Welcome back to Giving Helpful Feedback. Before we go into the seven feedback skills, let's explore an intriguing possibility that there's an optimal balance between the number of positive and negative comments you give employees. Recall in an earlier video, we talked about John Gottman, the marital researcher. Gottman found that married couples had healthier relationships when the balance of positive to negative feelings and actions in a relationship was five to one. Work relationships, obviously, are quite a bit less intimate than marital relationships, yet Gottman's research does suggest that the more positive experiences we have, the better off we'll be. We also know from our earlier discussion that negative events are given more weight than positive events. That is, losing a friend is giving more emotional weight than gaining a friend. So it is logical that to overcome a negative event such as criticism, we would need a greater number of positive events. Further, if we look at the Pygmalion effect, the teachers in Rosenthal's experiment were definitely giving intellectual bloomer students more positive feedback compared to non-bloomers. And those intellectual bloomer students did much better. This suggests that if you're a manager, start thinking about outweighing criticism or negative feedback with more positive events and positive feedback. Many of you may be familiar with the compliment sandwich rule of thumb. The compliment sandwich says that if you want to deliver negative feedback wedge it between two compliments. It's a handy rule of thumbs, however, I would suggest that it's not enough. In fact, the compliment sandwich needs more fixings. It needs to be a club sandwich, lots more lettuce, tomato and cheese. The equivalent of positive events for a healthy workplace. So keep the club sandwich in mind. Many of us have been in workplaces where positive feedback is rare and what really stands out is negative feedback. These are cultures of negativity and you know them when you're in them. As a manager, you want to strive for something else. One thing that might be occurring to you is that it would seem phony to give an employee lots of positive feedback whenever you give them one small bit of negative feedback. I agree with that. I think that in addition to verbal positive feedback, we need to create a culture that provides positive events on a daily basis. This means that appreciation and recognition are commonplace. Listening is the norm and respect and joint problem-solving between managers and employees is typical. So as we cover the basic skills of feedback in the next video, keep in mind the rule of thumb, the positive events need to outnumber negative events. This can be done by giving positive feedback but also by creating a positive culture. This is Tracy Jennings and thank you for watching Giving Helpful Feedback. [MUSIC]