Cheerleaders, Critics & Coaches
In 2013, Adam Grant, a young professor at the Wharton School, published a book that changed his life.
He combined his own organisational psychology research with others, in a book called Give and Take, that showed that success depends heavily on our interactions with the people around us.
By dividing people into three groups; Takers, Matchers, and Givers, he found that Givers were strangely both the least and the most successful.
The least successful were Selfless Givers, who give too much and burn out at the bottom.
The most successful were Strategic Givers who built valuable social capital to help them rise to the top.
The book was a commercial and critical success and it was reshaping how the business world views generosity and achievement.
That interest catapulted Grant out of the classroom and into the world of speaking and events.
Thrust into this new and unfamiliar world he needed to get better at public speaking and fast.
So he did what any good scientist would do and after each talk he’d ask for feedback.
He found that he got two types of responses:
Cheerleaders, who said things like “You were excellent”, or
Critics, who would say things like “It wasn’t your best.”
Both types of responses were short, vague, not actionable, and none of it was really helping him get better.
The Difference Between Feedback and Feedback
I spent almost a decade building a feedback company and here’s one big thing I learned.
There are two very different things, both called feedback, that a lot of people get muddled up.
Feedback /ˈfiːdbæk/ · noun
The highly unpleasant noise produced when the sound feeds back into a microphone.
Criticism and cheerleading both have some value, but they both also come with a lot of useless noise.
Critics focus on flaws and shortcomings. It might identify a weakness, but it rarely offers a way to fix the problem, and any value is lost in our understandable tendency to defend our pride and confidence from a perceived attack.
Cheerleaders focus on celebrating our successes. It feels great but it skews our perception of reality because it lacks actual direction or correction.
Either high praise or criticism without direction breeds stagnation.
So much of what is often called feedback, like online reviews, is just made up of the noise of superficial criticism and cheerleading.
It provides a top level statistic like a star rating or a thumbs down, but it rarely tells you why you have that score and what you can do to improve it.
Feedback /ˈfiːdbæk/ · noun
Obtaining opinions and information that allow you to evaluate or correct an action, event, or process.
Grant really needed high quality feedback.
He needed proactive and forward looking ideas.
He needed to uncover the ‘why’, and advice on how to progress.
So instead of asking for general thoughts, he started asking: “What one thing should I do to improve?”
This question nudged both sets of people away from providing simple default responses and encouraged them to provide advisory feedback instead.
He transformed his cheerleaders and critics into coaches.
Coaches both care and challenge, providing specific, actionable strategies.
As Grant later wrote in another of his books Hidden Potential:
"A critic sees your weaknesses and attacks your worst self. A cheerleader sees your strengths and celebrates your best self. A coach sees your potential and helps you become a better version of yourself."
And through this coaching, Grant was able to become a successful speaker, now regularly getting paid five figures per speaking engagement.
Coach Yourself to Coach
Encouraging others to coach you is useful.
Being able to coach others well is a big advantage.
In his classic Harvard Business Review study Leadership That Gets Results, Daniel Goleman evaluated six distinct leadership styles that the most effective leaders use in different situations.
One of those styles was coaching and it was very effective for driving long-term performance and high engagement.
But, it was also the least frequently used management style.
I missed a short section from that earlier Adam Grant quote, where he started by saying, “It’s easy to be a critic or a cheerleader. It’s harder to be a coach.”
Coaching takes effort, it takes time and it requires emotional intelligence.
A lot of leaders don’t want to take that time.
As Marcelo Bielsa, the football coach famous for mentoring football coaches says, "A good coach must bring his/her players closer to their full potential, or discover it. That is the main objective for the coach, and one that must be occupied every day through daily work."
So, if you can put the effort into coaching then you have a significant advantage, and your team has an advantage too.
Grant, A., "Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success", Viking (2013)
Grant, A., "Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things", W H Allen (2023)
Goleman, D., “Leadership That Gets Results”, Harvard Business Review (2000)
