When your feedback does more harm than good

Hi {{first_name|there}},

It's Martin here, with this week's newsletter aimed at helping you build your leadership confidence.

Giving feedback is one of the parts of leadership that new managers worry about most, and for good reason. If you don’t do it carefully, it can dent someone's confidence and damage your relationship with them, even when every word you said was fair.

Most feedback is well meant, but a good deal of it still leaves the person worse off than before you opened your mouth.

One of the managers I coach, I'll call him James, came to a session frustrated. He had given a capable member of his team some measured feedback after a presentation to senior stakeholders. The feedback wasn’t harsh: a couple of things that had gone well, one thing to work on. He thought the feedback conversation was fine. But over the next fortnight, the person went quiet and seemed unwilling to put themselves forward or speak up much in meetings. James could not understand it. He thought he had been very fair.

Feedback is important. As a leader, it is one of the ways you help your people develop. So, the key questions with feedback are not about whether to give feedback, but about when and how you give it. Here is what the research tells us.

Decades of research on feedback keep returning to the same point. Feedback tends to help when it holds the person's attention on the task, and tends to backfire when it moves their attention onto themselves (the original meta-analysis is Kluger and DeNisi, 1996, which I drew on when I wrote about why performance reviews can make things worse).

A more recent study shows how easily that can happen. Erickson and colleagues (2021) found that when a manager used negative emotional language, it pulled the employee's attention away from the task and towards themselves, and the employee’s effort levels dropped as a result. The same study found managers could limit the damage by making clear that the feedback was about the task itself, rather than the individual.

So when James said the presentation 'lacked impact', his team member heard that they were someone who made no impact. Had James instead said that the main recommendation got lost in the detail on slide four, there would have been something more task-focused to act on, rather than something personal to defend.

Gnepp and colleagues (2020) studied real and role-played feedback conversations. They found people were motivated to improve only to the degree that the conversation focused on future actions. When it dwelt on past performance, the conversations often descended into disagreements about what had actually gone wrong, as people became more defensive and self-protective. In those cases, you can leave a feedback conversation further apart than when you started.

This is the thinking behind what is sometimes called feedforward, where most of the conversation is about the next attempt rather than the last one (Rechter and colleagues, 2024). It’s close to a coaching approach, and in practice is it just the difference between saying 'the report was too long' and 'what could you do next time to make the recommendation more prominent?'

Specific, observed feedback works. A review of feedback in workplaces across two decades found it reliably improved performance when it was specific and behavioural rather than general (Sleiman and colleagues, 2020). 'Be more strategic' gives a person nothing actionable to do. Compare that with: 'In the steering group, you could hold your solution back until you've heard the other three views'. The more concrete the behaviour you name, the easier it is for someone to change it.

Often the reason feedback fails is that the person does not feel safe enough to take it in. Coutifaris and colleagues (2021) tested how leaders build that safety. Asking your team for feedback on you, on its own, did not last: leaders started the practice and then grew defensive, and the openness faded. What did work was when leaders shared the critical feedback they had themselves received, and what they were doing about it.

When a leader says: 'the feedback I got last quarter was that I make decisions too slowly, so here's what I'm changing,' they normalise the idea that we are all works in progress, and the people around them follow suit. Going first with your own feedback does more for a team's willingness to hear feedback than any amount of careful phrasing.

The way you give feedback is one of the main things that builds or damages your team's trust in you. When the issue is bigger than everyday feedback, a genuine performance or attitude problem, that is a different conversation again. But for the ordinary, week-to-week version, if you get it right feedback stops being an event people brace for and becomes part of how the work gets better. You move from being the person who passes judgement on individuals to being the person who helps them improve and grow.

Remember this: Feedback works when the person hears it as something about the work that they can act on next time.

Handled that way, the conversations you have been dreading become some of the most useful you have.

Coutifaris, C. G. V., & Grant, A. M. (2021). Taking your team behind the curtain: The effects of leader feedback-sharing and feedback-seeking on team psychological safety. Organization Science.

Erickson, D., et al. (2021). Feedback with feeling? How emotional language in feedback affects individual performance. Accounting, Organizations and Society.

Gnepp, J., Klayman, J., Williamson, I. O., & Barlas, S. (2020). The future of feedback: Motivating performance improvement through future-focused feedback. PLoS ONE.

Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254-284.

Rechter, E., et al. (2024). The feedforward interview: A theoretical account. Human Resource Management Review.

Sleiman, A. A., et al. (2020). A quantitative review of performance feedback in organizational settings (1998-2018). Journal of Organizational Behavior Management.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

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