The Feedback Lie
Feedback is the most ritualised act of modern leadership and one of the least examined. The evidence says it reduces performance more than a third of the time, that most of a rating measures the rater rather than the person rated, and that the conditions we design into performance cycles are the exact conditions that produce the largest stress response in experimental psychology. The problem is not that feedback fails. It is that we have spent thirty years describing a control system as a development system.
