A Complicated Relationship with Feedback

I have a complicated relationship with feedback.

I know its value. I have read the scholarship and examined it closely, and the research is consistent: feedback drives growth and development. I have not always experienced it as a helpful tool in my development.

I want to share the reasons, name the shift that changed how I see feedback, and describe how I now build what I learned about my reluctance into my work with leaders.

I try to have the conversation about feedback early in my professional relationships. I share that I receive feedback well when I know it comes from a place of compassion and good intention.

Even as I write that, it reads like an unrealistic expectation to keep consistent over time. I am asking people to manage my experience of their honesty, and I am aware of the magnitude of that ask.

Still, the declaration has worked in relationships where I hold the authority because I control the conditions under which feedback happens. Where I do not control the conditions and the feedback is for me, I have been less successful receiving it with an open heart.

I know why. The feedback itself can be hard to endure. The anticipation is often harder; waiting for it activates my worst fears of judgment and criticism.

Part of the reason sits in what I have seen organizations do with feedback. In too many places, feedback lives only inside the formal performance management process, and some of it surfaces for the first time after the final evaluation has already been written.

Picture walking into that conversation. Your rating is set, and attached to it is information no one offered you while you could still have acted on it. Whatever trust you held in the process, and in the leader across the table, leaves the room with you.

That is the worst case. It is also common enough that most leaders I know can picture it effortlessly.

Naming the two kinds of feedback helped me untangle my own reluctance. Evaluative feedback renders a judgment about past performance, and consequence follows: a rating, a personnel decision, a record in the file. Developmental feedback serves the person’s growth: a coaching conversation, a mentor’s observation, a debrief after a difficult meeting. It informs no rating and no personnel decision, and its only agenda is that the leader gets better.

Both kinds are legitimate. Organizations need evaluation, and people need development. The damage comes when the evaluation is the first forum where you learn a truth about your leadership.

So along my journey managing people, I built a different design. Every one of my check-ins opens with space for mutual feedback between the two of us. I offer feedback to the person I manage, and the same space invites their feedback to me.

The invitation runs upward as well as down. A direct report who runs their own check-ins can build that opening into the agenda themselves, and a supervisor who receives feedback in that space models the practice for those they lead.

The design helps in two ways. Feedback loses its stigma when it becomes an ordinary, standing part of how two people work together. And the evaluation holds no surprises, because a brave and safe forum existed all year for anything either of us needed to raise.

Researchers like David Rock gave me language for the fear itself. Rock calls it a SCARF threat: when feedback threatens your status or your standing among the people you work with, for example, the brain registers a threat and shifts its resources toward defense, away from learning. A standing practice lowers the threat: nothing comes as a surprise, and each conversation lands as one exchange in an ongoing practice.

Even a healthy feedback practice between two people has its limits. A single source is one perspective, which comes with its own bias. Feedback from one voice can arrive feeling neither balanced nor fair, whatever the intention behind it.

This is why I shifted RMA’s feedback work to the 360. In a 360, a leader hears from direct reports, peers, and supervisors along the same set of indicators. Everyone responds to the same questions, so where their responses differ, the difference itself says something about the leadership. No single voice overshadows another.

What emerges is a composite view of how their leadership is experienced across the people around them: where the views converge, where they differ, and where a strength in one direction reads as a growth edge in another. It is the most balanced and fair reading of leadership I have experienced.

We hold the frame as carefully as the instrument. Our 360 exists for the leader’s development. The data supports their growth: it informs no rating, no evaluation, and no employment decision. A leader can study how they are experienced, choose where to grow first, and bring those priorities into coaching, with nothing else attached to the data.

If you are ever offered a 360, ask two questions before you agree: who will contribute, and what will happen with the data. The answers tell you whose purposes the instrument serves.

My relationship with feedback is still complicated. What changed is the surrounding design.

Feedback serves growth when it runs as a process: regular, mutual, balanced across many voices, and held apart from judgment. I needed years to receive it that way. I build it that way now, so the leaders I serve can begin sooner.