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Coffee at Rosa's in Canberra, reflecting on feedback and workplace culture

Is Feedback Really a Gift?

Someone whose work I follow closely recently posted a meme rehashing the corporate mantra I grew up with that “feedback is a gift.” Throughout my career, every time I’ve heard someone say this, or something like it, I’ve always felt myself wince.

The traditional view goes that feedback is something that helps us improve, to become better at what we do. There are certainly plenty of articles around about how to give it. And increasingly, clients are asking me to include “how to give and receive feedback” in workshops. The receiving part feels newer. I think this is partly driven by some generational stereotypes about people who can and can’t “take feedback”.

But I keep coming back to my original wince and asking myself: what’s going on there?

A couple of weeks ago I started journalling about the best work feedback I’d ever received. I wanted to understand my own experience, as well as reading some of the organisational psychology research. What surprised me was how little of the “negative” feedback I’ve received throughout my career I actually found useful or productive. In several instances, it dramatically changed how I felt about and how much I then trusted the person giving it. In a couple of instances, it also took the gloss off the organisation they represented.

Here’s my hunch: like most interesting topics, I don’t believe feedback is inherently good or bad. It is way more nuanced than that. But I do think much of the feedback I have received – and I also hear my clients talk about in coaching sessions and workshops – is often less about how to improve a task or change a specific behaviour and more about who you are. And, I think this is the crux of it, whether you belong here.

The kinds of feedback I’m talking about are things like:

  • You’re not confident enough.
  • You need more executive presence.
  • You’re not agile enough (which usually means “working fast”).
  • You need to be more strategic.
  • You’re not detailed enough (often with the caveat that you also need to be “thorough and agile” - a kind of human ChatGPT, if you will).

Earlier in my own career, I was told more than once that I was “too soft.”

It wasn’t particularly useful feedback.

What did too soft mean? What specifically was I doing that wasn’t working? What should I have done differently?

What I now see was often being described as “softness” was my tendency to be the person in the business conversation asking: But what about the people impacts? Have we considered how this decision will affect them? Or I expressed empathy for someone facing a change or going through a redundancy. How soft of me!

Perhaps there were times when I did need to be more direct. Perhaps there were times when I should have made the decision and moved on. But I also wonder now: was I too soft, or did I simply value something that wasn’t particularly valued in that environment?

I’ve also been told I was “too emotional” and in one context, very early in my career, “not proactive enough”. I remember both pieces of feedback years later, but I still couldn’t really tell you what I was supposed to do differently as a result.

And that’s important because there is a big difference between feedback about something I have done and feedback about the kind of person someone thinks I am.

Of course, sometimes we absolutely need feedback: if my work contains errors, I’m consistently missing deadlines, I interrupt people in meetings, I’m not meeting an agreed standard or something I’m doing is having a detrimental impact on other people, I need to know. That is information I can do something with.

But “you’re too emotional”, “you’re not strategic enough” or “you need more executive presence” are different.They are interpretations. And these interpretations tell us as much about the person giving the feedback – and the culture they inhabit – as they do about the person receiving it.

There is actually some fascinating research on this. A well-known study of performance ratings found that more than half of the variation in ratings in two large samples was attributable to the idiosyncratic tendencies of the rater. In other words, when I rate you, that rating can contain a surprisingly large amount of me.

And decades of research give us good reason to be cautious about assuming that feedback automatically improves performance. A major meta-analysis found that while feedback improved performance overall, more than a third of the feedback interventions studied actually made performance worse.

Feedback also became less effective when it shifted people’s attention away from the task and towards themselves.

More recently, a 2026 systematic review of the performance-feedback literature found that positive feedback consistently enhances performance, while negative feedback is much more dependent on particular conditions – including the quality of the relationship between the person giving and receiving it. (Link below)

So should we really still be falling back on the old mantra of “feedback is a gift”? I think not.

Feedback has consequences.

I’ve heard people in coaching sessions and facilitated programs talk about feedback that has devastated them, damaged their trust in leaders and broken previously strong working relationships. It has also stopped them from recommending people and organisations for opportunities in the future.

One client ultimately left a job they were really good at specifically because they were told they were “too boffin-y” and “not commercial enough.”

Again: what do you actually do with that?

And of course questioning feedback these days carries its own risk. We’ve created an odd circularity around being “good at receiving feedback”:

Feedback Giver: Here’s my judgement of you.

Feedback Receiver: I’m not sure I agree with that.

Feedback Giver: See? You can’t take feedback.

I also think that instead of simply teaching people to become better at giving negative or “constructive” feedback, we also need to become much better at constructive positive feedback: And I don’t mean telling everyone they’re wonderful. I mean helping people understand specifically what they did well. Why it worked. What impact it had. What was distinctive about their contribution. And how they might do more of it.

I can certainly remember positive, constructive feedback I’ve been given and how encouraging and helpful that has been:

“You warmly and openly greet each person, individually, when they come into a room and that helps people feel welcome and included.”

“Your adaptable style means that important group discussions are prioritised over simply ‘sticking to your script’ – that’s the distinction between a good facilitator and a trainer.”

I think our obsession with capability frameworks and “development areas” have made us very practised at identifying what is missing, while being much less sophisticated at helping people understand what is already strong, (which is why I love strengths-based approaches).

And yes of course we also need to get better at receiving feedback critically. Not defensively. Critically.

  • Is this useful information about something I’m doing?
  • Is there a pattern here that I need to pay attention to?
  • Is something I’m doing getting in the way of what I’m trying to achieve?
  • Or is this someone’s preference about how a person in my position should behave?

Because I am increasingly unconvinced that being “good at receiving feedback” means accepting every judgement someone makes about us.

Sometimes feedback may be a gift.

Sometimes it may be genuinely important information we need to hear.

And sometimes, I think, it’s an invitation to become a little more like the person giving it.

 

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