Feedback delivered by a leader in the workplace can be an attempt to reinforce something they like, or to let someone know that there is something they could work on to improve.  There is another use for this excellent tool: Delivering feedback as a way to purposefully avoid delivering unintended Extinction.

We all expect some kind of reinforcement for our efforts, and sometimes that reinforcer doesn’t arrive. In behavioural science, the term for this frustrating process is Extinction. For example, if you work really hard on a report and your boss doesn’t even notice, your behaviour of working hard on reports has been subject to extinction. Or if you send an email to a colleague asking for something and you get no response at all? Extinction. Without a concerted effort, it is easy for the victim of extinction to simply say nothing when they experience the frustration of ‘no response’, and that can quickly become a cultural norm. Once that has happened, it’s very difficult to then start saying something without risking a breach of the now-accepted etiquette.

Using feedback is a way for leaders to be sure that they’re not inadvertently putting behaviours on extinction. By simply noting aloud what you see people saying and doing, you are acknowledging their efforts. This kind of feedback doesn’t need to be ‘praise’ or ‘criticism’, it just needs leaders to ‘say what they see’. Where a cultural norm is to frequently deliver feedback, extinction simply disappears.