Episode Transcript
So I was managing Sam, a communications director, who had been at the company 10 years before me. He was friends with all the company’s founders, and on several occasions, the work he shipped to me for review felt off brand and outdated. As a new leader on the team, I felt incredibly uncomfortable pointing this out.
On one occasion, I spent a sleepless night just figuring out exactly what to say on my next call with him only to completely abandon it. So there I was just praising the strengths of what he created, the timeliness with which he created it. I could not bring myself to highlight areas for improvement. In that moment, I became one of the estimated 21% of managers who completely avoid giving negative feedback to their teammates. After the call, I remember feeling both terrible about how I showed up, but also relieved that it was easy. And now over. The more I sat with it though, the more I realized I had chosen to be nice rather than kind.
Being nice was the profusely complimenting, but being kind and being a better manager would’ve been to highlight the strengths while also opening up a conversation around the areas for improvement. So as I’ve researched and taught about feedback literacy over the years, I’ve come to learn, there is a name for what I was doing.
It’s called reciprocity bias. Basically, I was being nice in the hopes that my colleague would reciprocate that niceness, right? Despite my being his manager, he had the power in the relationship. My being nice to him was a kind of organizational survival tactic. At some deeper level than I had fully thought through, I hoped that my niceness would mean Sam may have good things to say about me when he hung out with the founders, that he enjoyed working with me, and in return, I might get the job stability I so deeply craved at that time in my life. So I first thought about reciprocity in this way based on a paper published in the American Sociological Review by Alvin Gouldner way back in 1960.
Gouldner’s work suggested that reciprocity, is a deeply wired norm we humans have. It’s so deep it operates without much thought. I certainly hadn’t thought through the many reasons why I was doing what I was doing. And, Gouldner said something that has stuck with me. He wrote that when one person does something nice for another, there’s often what he refers to as a shadow of indebtedness that hangs over the relationship.
In other words, while I didn’t have much power in the relationship, I did have the power to, through pure niceness, create a shadow of indebtedness. So think about a relationship in your life right now. Or maybe one that’s been sitting in the back of your mind where you’ve been avoiding a difficult conversation, or maybe you’ve left the most important thing unsaid, maybe like me, you’ve even rehearsed it and then you fell back into niceness as a way to protect yourself.
Try to map out what’s holding you back. You might find the reasons lead to insight on how or if to move forward, like a new conversational entry point. For example, if you’re avoiding because of reciprocity bias, you might open the conversation with something like, Hey, I know I have a ton to work on and I’m not the best communicator, but there’s been something I’ve been meaning to bring up.
By acknowledging your own imperfection right at the beginning, you may find it gives you just a touch more courage to have a discussion about theirs. It may also help lower their defensiveness. See you next week.
Show Notes
- The Norm of Reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960)
- Attention Feedback Givers — Don’t Become the 21%
- Recency Bias in Feedback Relationships
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