It’s Time to Rethink Feedback

“We have a culture of feedback,” I was told when I joined Microsoft some years ago. It was a familiar tune; every company I’ve been a part of either strived to build such a culture or was proud of having one. Yet, in my experience, the costs and harms often outweighed its touted benefits.

There are two primary reasons why I find feedback detrimental to human growth. Firstly, most feedback is a projection. When I share my observations and suggestions with someone, I inevitably project my worldview, biases, and attachments onto them. In other words, my feedback says more about me than the other person.

A classic example: a man might see another man speaking up in a meeting as assertive, while perceiving a woman doing the same as pushy. This projection of biased opinions often triggers defensiveness rather than learning and growth.

But it’s my second concern about the practice of feedback that is even more troublesome: it can instill an unhealthy dependency in those who seek it. Instead of fostering the capacity for self-reflection, self-observation, and self-correction, it encourages reliance on others. I've seen people become lost and quick to blame their managers and colleagues for not providing feedback, unaware of the dependency they’ve developed.

Similar dynamics can arise with praise and recognition. In one organization I worked with, a seemingly positive culture of recognition led to an addiction of sorts, where individuals felt anxious when not regularly acknowledged and recognized.

So, why are we so fixated on feedback?

During a conversation with a colleague at Microsoft, I remember questioning our investment in the feedback culture. She adamantly defended it. “How else would people know if they are doing things right? How else would they learn?” she counted. She, like many others, assumed that people couldn’t accurately self-assess and self-correct. She was partially correct – while every individual possesses an inherent capacity for self-reflection, this capacity often remains underdeveloped due to our societal tendencies to favor external authorities.

Consequently, instead of focusing on feedback, our emphasis should be on developing the capacity for reflection and self-observation in everyone.

Practically speaking, if someone seeks feedback from me about X, I would encourage them to reflect first. “What did you notice about X? What did you observe—in terms of your thoughts, your actions, and the consequences? What did you learn from it? How might you improve next time? What coaching would you give yourself? What kind of support might you seek, and from whom?”

Once the person has undergone thoughtful reflection, I might ask, “How can I assist? Would my perspective be beneficial, acknowledging that it’s merely a biased opinion, not an objective truth?”

The key premise: Trust the person to do their work of self-reflection first rather than doing their work for them. Avoid building dependency on feedback. Build their self-reflecting, self-governing, and self-correcting capacity instead. They and the world around them will be better off as a result.

PS: Research supports the observations I'm sharing above. In their HBR article “The Feedback Fallacy,” Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall note:

“For years managers have been encouraged to candidly praise and criticize just about everything workers do. But it turns out that feedback does not help employees thrive. First, research shows that people can’t reliably rate the performance of others: More than 50% of your rating of someone reflects your characteristics, not theirs. Second, neuroscience reveals that criticism provokes the brain’s “fight or flight” response and inhibits learning. Last, excellence looks different for each individual, so it can’t be defined in advance and transferred from one person to another. It’s also not the opposite of failure. Managers will never produce great performance by identifying what they think is failure and telling people how to correct it.”

It’s noteworthy that the authors suggest an alternative: catching people when they do something right and explaining why, which in essence, is another form of feedback!