Feedback Lessons from the Food Bank
A couple of days before Christmas, I volunteered at a local food bank. In a group of about thirty people, we spent most of our time sorting donated canned goods. Part of the team took the boxes of cans and spilled them onto a long conveyor belt. The rest of us were positioned next to different boxes, waiting to pick the cans that fit our respective categories. I had to grab the tomato products and put them in the box on my right, and grab the milk products and toss them into a box on my left.
However, the inflow wasn’t random. Because there might be a large donation from, say, an Italian food distributor, there might be dozens of tomato cans flowing past me in one minute, and I could be idle for a few minutes after that.
The embedded breaks provided an opportunity to observe how other volunteers performed their tasks. A couple of stations down from me, a teenage guy would roll the cans as they passed him, making them come down the conveyor belt faster. Across the way—the conveyor belt was in a loop—two women picked up cans lying on their sides and placed them upright. Another volunteer, trying to be helpful whenever there was a rush of tomato products, would pick them and walk the 20 feet over to my bin.
The theme across those behaviors: each person was doing work that the conveyor belt would have done on its own. That is, they were expending effort without adding value.
As I reflected, I realized that their actions reflected a knowledge gap. If they’d spent time in factory settings, they would have known what types of contributions were more or less valuable. Moreover, I was struck by how it didn’t feel worth my time to give them feedback. After all, their actions were well-intentioned, and they were volunteers—it wasn’t my place to say something. Still, their inefficient actions continued.
It got me thinking: In what other situations does this dynamic occur in our professional and personal lives?
It happens when people produce reports that nobody reads. But instead of saying, “I don’t need this,” most people just delete the email.
It happens when people create approval processes that require them to check something against a standard, rather than simply telling people what the standard is and letting them go. Here too, people might grumble about the useless process, but may not make it their business to suggest a fix.
And it happens when people manually send confirmations or reminders when the system already produces these. Again, it’s easier to ignore rather than provide feedback.
The most obvious point is that leaders owe it to their teams to provide feedback to close the knowledge gap about what work is valuable and what is not. It’s a simple matter of efficiency.
However, clarity is also important because when people put forth genuine effort but don’t know what’s valuable, it creates a significant opportunity for an emotional wound when they discover, during later performance reviews, that their manager doesn’t see that effort the same way.
I work hard, but I’m never rewarded.
They don’t appreciate what I do here.
That’s why it’s important for leaders not just to say what’s generally valuable, but to clarify what I will value in your performance review. Clarity provides an opportunity for team members to right-size their effort toward activities that are helpful—e.g., social planning, mentoring, everything below #5 on the priority list—but are rarely the primary reason someone gets rated highly or promoted.