Feedback, the basics

01 Feb 2025

Leading without giving feedback kills your team’s culture. No one knows where they stand and fear spreads through your team.

Learning to give useful feedback is a key skill for transitioning into a leadership role. Investing in building the habit helps you become a mentor and leader for your team, helping them grow beyond their current role into the people you need them to be as your business scales.

Even better, learning to give feedback doesn’t take months of practice or studying. You can just just start doing it, for free, right now by taking these two steps.

First: Notice specific things that people on your team do.

Second: Tell them that you noticed the specific thing they did.

Easy, right?

Okay, sorry, there’s a little more to read. Those are the two steps, but we have to talk a little more about step two with a few examples.

The basics of positive feedback, by example

“Good job on that bug fix, Julie, thanks for taking care of it,” is not feedback, it is appreciation. It is fine to tell your team you appreciate their work, but if this is as far as you go, you aren’t leading your team.

“Thank you for your help resolving that bug today, Julie! I really appreciated the way you triaged the issue right away and communicated with support to give them a workaround while you fixed the code. Noticing that we didn’t have test coverage for this and adding it as part of the fix was the right call too.” What’s different in this example?

First, I am giving specific feedback about the actions that I want to see more of. As Julie’s leader, I’ve just communicated clearly with her that I value proactive communication, I value quick action when something is broken, and I value making our systems more resilient for the future, even under time pressure. Now Julie doesn’t have to guess that those were the parts of her actions that I appreciate. “Good job” leaves ambiguity. More detail provides clarity.

Second, Julie knows that I am engaged with her work and that I understand what she is doing. If I only have a surface level understanding of what’s happening, my feedback, positive and negative, is less valuable. Specificity builds trust that I know what’s happening and will be there to help when something goes awry.

Positive feedback comes naturally to many of us. If we are engaged with our team and their work, we will find positive things to share. Because (for most of us) it feels nice to tell someone they did a good job, sharing that positive feedback is easy once we build up the habit.

If you have never given feedback before, try starting with this: Set a goal to notice 2 positive actions or behaviors from each member of your team this week. Then give them that feedback in your next meeting with them.

The basics of negative feedback, by example

Negative feedback is more intimidating for most of us.

We need someone to make a behavior change, improve their work, or to stop doing something. They need to improve, which means you need to tell them that they’ve done something wrong, even if they don’t realize it. This can be uncomfortable, especially for people who are nervous about conflict or see giving negative feedback as hurting the recipient. This was me, early in my career as a leader. I know the pain, and I know it can be fixed.

Most of us don’t want to ruin someone’s day by telling them they did a bad job. Don’t they already know? Don’t they already feel bad enough? And anyway, if they can’t figure it out on their own and I have to tell them what went wrong, they’re probably bad at their job, right?

This mindset is actively harmful to your team and your business.

Hiding feedback from your team means they don’t know what you expect from them and they don’t know how to improve. Over time, avoiding negative feedback causes a sequence of events like this:

• Your team doesn’t improve. Mistakes that were fine once happen for the 5th time, or the 100th time because you are too scared to have a difficult conversation. Quality trends down over time because you can’t learn and grow efficiently without addressing issues head on.
• Eventually, you get fed up with the people making the most mistakes which forces you to have the worst kind of difficult conversation. You fire them. Since you’ve never given them negative feedback, the firing is a shock to them, and often to the rest of the team, many of whom are probably making similar mistakes because no one is hearing from you what needs to improve or what your expectations are.
• Now the paranoia sets in. Fear of making a mistake or being next to go permeates the culture. Work slows down. Innovation disappears. You take on more and more work because you don’t trust anyone on your team, because they don’t know how to meet your expectations. Your business is failing because you didn’t want to have occasional hard, direct conversations.

Probably better to have the hard conversation early and avoid that mess, right?

Like with positive feedback, negative feedback needs to be specific and needs to be about an action, decision, or outcome that the person receiving the feedback had direct control over. “You should have handled the bug report better today, Julie.” This isn’t feedback, it’s just criticism and you’re just being a dick.

“The bug report today could have been handled better, Julie. You fixed the issue but the support team was in the dark about how to handle it before the fix went out. They had to reach out to me to learn that the issue was being worked on and that a workaround existed. We need to keep communication with the customer-facing teams in mind even when we’re trying to work quickly.” Specific, clear, and within Julie’s control.

We’re not done with the conversation though. Julie knows what the expectation is now, and that there is something that needs to improve. We are missing how to improve for next time, and we need an agreement from parties that we both understand what needs to change.

“What should we do differently to make sure customer-facing teams know what’s happening with high profile bug reports in the future?” Now we’re having a learning conversation. We’ve made the expectation clear, and now we’re solving a problem together.

State the solution and the expectation of future behavior clearly once an agreement has been reached. You might even want to write the solution down, if the solution is an expectation for other people to meet too.

“Great, next time we have an issue like this we will… so that…”

Now, Julie knows what your expectations and standards are and how to meet them. Julie knows how to succeed, and you know that Julie knows how to succeed.

No sneak attacks, no surprises, no ambiguity.

Learning to give feedback and building a habit of regularly giving your team feedback will make you a better leader, a better manager, and help you build the culture of trust that your team needs to tackle the hard challenges that come with scaling a business. Try it out, see how it feels.

You’ll know it is working when the behaviors you want to see start spreading across the team. People that haven’t gotten specific feedback from you will start to pick up the behaviors you’ve reinforced. Things that you wanted to see change in one person will change in other people. Your team will become more cohesive, more engaged, and will operate at a higher level of trust.