100 Ways to Motivate Others : How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

The failure to give appropriate and timely feedback is the most
extreme cruelty that we can inflict on any human being.
—Charles Coonradt, Management Consultant
Human beings crave feedback.
Try ignoring any 3-year-old. At first, he will ask for
positive attention, but if he is continually ignored, soon
you will hear a loud crash or cry, because 
any feedback,
even negative feedback, is better than no feedback
.
Some people think that this principle only applies to
children. But it applies even more so to adults. The cruel-
est form of punishment in prison is solitary confinement.
Most prisoners will do 
anything—
even temporarily improve
their behavior—to avoid being in a situation with little or
no feedback.
You may have heard of the relaxing effect of a sensory
deprivation chamber. You are placed for a few minutes in
a dark, cocoon-like chamber, floating in body-temperature
salt water, with all light and sound cut off. It’s great for a
few minutes. But not for long.
Keep Giving Feedback

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One day the sole attendant at one of those sensory-
deprivation tanks walked off the job in a huff over some
injustice at work, leaving a customer stranded in the cham-
ber. Several hours later, the customer was rescued, but
still had to be hospitalized. Not from any physical harm,
but from the psychosis caused by deprivation of sensory
feedback. What occurs when all outside feedback is cut
off is that the mind manufactures its own sensory feed-
back in the form of hallucinations that often personify the
person’s worst fears. The resulting nightmares and ter-
rors can drive even normal people to the point of insanity.
Your own people are no different. If you cut off the
feedback, their minds will manufacture their own feed-
back, quite often based on their worst fears. It’s no acci-
dent that “trust and communication” are the two
organizational problems most often cited by employee
surveys.
One of the most notorious military and secret intelli-
gence torture devices over the years has been to place a
recalcitrant prisoner into “the black room.” The time spent
in total sensory deprivation breaks prisoners faster than
physical beatings.
Let’s take the scene home. The husband is encourag-
ing his wife to get ready for an evening event on time.
She asks, “How does this jacket look on me?”
“Fine, just fine, let’s go!”
“Well, I 
knew
I didn’t look good in it. I just can’t find
anything else to wear!” she says.
Human beings crave 
real
feedback, not just some pa-
tronizing, pacifying words.
The managers who have the biggest trouble motivat-
ing their people are the ones who give the least feedback.

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And when their people say, “How are we doing?” they say,
“Well I don’t know, I haven’t looked at the printout or
anything, but I have a 
sense
that we’re doing pretty well
this month, but I don’t know.”
Those managers have a much harder time inspiring
achievement in their teams. Achievement requires con-
tinuous feedback. And if you’re going to get the most out
of your people, it’s imperative that you be the one who is
the most up on what the numbers are and what they mean,
because motivators do their homework. They know the
score. And they keep feeding the score back to their people.
8. Get Input From
Your People
I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.