Mirror-holders create the conditions for positive and lasting change. The best feedback is the kind that helps others understand their strengths and provides the encouragement and guidance to build on those strengths. It takes a coach approach to feedback that leads to highly desirable outcomes, like helping managers empower their teams or guiding teachers to improve student achievement. This takes the pain out of giving feedback by shifting its focus from accusation to inquiry and deescalating conflict through dialogue. Rather than push a plan of correction, mirror-holders prompt others to suggest their own ideas for improvement. Their feedback is guided by questions instead of assumptions. When people give feedback as a mirror-holder, they do a lot more asking and a lot less asserting. Mirror-holders challenge others to see it for themselves. Or to put it another way: Window-gazers tell others what to see. Mirror-holders give feedback with only one goal in mind: to guide others towards a self-discovered view of their own performance – the part that’s staring right back at them. Any meaningful information must come from the person on the other side. Unable to see past the mirror’s opaque backside, mirror-holders can’t dictate where to look or even what’s in sight. Mirror-holders, on the other hand, deliberately shield their view. It captures only part of the performance picture – the part that the window-gazer managed to see. Often, it’s narrowly focused, subjectively framed, and limited in its perspective. Window-gazers tend to give specific but myopic feedback about another person’s work. And because their field of vision is hyper-focused, they tend to lose sight of everything else within view. When they size up others, window-gazers already know what they’re looking for and where to find it. Window-gazers look at their surroundings and tell others what they see. But there’s also a subtler problem, much less discussed but no less destructive: When giving feedback, people have a tendency to act like window-gazers, not mirror-holders. There are lots of reasons why – it’s not specific, too infrequent, and tinged with rater bias. By some estimates, people ignore our feedback nearly 70% of the time. It’s no secret that the feedback we share with others fails to bring about positive and lasting change.
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