Employees Want Their Bosses to Respond to Feedback — But Not Too Quickly

What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Well, that depends…

That might not seem like much of a slogan. But new research indicates that it accurately reflects the way most employees feel about how quickly their superiors should respond to feedback about their leadership behavior. When leaders change their behavior lickety-split, they may be seen as responsive. But they may also be seen as insincere.

“People want these changes to happen, but when the changes happen too quickly, people find fault in the leader making them,” says Francis Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, who conducted the research with lead author Danbee Chon, an assistant professor at University of South Florida Muma College of Business and a former postdoctoral fellow at Stanford GSB, and Ovul Sezer, an assistant professor at Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.

“The fact that proactively improving in response to feedback — but doing so too quickly — could result in perceptions of inauthenticity puts leaders in a difficult, double-bind situation,” Chon adds.

Flynn first became aware of this paradox while coaching executives who were trying to change their behavior in response to workplace evaluations. Some, he recalls, worried that if they returned to their jobs and suddenly began doing things differently, they might come across as being “a little bit phony.”

Flynn and his colleagues have proved that intuition right. While past research — and conventional wisdom — suggests that leaders should respond promptly to employee feedback to avoid seeming dismissive, the researchers demonstrated through a series of studies that people don’t necessarily trust rapid changes in their leaders’ behavior, especially when they consider those changes to be difficult. Instead, they may regard sudden shifts as inauthentic, betraying a lack of fidelity between a person’s actions and their genuine thoughts and feelings.

Penalized for Rapid Change

This “authenticity penalty” diminishes employees’ trust and respect for their superiors. And once that relationship has been damaged, employees may be less inclined to offer additional feedback in the future.

“If people feel like their feedback has been taken seriously before, they’re more motivated to offer it again,” Flynn says. “But if they think that the reaction they got the last time around was insincere, why would they feel motivated to contribute more feedback later?”

The first study centered on doctoral students at research universities, a population that presumably would be delighted to see any requested changes in behavior from their advisors, who wield enormous power over their careers. “It’s hard for students to offer feedback, so if they do and their advisor actually changes, you’d think they’d be happy,” Flynn says.

They were not. The researchers first asked the students to consider how their advisors might improve as leaders, and then asked them to describe how they would react if those improvements were made either rapidly or gradually. The students used words like “disingenuous” and “duplicitous” to describe rapid changes, and “thoughtful” and “genuine” to describe gradual ones.

Flynn and his colleagues encountered a similar distrust of rapid change when they asked a cohort of people to rate the authenticity of a fictitious manager named Taylor who was responding to feedback from a leadership assessment. Taylor’s goals, drawn from real action plans developed by executives in a leadership development program, involved challenging tasks such as coaching others and giving constructive feedback. Once again, participants regarded gradual changes as more authentic than rapid ones.

The researchers claimed that these negative reactions to rapid changes in behavior are tied to a fundamental belief that authentic change requires substantial time and effort, a belief they confirmed in a survey of executives from across the United States. Building on this, they proposed that people might judge leaders more harshly for quickly making difficult changes as opposed to easy ones.

To test this idea, the team conducted a third study, in which participants were asked to imagine that a manager named Mark was attempting either a difficult or an easy behavioral change in response to employee feedback, and that he was doing so either rapidly or gradually. They were then asked to assess Mark’s authenticity and their willingness to offer him ongoing feedback.

When Mark quickly made an easy change, participants didn’t dock him points for being inauthentic. Instead, they saw him as responsive, and their willingness to offer future feedback remained unaffected. But when he quickly made a difficult change, participants regarded him as both less authentic and less responsive, and they were less willing to offer further feedback.

Context and Communication

For Flynn, this all adds up to a highly nuanced picture of how people judge the way their superiors respond to feedback, and what that means for leaders who are contemplating change. For one thing, he says, context matters. Is the change one that employees will view as difficult or easy? And is maintaining authenticity the main concern, or does responsiveness matter as well? Figuring out which factors are at play could help leaders determine exactly how to proceed.

Just as importantly, leaders who are attempting to change their behavior might benefit from clearly communicating just how difficult the process is for them. “People don’t know what you’re going through to effect change,” Flynn says. “They’re just using time as a proxy for effort or some investment of other personal resources.”

Or as Chon puts it, people tend to have a better understanding of their own feelings, motives, and thoughts than others do. “Leaders thinking about how to enact change may want to consider that how they judge their own sense of authenticity may not be how their employees evaluate these behavior changes,” she says.

As a result, explaining that you’ve already put a fair amount of thought and effort into altering a particular behavior might help persuade people that the change is sincere, no matter how quickly it seems to happen.

In any event, leaders would be better off giving careful thought to the process of behavior change rather than simply trusting that those around them will view it in the best possible light. “If there’s one thing this research shows,” Flynn says, “it’s that you’re not going to get the benefit of the doubt.”