The power of feedback is described in this excerpt from an ROI Case Study, The Neuroscience of Executive Team Coaching.

"….At the end of each workshop, we initiated a step-by-step process for feedback. After demonstrating the process, team members were allowed time to practice the skill. The key factors that guided this practice included allowing the team members to offer their own observations first. Other factors included keeping the feedback specific and focused on the positive. Follow-up questions such as “What did you do well and discover about yourself?” or “What went well, what impact did that have, and how do you think you could do more of that?” serve to reinforce positive neural patterns and create new habitual behaviors.

The delivery and receipt of skillful, positive feedback is further endorsed by neuroscience research indicating that social and physical pain are similar (Lieberman & Eisenberger, 2008) The findings suggest that bringing out the best in people in the workplace depends at least as much on optimizing a person’s social and emotional well-being as it does on cognitive processes.

Leiberman and Eisenberger offer the analogy of “expecting someone who has a broken leg to run from one meeting to the next…But when someone is in social pain, we often treat this as if it should be compartmentalized and kept outside the office. We might tell them to ‘get over’ their hurt feelings despite the fact that we would never think someone should ‘get over’ their broken leg.”

According to Leiberman and Eisenberger, specific, positive feedback that treats individuals as valued members of the organization may activate reward systems in the brain that promote stronger learning of those behaviors. When social needs are satisfied, the brain responds in much the same way as it responds to more tangible (monetary) rewards. Skillful feedback can be viewed by organizations as a highly cost-effective social reward system."