Good feedback can still feel bad
When I think about the core skills of a good leader, delivering skillful feedback is always at the top of the list. Yet for all its importance, giving feedback brings noticeable stress and anxiety to the person delivering it (never mind the receiver!). In my own work with leaders, I've watched that discomfort push good managers to soften the message, put it off, or skip it altogether. Some will even avoid giving positive feedback for the same reasons.
The problem, as I see it, isn't the content or format of the feedback. SBI, Situational Leadership, Radical Candor, and plenty of other frameworks show you what skillful feedback should sound like. But none of them touch the experience of actually delivering it. Think back to the last time you gave someone hard feedback. What was going on in your head in the hours before? If you're anything like me, you ran every possible reaction they might have, over and over.
So we take all that uncertainty into the feedback conversation, softening it so we don't bruise them. When in reality, we’ve meandered so off point that our receiver gets the wrong message from us. We pay a large anticipatory tax only to have the feedback fall flat and give us nothing to follow up on.
Working on the content alone was never enough, so with every leader I focus less on what their feedback said and more on why delivering it felt so vexing.
Elite feedback blueprint
For one leader, it was the imposter syndrome tied to picking what needed to improve. They doubted they'd chosen the "right" thing, and that doubt turned into shaky delivery. Deep down, they didn't believe their feedback carried enough value to deliver with conviction.
To shift this leader's perspective on the feedback ahead, we worked on visualizing someone they respected. How would that person deliver it? What would they sound like, and most importantly, what would the experience feel like for them? They landed on a few qualities: confident, kind, firm, and effortless. That became the blueprint for future hard conversations. Not just what they'd say, but how a leader with those qualities would feel giving it.
So here's my question for you this month: when you picture the leader you want to be, how do they experience delivering hard feedback?
What I’m reading
Now that we've looked at delivering feedback, what about getting it? If you're like most leaders I work with, the quantity and quality of the feedback you receive is low. That's where Marshall Goldsmith's What Got You Here Won't Get You There comes in.
Goldsmith lays out 20 habits that hold leaders back. One I see constantly is adding too much value: the urge to improve every idea your team brings you.
Pick one of those habits and ask for feedback specifically on it. It makes the behavior easy for your manager or your reports to watch for, and it gives them permission to be more direct. Then check back in a month later. You'll see the change you're making, they'll confirm it, and you've built the foundation for better feedback from everyone around you.
Before you go
One thing I've come to believe, from both the research and my own work: people want far more feedback than we give them, and they want to give us more than we ask for. It's the discomfort that's holding us all back. Close a little of that gap this month, in either direction, and tell me how it went. Just hit reply.
And if you lead a revenue, GTM, or sales team and want to work on this more deliberately, that's what I do at Revem. Reach out anytime.
Garret