The comment I heard was about Gregg Popovich, coach of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, and how he tried to isolate feedback so that his message was either entirely positive or entirely negative. Longtime NBA fans will know ‘Pop’ is considered the league’s best coach over the past two decades and I therefore took immediate notice when I heard this was one of his methods. It makes a lot of sense to me on the surface – by delivering feedback in this way, Pop knows his team isn’t going to arbitrarily ignore one half of the message by choosing to focus on the other half.
However, as I’ve noted in the past, managing a team is a complex business and blindly adhering to one principle or method is a sure route to failure. The problem of strictly negative feedback is that it risks straining a relationship (and the shit sandwich essentially exists to address and resolve this problem by reducing the net negativity of any one interaction). I thought about this after I posted the newsletter and I realized the key goes back to the idea of how good relationships tend to require a ratio of around five positive interactions for each negative one (1). This thought gives me a rough framework to start with as I explore the implications of giving strictly positive or negative feedback – if I must deliver solely negative feedback, I need to make sure I’m following up with a few positive interactions.
Footnotes / like an auction?
1. The five to one rule
I’ve most notably seen this ratio expressed in the context of ‘bidding’, a term researchers use to describe how people build relationships by simply acknowledging each other. The research tends to settle around five to one as minimum viable ratio and predicts negative strain on the relationship if the balance of positive to negative interactions falls below this figure.
1a. Suddenly, I'm hungry...
Just as I was about to hit 'publish', I realized that perhaps this explains why The Shit Sandwich doesn't work (or is another reason why it doesn't work, I should say) - if you are using two positive comments as a frame for delivering the one negative comment, the five to one concept suggests you are coming up three comments short. Might wanna add some bread to that sandwich, chef...
