Asking for Feedback You Won't Use

I got a phone call from someone who wanted my input. They told me they’d posted new job descriptions and had already started a hiring process. And then they asked me: "Do you think we're doing the right thing, restructuring the roles like this?"

I didn't think they really wanted my opinion. The jobs were posted. People were being interviewed. What they wanted, I think, was validation, or maybe just the ability to say they'd asked for feedback along the way. Has this happened to you? I'd guess it has.

Or maybe you’ve been the person asking for feedback like that. I certainly have. I've moved too fast, skipped the input step, and then felt guilty. So I backtrack and ask people what they think, except I've already moved forward and the decision would be hard to undo at that point anyway. Sometimes I'm honest with myself about why I'm asking. Sometimes I'm just looking for someone to tell me I did the right thing.

None of this makes us bad leaders. It makes us human. But it's worth thinking about, because the people on the other end of that question usually know exactly what's happening, even when we don't say it out loud.

Researchers have a name for it: pseudo voice, or offering someone the chance to speak up when you have no real intention of using what they say (de Vries, Jehn, and Terwel, 2012). In a study of employees at a healthcare organization, the people who sensed their input was being ignored spoke up less over time, and that silence led to more conflict on their teams. The researchers noted that the staff experienced it as a form of deceit, even when no one intended to deceive anyone.

That lines up with what decades of research have shown. People accept even difficult outcomes more easily when they've had a genuine chance to weigh in (Lind and Tyler, 1988). The benefit was never really about the asking itself. It's about believing the asking might change something.

So the next time you find yourself picking up the phone to "get some input," it's worth pausing to ask why. A few questions can help.

• Is there anything you could hear right now that would actually change your decision, not just how you deliver it?

• Are you asking because you want a different perspective, or because you want someone to confirm you're right?

• If you already moved forward, are you asking for feedback or asking for them to help you feel better?

There's no shame in any of those answers. But the answer changes what you should say to the person on the other end. If the decision truly isn't changing, tell them that. Ask how they'd support the change or what concerns they have about the rollout, rather than asking whether they'd have made the same choice. People can work with "this is happening, help me think about how." What decreases trust is being asked "what do you think" when the honest answer doesn't matter.

A few things help if you want feedback to mean something in your organization, not just be a phrase you use.

• Ask while the decision is still open. Once you've told the hiring committee to post the roles, the moment for real input on the roles has passed. You can still ask good questions after that point. Just not that one.

• Close the loop, every time. Tell people what you heard and what you did with it, even if the answer is "nothing changed, and here's why." Silence after asking is where people start to suspect they were never really being asked at all.

• Decide which decisions you’re going to make on your own and which need input. Not everything needs input from others. "This one's mine to decide" lands a lot better than a fake invitation to weigh in.

None of this is complicated. It just takes being honest with yourself before you're honest with your team. 

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