Overcome your fear of giving feedback

Giving performance feedback is a part of every people leader’s job. Here are three of the most common pre-conceived notions and what to do about them.

1. The feedback conversation is going to be long and drawn out.

Let’s say you have a colleague with whom you have a good working relationship. You care about the other person’s perspectives, and they care about yours. You have observed that they care about the quality of their work, and the impact they have on other people and projects. In addition, when you’ve given them feedback in the past, they’ve received it without defensiveness and made the changes you requested.

You’re likely working with a “feedback magnet” — someone who readily accepts and acts on feedback. When you’re working with a colleague like this, you don’t necessarily need to have long, drawn out feedback conversations. If you’re working with a feedback magnet, they’re likely to acknowledge their misstep, and offer their own plan for remedying it. And then, you can thank them for their proactivity, and offer to make yourself available if and when they need you.

Of course, not every feedback conversation you’ll have will be with someone who is self-aware, self-motivated, and self-directed. In those cases, you have a longer conversation ahead of you. But don’t assume that every conversation needs to be long or multifaceted.

2. I need to make the feedback perfect.

Most performance feedback is a combination of objective input (observed through measurable data, facts, and backed up by verifiable evidence) and subjective input (influenced by personal opinions, feelings, or experiences). This means that your employee might see things differently than you do, and you may or may not be “right” the first time. If you’re willing to having a feedback dialogue rather than a monologue, you’re likely to get new information, additional perspectives, and even reactions to the feedback that you should consider. This means that your planned 30-minute meeting might become a series of discussions for the feedback to be more useful for both of you.

Feedback might take more than one conversation when, for example: (i) the feedback is nuanced or complex; (ii) the recipient has a negative reaction to the feedback, and you want to give both of you time to regroup; or, (iii) you realize that you didn’t have enough context and want to update the feedback.

This will make feedback easier in the short term when you can free yourself from needing to get it perfect right out of the gate. It can also make it easier in the long run, when your colleague learns that that you’re going to give them the opportunity to share their perspective.

3. My feedback is going to be taken the wrong way.

It’s understandable that you don’t want to upset your direct reports — or anyone else for that matter. Nevertheless, other people’s reactions and responses to feedback are largely out of your control (and sometimes out of their own). And while you have a contribution to how they experience the feedback, you are not in total control of it.

You do need to commit to making your part of the conversation as helpful and productive as possible. This includes articulating a positive intention for the feedback, being clear about what you’re observing and requesting, naming the impact, focusing on strengths, developing actionable next steps, and delivering the feedback with care and curiosity.

It also includes asking for feedback on your feedback, so that you can improve your impact as well. Keep in mind that you may have to ask a direct report for this kind of upward feedback more than once, or offer specific examples of feedback skills you know you need to work on, or tell the story of a time when you helped your boss give you more productive feedback by sharing what worked and what didn’t with them.

Giving feedback isn’t optional for people leaders but making it harder than it needs to be certainly is.

Adapted from: “Overcome Your Fear of Giving Feedback”, by Deborah Grayson Riegel, a professional speaker and facilitator, as well as a communication and presentation skills coach (she teaches leadership communication at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and has taught for Wharton Business School, Columbia Business School’s Women in Leadership Program, and Peking University’s International MBA Program; and also, she is the author of Overcoming Overthinking: 36 Ways to Tame Anxiety for Work, School, and Life and the best-selling Go To Help: 31 Strategies to Offer, Ask for, and Accept Help), published on Harvard Business Review on 26 July 2024.