Ashley Whillans (photo by Evgenia Eliseeva)

Ashley Whillans (photo by Evgenia Eliseeva)

Workplace feedback can range from helpful to harmful, says Assistant Professor Ashley Whillans, but far too often it falls somewhere in the milque-toasty middle. The reason? We are asking the wrong question. Research by Whillans and three HBS doctoral students—Jaewon Yoon, Hayley Blunden, and Ariella Kristal—found that people who go seeking advice receive information that’s far more useful than those who request feedback.

The researchers conducted studies with more than a thousand participants, including online lab studies and a field experiment, all of which confirmed that asking for feedback produces more vague and limited responses, while asking for advice results in forward-thinking and actionable input. The difference boils down to mindset: judging past performance versus imagining future potential.

Whillans explains that our exposure to feedback most often occurs in a setting like a performance evaluation, where someone either has or has not passed a measurable threshold. As a result, we limit ourselves to examining what went right or wrong. When providing advice, on the other hand, it’s as if we develop a curiosity about the person’s potential. “We start thinking about how we can help this person grow into the employee that we believe they can be,” she says.

Whillans and her fellow researchers are looking into whether these findings could also help explain the gap in critical feedback that women typically receive relative to their male peers, as well as the withholding bias that minorities experience in the workplace. In those dynamics, people refrain from sharing the information that could be most useful in helping a person improve and succeed in their career. “It’s an implicit effort to not seem negative, but reserving that input has performance consequences later on,” Whillans says. “A better understanding of how advice-seeking closes those gaps would be a really powerful effect of this work.”

For more on the research, see their HBS working paper, “Framing Feedback Giving as Advice Giving Yields More Critical and Actionable Input.”

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