Respectful and Helpful Feedback

A few years ago, I had dinner with several board members and leaders of a nonprofit. The board chair mentioned that when he’s away from home, he always orders red meat at restaurants. His son had convinced him that cows weren’t good for the environment, so he should give up red meat.

I could barely process what he described. It wasn’t the point on red meat—it was the notion that a son dared to give unsolicited feedback to his father. 

It would have never occurred to me to share my thoughts about my father’s decisions, much less to have an expectation that he would care what I thought. And we had a good relationship!

When talking to a CEO who wanted people in her company to provide feedback that is both “respectful” and “helpful,” I thought of those two situations. Namely, that feedback is not simply a matter of finding the right words at the right time. Instead, the relationship context in which it is delivered affects whether the receiver deems it respectful and helpful.

In my experience working with leaders and teams, I have found that three key questions help indicate whether a relationship has sufficient space for effective feedback.  

1. Do you have the right to give me feedback?

In organizations, we assume that certain people are legitimate feedback providers—most obviously, our boss and those with demonstrated expertise in the subject. If our boss gives feedback, regardless of how helpful or respectful it is, we at least know it’s worth listening to. And if the acknowledged expert gives feedback, we pay attention because we know they know more than we do. 

However, this does not hold for everyone. Imagine delivering a presentation of your most important project and, when you finish, the junior analyst from another department who hasn’t been part of the project chimes in with challenging critiques and suggestions. For many people, the first thought would be, “Who the hell is this guy???” 

Even if the feedback is useful, it may be hard to take if we don’t believe the other person has the standing to provide it. (This is also how I feel whenever my kids make comments about my cooking or driving.) 

The relationship context influences how each party interprets their role in the interaction, and, unfortunately, it’s very easy for two people to have different perspectives on what’s legitimate, especially if the organizational norms regarding feedback are unclear. 

2. Have I asked for feedback?

Another reason feedback doesn’t land is that the person is not ready to accept it. The micro version of this dynamic occurs when people deliver feedback to someone who is busy, distracted, or upset. The moment after they bombed their big presentation is not the moment to give them pointers. 

That said, I most often hear the macro form of unaccepted feedback from executives who are frustrated that someone on their team is not developing in the way the boss would like. The question I often ask clients is, “Has the person said that they want to improve on this dimension?”  

The tricky part for many bosses is that they assume that if they care about improvement, their team members should as well. But this is not how most people I’ve seen operate. We pay much more attention to the feedback that will enable us to achieve goals that are important to us. Thus, in situations where someone isn’t responding to feedback, the task may not be to change the content of the feedback but to better understand the context—what matters to them. 

3. Do you care about me?

A topic that often arises in coaching sessions with my clients is that they want to provide direct or even tough feedback, but are reluctant to do so because they’re afraid the person won’t receive it well. Sometimes they express that reluctance in the midst of a “kids these days” complaint about Gen-Z employees being supposedly afraid of tough feedback. 

For me, the solution isn’t to make the feedback less direct or tough, but to deliver it in a context where the recipient understands that you care about them. You can provide tough love, as long as they recognize the love part of the equation. 

There are many parts of building a trust-filled relationship, but the baseline is understanding what they want to accomplish, which enables shifting “Here’s how you could do this better” feedback to “If you want to achieve [the professional goal that we’ve talked about previously], here’s how you could do this better.” 

With that context, the feedback is less about making them more valuable to you and the organization. Instead, it’s about making them more valuable to themselves.

Even if you establish the right relationship context for feedback, it may not be received well if the content is off. One reason this happens is that many people have different definitions of what feedback is. 

The Ladder of Inference is a framework that can help people understand what they’re doing when they provide feedback. The ladder has several rungs:

• Observable Data: In any situation, there are the facts of what happened, though each person only has part of the available information. 

• Selected Data: Among the available information, each person makes note of some of it and ignores other data based on their frames of reference, experience, and biases. 

• Interpretations: People assign meaning to the partial data they have noticed—again through their biased lens.

• Assumptions: People fill in the gaps to make inferences about why something is happening.

• Conclusions: People reach judgments based on those assumptions.

• Beliefs: Over time, conclusions solidify into beliefs that guide how people view the world.

• Actions: People act based on those beliefs.

The framework is powerful in helping people give more effective feedback because it can help them have these types of realizations:

What I observed isn’t the whole story. Once people realize this, it becomes clearer why feedback should be framed as their perspective on what happened, rather than a claim on the facts.  “I noticed X. Is that what you observed?”

The impact of the behavior on me might have been different than the impact on others. For example, instead of saying something like, “Your presentation style was ineffective,” it would be more intuitive to slim down the feedback to, “When you did Y during the presentation, it did not resonate with me because…”

I may not have the experience to provide a judgment. While all of us have opinions, judgments require analysis by someone with demonstrated competency to do so. I can say, “I prefer Wine X over Wine Y,” but only the professional sommelier has the standing to declare, “Wine X is better than Wine Y.” Understanding the distinction between opinion and judgment, it is easier to avoid providing feedback that one does not have the credibility to give. 

My thoughts about what the person should do with the feedback are limited. So, while it might be helpful to share ideas for what the person could do next time (e.g., “I have observed others be effective when they have summarized their point at the start.”), it’s helpful to avoid framing them as “shoulds” (i.e., “You should always summarize your point at the start.”). 

When people know how to make those types of adjustments in their feedback, they are more likely to deliver grounded feedback and avoid overstepping the bounds of the relationship, which can cause people to reject it.