In one study, researchers found that leaders who were aware of their strengths were more self-confident, were more highly paid, and were happier at work.
On a personal level, having self-awareness allows you to approach people and situations with confidence. In turn, this means that you gain control of your own life, direction, and experiences.
How to Develop Self-Awareness
There are several ways to develop self-awareness.
Keep in mind, however, that this takes time and work.
1. Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses. You can start building self-awareness
by learning where you are strongest and weakest.
Conduct a Personal SWOT Analysis to get a better understanding of this. You might also want take the StrengthsFinder self-test, which helps you identify your five greatest strengths.
When you understand how your personality compares with the personalities of other people, you can discover what motivates you, and how you relate to the world. Both of these are important aspects of self-awareness.
This is where personality tests such as the Big Five Personality Model and MyersBriggs ® can be valuable tools for self-discovery.
2. Reflect on the Impact You Have
When you are self-aware, you understand how you instinctively think, connect with other people, communicate, and make decisions. A great way to understand these things is to keep a journal, where you write about your day, the
things that you did, the emotions you experienced and expressed, and the consequences of these. This helps you think about what does and doesn’t work for you, and helps you be more aware of your impact on other people.
Alternatively, take a break for five or 10 minutes a day and meditate. Meditation helps broaden and strengthen your self-awareness, and it can also lower stress.
Or take time in the evening to reflect quietly about your day, and think about how effectively you worked with people. What did you do really well? And what could you have done better?
3. Focus on Others
People who are self-aware are conscious of how their words and actions influence others. To become more aware of how you affect others, learn how to manage your emotions. Take time to weigh what you say carefully, and think about how it will affect the person that you’re speaking to.
If you find yourself taking your stress, anger, or frustrations out on others, stop immediately. Instead, see if you can find something positive about the situation. Take a few deep breaths, or even walk away if you find that you can’t control your emotions. When you manage your own words or actions, it doesn’t mean that you’re being false. Rather, it shows that you care about other people enough not to say or do something that might affect them in a negative way.
Showing humility is an important part of this. When you’re humble, you focus your attention and energy on others and not on yourself.
4. Ask for Feedback
Getting feedback is important for developing selfawareness – after all, this is often the only way that you can find out about issues that you may not be able to face directly. (See our article on the Johari Window for more on this.)
You can get feedback from your colleagues and team members, either with direct questions or with 360° Feedback . When you ask for feedback from the people around you, this gives you a chance to see your behavior from their point of view. What’s more, it can help you identify weaknesses that you can’t see, or that you’d prefer to ignore.
Key Points

• By developing self-awareness, you get to know what does and doesn’t work for you, and you learn how to manage your impact on other people. People with high levels of self-awareness are more effective as leaders, because they deal with people positively, and they inspire trust and credibility in their team members. As a result, these people also often have more satisfying careers and higher incomes.
• To develop self-awareness, learn about your strengths and weaknesses. Take time to analyze the decisions that you make, focus on managing your emotions, and be humble about your accomplishments. Apply This to Your Life.
• Schedule some time to meditate. Find a quiet place where you can sit down, and take a few minutes to meditate properly.
• Buy a journal. In the evening, set aside a few minutes to reflect quietly about your day, and then write down your thoughts. If you can, do this as soon as you get in, as the events of your day will be fresh in your mind.

12/22/2015 Developing SelfAwareness -Understanding Yourself
https://www.mindtools.com/community/pages/article/developingself-awareness.

Train Your People to Take Others’ Perspectives

From the Harvard Business News November 2012 Issue

Successful collaboration between stakeholders starts with what social psychologists call perspective taking: the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes. How can leaders of organizations foster this crucial skill? New social science research, including my work with senior executives at Fortune 500 companies, points to four tactics.

Soften your hard line.

For years Microsoft railed against Chinese authorities for their lax enforcement of intellectual property laws, to no avail. Significant progress came only when executives realized that they had to stop pounding the table and start paying attention to why government officials were turning a blind eye to the problem: because many of their citizens earned their living making knockoffs, and because the prices of legitimate products put them out of most people’s reach. A willingness to understand the Chinese perspective allowed Microsoft to finally make some headway in its antipiracy fight. Now the company is creating more jobs in China and lowering the prices of its products there in return for better enforcement.

Hire from outside.

In the early 2000s the fledgling Google News service was under attack from newspaper executives who were convinced it would cannibalize their business. Google could have simply carried on, but CEO Eric Schmidt wanted partners, not opponents. So he hired senior people from Reuters and the Los Angeles Times and formed a team to explore ways Google could help news organizations. Once the company understood the industry’s anxiety about whether and how to charge for content, it developed tools, such as “editor’s picks” and “first click free,” that allowed publications to distinguish their offerings and boost registrations and subscriptions. Bringing external stakeholders in-house made this solution possible.

Invest in colocation.

When the heads of two divisions of Novartis (a firm I have consulted for) decided to work together to make better animal drugs from compounds developed for people, they sent Juergen Horn, a manager at the Switzerland-based Novartis Animal Health, to work at the Massachusetts-based Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, where he was given an office on the executive floor. This provided countless opportunities for informal interactions. Horn learned that the NIBR scientists appreciated brief, direct questions about their work and could get excited about the project as long as he kept them involved in the process. They started thinking of him as one of their own and accepted his advice about how to share data and expertise. This level of collaboration couldn’t have happened remotely.

Increase autonomy.

You might think of the U.S. military as extremely hierarchical, but in Afghanistan it gives soldiers significant autonomy in order to encourage perspective taking and improve relations with villagers. Consider Lt. Col. Brian Christmas, the head of a patrol that came upon a group of men at a funeral. They claimed they were burying a child—an obvious lie, given the size of the grave. Christmas suspected they were Taliban fighters burying a fellow militant and could have taken them in for questioning. But because the Marines had trained him to use his judgment rather than follow a playbook, he talked to them instead. Eventually they told him the truth and explained why they supported the Taliban; this gave him an opportunity to persuade them to switch allegiances.

The tactics illustrated by these stories show how leaders can turn perspective taking from an individual skill into an organizational capability. It’s key to more-productive collaboration.

A version of this article appeared in the November 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Pino G. Audia is a professor of management and organizations at Darmouth’s Tuck School of Business.

• We can all be a jerk sometimes, but the key is to understand how and why you and others get triggered into negative or Shadow Behaviour.

• Imagine how much more effective and productive your organisation could be if your managers did not have to address Shadow Behaviour.
• Research has identified that managers spend 42% of their time addressing Shadow Behaviour each day. Shadow Behaviour not only costs time but is a large drain on the bottom line as it usually spreads. 50% of people voluntarily leave their job because of Shadow Behaviour in their boss.
• A disengaged employee (in Shadow-self) will damage relationships, erode communication, destroy morale and undermine the culture.

USING PRINT TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AND BUILD A HIGH PERFORMANCE CULTURE?

PRINT® is a unique profiling and development tool that helps improve individual behaviour and whole team performance, as well as create sustainable change to build the organisational culture. PRINT® helps us understand why we do things, rather than just labelling our behaviour. It goes much deeper to expose personal drivers and motivators to identify and understand our “Best Self” – when we are positive, productive and behaving and performing at our optimum level and “Shadow” behaviours -the negative behaviour that we engage in once Triggered. It explores individual Triggers that push us into our Shadow selves, and it gets to the root cause of persistent behavioural issues that reduce team and organisational effectiveness.

PRINT® delivers proven and measurable improvements for organisations.

PRINT® was developed and designed in the US, and has been utilised successfully by major corporations there for more than 15 years.
WHY USE PRINT?

• To support personal transformation through greater self-awareness and strategies to change.
• To build high performance teams, through a greater understanding of the motivations of others and a language to heighten awareness and power constructive change.
• To select exceptional talent.
• To create an engaged workforce.
• To provide a platform for sustainable change to build the organisational culture.

INTERESTED IN FINDING MORE ABOUT PRINT®?

Call us on (08) 93226633.

1. There’s no such thing as valuable feedback from someone you don’t trust

When receiving feedback, employees don’t separate the content of feedback from the person delivering it. In other words, there’s no such thing as valuable feedback from someone that you don’t trust.

Before any feedback will be effective, the recipient must see you as a credible source of development advice. Critically, the person you’re giving feedback to must believe you have their interests at heart. If not, your feedback won’t be effective in driving behavioral change – no matter how well-intentioned.

Read more: American Psychological Association

2. Struggling employees already realise that they have a problem

It’s easy to think that the role of negative feedback is to educate your employees on issues that haven’t come to their attention. But most of the time, that’s just not the case. In a study of nearly 4000 people who had just received constructive feedback, 74% of respondents indicated that they already knew about the problem and were not surprised to get negative feedback.

Most often, it’s not that employees aren’t aware of the issue – it’s that they don’t know how to respond. So just pointing out that they have a problem isn’t enough to be helpful. To improve performance, constructive feedback must go one step further and provide specific feedback around potential causes and solutions.

Read more: Harvard Business Review

3. The more you listen, the better employees think you are at giving feedback

If you want to give great feedback, the most important thing you can do is listen.

This is somewhat counter-intuitive: Many people typically about the feedback conversation as an almost one-way discussion where the manager provides advice and guidance.

But as the data shows (see below), more time spent listening has a strong payoff. The more you listen to employee views before giving feedback, the better the employee experiences and understands the feedback. It’s all about making sure employees understand and agree with the basis of the feedback, and buy into the course of action.

Read more: Harvard Business Review

4. Most employees prefer corrective feedback to praise and recognition

A majority of employees prefer corrective feedback to praise and recognition. In this survey of 900 global employees, 57% of respondents stated that they prefer corrective (negative/constructive) feedback, whilst only 43% stated that they prefer praise or recognition.

Read more: Harvard Business Review

5. The more confident you are, the more likely it is you prefer negative feedback

Interestingly, the more confident you are, the more likely it is that you prefer corrective feedback. As clearly shown in the graphic below, confident individuals are more likely to prefer corrective feedback relative to positive praise or recognition.

Read more: Harvard Business Review

6. Almost everyone loves receiving feedback but hates giving it

It turns out that most people like getting feedback a lot more than they like giving it.

As shown in the visual below, most employees love receiving feedback (especially of the constructive variety). However, the same employees tend to dislike giving feedback (again, more specifically negative feedback).

Read more: Harvard Business Review

7. Older workers want more feedback than younger generations

Older workers have a preference for both more positive and negative feedback than younger generations. As shown below, older generations were also much more likely to give positive feedback.

Whilst this is interesting and provides a strong counterpoint to the millennial feedback myth, it’s worth noting that the research didn’t control for rank or role – so some of this effect is likely to be explained by seniority.

Read more: Harvard Business Review

8. Star performers need extra affirmation after setbacks

Recent research from London Business School shows that star performers need more positive affirmation after setbacks.

Researchers looked at the performance of top talent after they’ve had a major setback that involves loss of status. The findings show that when previously high performers lose status, their performance suffers. And the very best performers suffer the most. The mediocre performers, by contrast, barely suffer at all.

The research also shows that it was possible to mitigate the effects of this performance drop with targeted affirmation. The academics suggest that this reinforces just how important it is to give your star a break after they’ve bungled something or lost face. As a manager, you have a critical role here in helping your star performer regain status by letting them know how you value their work.

Read more: Harvard Business Review

9. Positive feedback should praise effort, not ability

When giving positive feedback, it’s important to praise effort rather than ability.

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has shown that focusing individual praise on talent rather than effort leads to poor performance. In a number of studies, Dweck has shown that praising individuals for their natural talent leads to increased risk aversion, and those individuals exhibiting being more disturbed by setbacks.

This contrasts with individuals who are consistently praised for their effort (rather than ability). These individuals are more likely to build determination and resilience, leading to better performance over the long term.

Read more: Harvard Business Review

10. Strong team engagement is built on a culture of honest feedback

This recent study of over twenty thousand leaders showed that strong team engagement is built on honest feedback.

In the study, leaders ranking in the bottom 10% of feedback givers saw team engagement scores that averaged just 25 percent.

In contrast, those leaders in the top 10% for feedback giving saw team engagement scores average 77 percent.

Read more: Forbes

11. Improving performance requires both specific goals and specific feedback

Most of us know from our own work experience that specific feedback is significantly more helpful in improving long-term performance (compared to general platitudes).

But it turns out that specific feedback isn’t helpful unless you have specific goals as a frame of reference (see the visual below for easy explanation).

Read more: Journal of Applied Psychology

12. To improve effort, focus on relative feedback

Fascinatingly, the most motivating kind of feedback is finding out you’re just behind someone else. It’s most motivating knowing that you have the chance to ‘win’ (but aren’t currently doing so).

As the researchers in this study stated: “Managers trying to encourage employees to work harder, for example, might provide feedback about how a person is doing relative to a slightly better performer,’ they said. ‘Strategically scheduling breaks when someone is behind should also help focus people on the deficit and subsequently increase effort. This should lead to stronger performance and ultimately success.’”

Read more: BPS Digest

13. Following-up feedback is critical for improving performance

This research study showed the power of following up feedback in improving long-term performance.

With 252 managers over 5 years, researchers found that: “Managers who met with direct reports to discuss their upward feedback improved more than other managers, and managers improved more in years when they discussed the previous year’s feedback with direct reports than in years when they did not discuss the previous year’s feedback with direct reports. “

Significantly, it seems that the more action you take to follow up and truly understand feedback, the larger the performance improvement.

Read more: Personnel Psychology

14. Withholding negative feedback is really about protecting yourself (not the recipient)

The reason you withhold feedback isn’t to protect the recipient, it’s to protect yourself.

In this research study led by Carla Jeffries, researchers tested how the content of feedback changed based on the medium of delivery (face to face or anonymous) and the self-esteem of the person giving feedback.

As the researchers described: “The findings provided strong evidence that we mostly withhold negative feedback to protect ourselves, not to protect the person we’re judging. If people’s motives were selfless then arguably the feedback provided should have been just as positive regardless of how it was delivered. In fact, students in the face-to-face condition provided the most positive feedback”

Read more: BPS Digest

15. The more you ask for feedback, the more effective you are as a leader

Leaders who ask for feedback are significantly more effective. In this study of leadership effectiveness across 51,896 managers, there was a strong correlation between the tendency to seek feedback and leadership effectiveness.

The survey results showed:

· Leaders in the bottom 10% of asking for feedback were also rated in the lowest 15th percentile in overall leadership effectiveness.

· Leaders in the top 10% in asking for feedback were rated average in the top 14% for leadership effectiveness.