How to Give Feedback
- Stephanie Edward
- Jul 30
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 5
Coaching gets a lot of time in the limelight… and for good reason. Coaching can make the difference between merely meeting expectations and thriving, merely addressing day-to-day issues and levelling up for future opportunities.
However, sometimes people misconstrue all this attention on coaching to mean that it’s better than feedback, that providing feedback is somehow bad.
It isn’t. Coaching isn’t better than feedback.
In fact, leaders need both to properly support their people.
Feedback is needed to evaluate or improve performance. Coaching is needed to develop thinking and future capabilities.
There tends to be a lot of focus on helping leaders learn how to coach because, in many organizations, they don’t do a great job of it for myriad reasons: they are too busy, they don’t know how, it’s uncomfortable for them.
So, many leadership training programs focus on coaching at the expense of feedback.
The reasoning is often that leaders typically have a lot more experience with giving feedback. So, the assumption is that they’re set in that department.
That’s a risky choice because having more experience with giving feedback does not necessarily translate to being any good at it.
I won’t belabour all the ways in which a leader might get the act of giving feedback wrong but it’s a common enough issue that I’d bet my bottom dollar that each of you reading this has at least one cringe-worthy feedback story from a manager at some point in your career.
Leaders can struggle to provide positive or negative feedback.
(If you bristled at the use of positive or negative here, I get it. I’ve used these terms throughout this article to keep things straightforward and simple. Feel free to sub in your preferred wording, as needed!)
Some leaders might be rockstars at recognizing a job well done but recoil from giving any constructive criticism at all, for fear of saying the wrong thing.
Others might be eager to point out mistakes and give instructions on how to fix them… sometimes a little too eager.
Others might deliver negative feedback in such a way that the feedback itself is forgotten, either because they were not clear enough or they were a jerk about how they said it.
Studies have shown that an employee’s acceptance or rejection of feedback and its impact are influenced more by how that feedback was delivered than by the feedback itself.
In other words, how a leader delivers feedback matters.
How to give feedback
If you’ve ever wondered if you’re giving feedback the right way, here are four things to consider.
1. Get specific.
When providing positive or negative feedback, get as specific as possible.
If someone did a great job at a client meeting, don’t merely say “good job.” Tell them specifically what they did right. Did you like the flow of the agenda? Was it the way they explained a complex issue? Was it how well they listened and demonstrated that they heard the client? When an employee hears “good job”, yes it feels nice but what they care most about is how they can replicate that good behaviour.
Don’t leave them guessing.
Similarly, if someone missed the mark on a task, don’t merely tell them it isn’t good enough. Explain exactly what the issue is.
2. Focus on behaviours.
Never make feedback about personality traits. Feedback is about behaviours. Period.
If your employee talks too much in meetings, it’s not about how talkative they are. That’s a personality trait that, in some situations, may be welcome or even needed.
You are not trying to change who your employee is.
Make feedback about specific behaviours. This does not mean that you should not address your employee who talks too much in meetings. However, instead of saying, “You’re too talkative”, you draw their attention to what happens when, say, they ask a question and then elaborate on that question for ten minutes before letting the other people in the meeting answer that question. You make this about the behaviour or skill of asking questions or collaborating or collecting information.
The same goes for positive feedback. If your employee did a great job at a networking event, don’t tell them it’s because they’re so personable. That’s just who they are.
Focus on the things they did during that networking event that you want them to keep doing.
3. Explain why it matters.
It isn’t enough to talk about specific behaviours. You need to explain the impact of those behaviours, be they good or bad.
I’ve spoken before about the need to help employees identify the meaning or the why behind expectations and tasks. (See Insight into Gen Z Work Attire and Spelling Out What Goes Unsaid At Work.)
We can't expect employees to always figure out the "why" themselves.
Talk about the downstream impact. Talk about the why.
4. Outline next steps.
Get specific about how to move forward.
If the feedback is positive, there may not always be a next step to discuss. However, don’t assume there won’t ever be one. Using our client meeting example from above, if you like how your employee handled the agenda at a meeting with one client, talk about how the same approach might work for an upcoming meeting with a different client (and why).
If the feedback is more negative, you can’t merely say, “Hey, you messed this up and this is why it’s a problem.” You must provide details on how to fix the situation and/or how to avoid it in the future. This isn’t the time to leave things open to interpretation.
This isn’t spoon-feeding.
If you are flinching as you read this and thinking “I don’t want to spoon feed my employees everything!”, you won’t be.
With feedback, you get specific and directional. However, at your next coaching meeting, you can then have your employee think through how this applies to upcoming tasks or situations.
Your role as a leader is to support your people’s success.
In the case of both positive and negative feedback, your employee wants to do a good job, whether that means continuing to do something “good” or avoiding doing something “bad”. Make it easy for them to understand how to succeed.
Warmly,
Stephanie
Want to help your leaders get better at feedback?
I talk about this in my leadership workshops and retreats. You can learn more by contacting me.
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