the power of listening

Giving performance feedback is one of the most common ways managers help their subordinates learn and improve. Yet, research revealed that feedback could actually hurt performance: More than 20 years ago, one of us (Kluger) analyzed 607 experiments on feedback effectiveness and found that feedback caused performance to decline in 38% of cases. This happened with both positive and negative feedback, mostly when the feedback threatened how people saw themselves.

Whereas feedback is about telling employees that they need to change, listening to employees and asking them questions might make them want to change. The research findings suggest that attentive and non-judgmental listening seems to make an employee more relaxed, more self-aware of his or her strengths and weaknesses, and more willing to reflect in a non-defensive manner. This can make employees more likely to cooperate (versus compete) with other colleagues, as they become more interested in sharing their attitudes, but not necessarily in trying to persuade others to adopt them, and more open to considering other points of view.


Guy Itzchakov and Avraham N. (Avi) Kluger
"The Power of Listening in Helping People Change." Harvard Business Review. May 17, 2018.

Also check out Avi Kluger's homepage, and his TED Talk on the subject.

outlaw powerpoint

Jeff Bezos has a non-traditional management style at Amazon, and he says Amazon’s unique twist on meeting structure is the “smartest thing we ever did.”

“Many, many years ago, we outlawed PowerPoint presentations at Amazon,” Bezos said at the Bush Center’s Forum on Leadership in 2018. “And it’s probably the smartest thing we ever did.”

To replace the PowerPoint presentations, Bezos created a new way to hold meetings: Meetings start with each attendee sitting and silently reading a “six-page, narratively-structured memo” for about the first 30 minutes of the meeting.

″[The memo is] supposed to create the context for what will then be a good discussion,” Bezos said.

Those participating are encouraged to take notes, and after the reading period is over, they discuss the memo.

Bezos says the reason for the group reading is that “executives will bluff their way through the meeting as if they’ve read the memo because we’re busy and so you’ve got to actually carve out the time for the memo to get read.”

Taylor Locke

"Jeff Bezos: This is the ‘smartest thing we ever did’ at Amazon". CNBC. October 15, 2019.

the complaint sandwich

Psychologist Guy Winch recommends a formula called “the complaint sandwich”—a series of three statements calibrated to make people more receptive to changing their ways. The first “slice of bread” in the sandwich is a positive statement that will hopefully make the listener less defensive when the complaint itself arrives.

“The meat of the sandwich is the complaint itself,” Winch said. “And here’s the trick: The meat has to be lean. In other words, all you need is the one incident to make your point.” Don’t present a compendium of every offense; just stick to the specifics of the present situation.

The final component of the sandwich is another positive statement, this time one that might motivate the other party to do things differently.


Joe Pinsker
"How to Complain". The Atlantic. June 29, 2019.

email interruptions

Researchers from Michigan State University say that keeping up with email throughout the day places high — and sometimes downright impossible — demands on managers that prevent them from achieving their personal goals and from being good leaders for their teams.

According to the study, office workers of all seniority levels spend more than 90 minutes a day just recovering from email interruptions and returning to their normal workload. For managers, these distractions caused by email have wider-reaching consequences.

“Like most tools, email is useful but it can become disruptive and even damaging if used excessively or inappropriately,” explains MSU management professor Russell Johnson, lead researcher for the study, in a release. “When managers are the ones trying to recover from email interruptions, they fail to meet their goals, they neglect manager-responsibilities and their subordinates don’t have the leadership behavior they need to thrive.”

Johnson and his team found that managers recover from these frequent disruptions by limiting their leadership duties, such as long-term growth and development of the team, and turning instead to more day-to-day tactical decisions and tasks. This recovery decision is both a strategic one and a way for them to feel more productive.

Ben Renner

"Study: Checking Email Less Often Leads To More Productive Workday, Especially For Managers". Study Finds. April 25, 2019. The study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

go to work and help

If a man were poor or hungry, [some] would say, let us pray for him. I would suggest a little different regiment for a person in this condition: rather take him a bag of flour and a little beef or pork, and a little sugar and butter. A few such comforts will do him more good than your prayers. And I would be ashamed to ask the Lord to do something that I would not do myself. Then go to work and help the poor among yourselves first, and do all you can for them, and then call upon God to do the balance.

John Taylor

Journal of Discourses, vol. 19, p. 340 as found in Prophetic Statements on Food Storage for Latter-day Saints by Neil H. Leash. Cedar Fort. 1999. p.127