How to Deliver Negative Feedback More Easily

It feels like we've become a nation of softies. Tip-toeing around delivering any kind of criticism. Like criticism is a bad thing. But it's not.

We know the research.

Gallup 's work shows that frequent, meaningful feedback makes employees three times more likely to be engaged. Harvard Business Review 's study on feedback preferences indicates that 72% of employees believe their performance would improve if their managers provided more corrective feedback. Kim Scott covered how direct and empathetic feedback improves performance while building trust in Radical Candor.

But we don't give that feedback, do we?

Almost half of managers find delivering negative feedback to be stressful. Almost one in four won't do it at all.

This Is Why It Is Important

I could parade out a pile of statistics about feedback and its impact on the organization. How much more performant teams are when feedback cycles are good, how much lower turnover is, and how that connects to favorable economic outcomes for organization. Quantifying what you qualitatively know to be true.

But I won't.

Because the statistics won't convince you to change a goddamned thing and because it is a waste of my time writing, and your time reading, this article if nothing changes.

Instead, I want you to think back on your life, on a moment when something really changed for you. Rewind all the way back to your youth. A transformative personal moment connected to a transformative person. When you became a harder-working and more committed person.

I'm going to bet that moment was connected to corrective feedback.

Maybe a coach told you something that wasn't fun to hear, but you knew you needed to hear it. Or a friend's parent delivered the straight talk in a way that landed differently than when your parents said the same. We all have had authority figures in our lives deliver, in a direct, unambiguous, and unquestionably corrective way the feedback we needed to hear.

Hearing it, something changed in you. It wasn't a fun day, but looking back on that moment, it made it a great year. It changed a chapter of your life—maybe the course of your life itself.

Most of us have a few of these moments. As a leader, it is your job to give your employees the gift of the opportunity to improve and clarity about what improvement looks like.

This Is Why We’re Failing at Critical Feedback

We are afraid of the conflict that comes with delivering negative feedback. Most of us have not practiced this kind of feedback in our lives. It is really uncomfortable, and like most painful things, we'd prefer to avoid it. Most of us do until the circumstances become so problematic that the conflict can no longer be ignored.

These dormant performance problems waiting on feedback are like cracks in the windshields of our lives.

We see the cracks and are content to work around them. Squinting through them. Craning our necks uncomfortably around them. Pretending as though they are not there—until one day, the temperature shifts. The cracks propagate. We're blinded, unable to move because the problems we've been able to side-step for so long have finally encountered a circumstance that stops us in our tracks.

Opportunities for benign correction are lost. A quiet moment for personal growth has now become a highly visible failure. The leader is to blame, not the employee, but the employee and the organization will suffer due to a leader's failure. It happens in work, parenting, and coaching.

We fail as leaders because we don't know how to deliver feedback. Improving seems difficult because each feedback interaction feels like a high-stakes game. We're so afraid of attempting to do feedback that we don't practice it. Our lack of practice prevents confidence and skill development.

We want our leaders to be good at it. So we give them oodles of guidance material. Too much guidance material, really. We tell our leaders they need:

• a specific ratio of negative to positive feedback;
• to connect each feedback to a specific goal;
• to deliver feedback within a certain period of time or they're unable to deliver it at all;
• to have the feedback connected to a very specific example with clear next steps;
• to deliver the feedback in a certain way, describing the situation, the behavior, and the impact, using very specific mechanics;
• to be direct but also empathetic; and so on

So we take people nervous about something, not confident in their abilities or themselves and pile on a veritable mountain of other confusing qualitative directions. This new pile of stuff that they're not confident handling makes them even less confident they can wade into what is, for them and their team members, a challenging situation.

This Is the Easy Button

Scrap the laundry list of rules. Don't worry about if the situation happened last week. Or last month. Don't worry about whether or not the issue is connected specifically to a goal. Don't worry about whether or not you've buttered up the team member with enough affirmative stuff or if you've got your compliment sandwich properly prepared.

Worry about this and only this.

If I give my team members feedback about where they need to improve, can they improve?

If the answer is yes, continue. If not, you have a challenge where the team member needs a different seat on the bus (or a different bus). Then, make the time (meeting or otherwise) and start with this phrase:

"I'm giving you feedback about how you can be better because I have high standards, I believe in you, and I know that you can meet them."

That is it. That is all you need. It works. It is easy.

It connects to David Yeager 's work at the University of Texas. What Yeager discovered is that feedback delivered with an additional note that said, "I'm giving you these comments because I have high standards, and I know that you can meet them," had the following profound effects in a challenging scenario: It increased the participants':

• engagement and likelihood of doing the additional work;
• trust; and,
• overall performance

Make it easy on yourself. Make it easy on the leaders that work for you. Give them the environment and the simple tools to hone their craft as a leader and provide productive feedback to their teams. Focus on creating an environment that embraces, practices, and is transformed by feedback even while learning to do feedback well.

The truth is that we have a responsibility as leaders not only to perform inside of our business role but also to improve the careers and lives of the people who work for us. Remember that moment when your life transformed and changed when you were small? Give that same opportunity to your teams in their adulthood.

If they know that you really believe in them, in your heart, and want them to win and grow then that is all they really need.

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While I’m working to be a better man, dad, and leader, maybe you are too. Follow me here. I’ll share what I’m discovering while I work to show up as a better version of myself. To be more engaged with my partner and children. To show more joy in my work. If you’re open to it, I encourage you to share what you discover in your wanderings as well.