What does Strictly tell us about elite performance at work?
(4 minute read)
Feedback is the oxygen of performance. The popular show highlights our myriad and often contradictory responses to it.
Vital and life affirming or gaudy hype-fest? Whatever you think of it, you can hardly ignore the BBC top-rater, as it moves towards its crescendo this week. In a recent conversation, our client (a Chief People Officer and big fan of the show) made the case that it also highlights some useful lessons about responses to feedback.
We all know the format. After their performance, the breathless celebrity and pro-dancer await the panel’s feedback.
It’s at this moment (her thesis goes) that we can see the way in which sports people respond to feedback, and how it differs from the way in which most people react. Contestants from a sports background tend to respond in a way that is more constructive and unemotional than the rest of us do.
Performance Paradox
Feedback is the ultimate performance paradox. There is no improvement without it and yet we humans are notoriously poor both at giving it and receiving it.
Most management training certainly hasn’t helped. The feedback section on the bog-standard course is rarely evidence-based or intellectually coherent. The fashion for delivering every message through a filter of “positivity” has mired the workplace in sugarcoating. Nothing wrong with that, if it leads to better performance, but the evidence paints a different picture.
As studies show, most employees rate their performance appraisal as next to useless due to the lack of honesty from the line manager.
Working across cultures
In a recent global programme about working across cultures that we ran, many South-East Asian Managers noted the lack of directness in western management and leadership speak, where it seems that the relentless need to sound ‘positive’ frequently leads to a loss of clarity. This is all the more eye-opening, because it runs counter to the commonly held view that South-East Asian cultures are more about restraint and courtesy, as opposed to directness.
Even the scientifically accurate term negative feedback is becoming taboo; replaced by the euphemistic ‘constructive’ or ‘corrective’ feedback.
In our recent article, “Why Threshold is reclaiming negative feedback,” we pointed out that negative feedback is more effective at spinning new neural pathways than positive feedback.
Negative Feedback
In layman’s terms, negative feedback more effectively spurs action by creating that open loop of discomfort in the mind.
Of course, as many of us find, negative feedback often carries an emotional cost. The bruising to our self-esteem can hamper performance improvement, resulting in a drop in confidence, denial or defensiveness. Psychologist called this ‘identity injury.’
Elite sports people cultivate the ability to draw the value out of feedback, while neutralising identity injury.
Elite performers
Fascinatingly, new research suggests that this is something that people with high autism traits share with elite performers.
A key factor is self-concept: how tightly our sense of self is tied to others’ opinions. For many neurotypical people, feedback can feel like a threat to identity, triggering defensiveness. Social neuroscience shows that criticism activates the same brain regions as physical pain (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004). By contrast, people with higher autistic traits often have a more internally anchored self-concept, relying less on social approval and more on objective accuracy or task performance.
Inferred social meaning
This difference shapes how feedback is processed. Autistic cognition tends to favour systemising over mentalising—focusing on logic and detail rather than inferred social meaning (Chevallier et al., 2012). Where one person might worry about how feedback was delivered, another may focus simply on what needs fixing. This allows feedback to be experienced more as information than judgement.
So are sports people likely to have autistic traits? No. The more likely explanation is the other way round. Sports people cultivate the ability to process feedback as information, rather than personal judgment.
“I’m gutted to be honest,” said England International Karen Carney, having just delivered a performance she knew to be under-par, in one of this season’s earlier Strictly episodes. It was a moment of rare candour. But what was truly remarkable was the immediacy with which Carney’s expression transformed into one of quiet, focused resolve.
Sports psychology
This is the state of mind that elite performers seek to achieve.
Sports psychology shows that elite performers recover best when they analyse failure closely and objectively.
The answer lies in what successful performers avoid. In both cases, failure is protected from becoming an identity story. When failure is framed as something immutable, it repeats. When it is framed as changeable, it becomes workable.
The challenge is to examine failure deeply without triggering self-judgement.
Top football coach, Carlo Ancelotti understood this instinctively. With psychologist Bruno Demichelis, he created the Milan Lab at AC Milan—a space deliberately designed to induce calm, distance, and clarity. In this environment, players could review errors without emotional rawness, treating improvement as a neutral project with defined steps.
Psychological safety
The lesson for organisations is powerful. When we create conditions of psychological safety, calm attention, and emotional distance, people—autistic or not—can process feedback as data.
And the most astute organisations are increasingly recognising this. Threshold’s most requested course of 2025 was, This Is your brain on feedback. A scenario-based workshop that boosts the ability to receive and process feedback effectively.
Elite performers want to know where they have gone wrong and what to do about it. They want to know now, and they want to hear it straight!
Can you imagine Serena Williams’s coaches using the feedback sandwich on her or saying ‘Serena, that would have been even better if…”
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
