Giving Feedback That Lands — The Backbone of Change
Feedback is ingrained into everything we do. From a comment on a shared document to a performance review, we are constantly sending and receiving signals about how we’re doing and what we can improve on.
Good feedback builds trust, accelerates growth, and makes teams better. Bad feedback, on the other hand, can erode confidence, create resentment, and quietly poison the culture it was meant to improve. The difference between the two is rarely about intention.
Most people do not intend to give bad feedback. The gap is almost always in the how.
The Importance of Feedback
The Good:
It is difficult to see the flaws in your own work. Not because people are incapable of self-reflection, but because proximity blinds us. That is why an outside perspective, offered with care, can be eye-opening. Feedback helps identify our strengths and weaknesses, giving us the clarity to adjust our behaviour and improve performance.
At its core, feedback is an act of attention, and attention is something every person fundamentally craves. When you take the time to give someone feedback, you are sending a clear message: you matter enough for me to invest in you. What starts as a one-way exchange quickly becomes a conversation — one that builds trust on both sides.
The not so Good:
It is also important to acknowledge that not everyone responds to feedback in the same way. Personality, past experiences, and the relationship between the person giving feedback and the person receiving it shapes how feedback lands. This means that giving feedback well is only half the equation; the individual receiving feedback must also be willing to think critically and keep an open mind.
But even feedback that is accurate, specific, and well-intentioned can still land badly — because how it's delivered often matters more than what's said. Tone carries its own message. The same words spoken with impatience, sarcasm, or a raised eyebrow tell a very different story than the same words spoken with warmth and curiosity. A rushed "good job" can feel dismissive. A pointed "we need to talk" can trigger defensiveness before a single word of substance is shared. Delivery isn't decoration. It's the difference between feedback that is heard and feedback that is merely said.
Giving Good Feedback
Before anything else, the person giving feedback must be credible. This does not necessarily mean seniority or expertise, but it comes from consistency, integrity, and the relationship you have with the person you are giving feedback to. Feedback from an individual you respect and trust is going to be more meaningful and impactful than someone whose own standards you quietly question. If you want your feedback to be heard, you need to earn the right to give it first.
Feedback needs to be specific and purposeful. Vague praise or criticism gives a person nothing to work with. If they cannot point to an exact moment or behaviour, they cannot learn from it, build on it, or repeat it. Saying something just for the sake of saying it is not feedback, it is noise.
Instead of saying “that was a good presentation,” try saying something such as: “your confidence when you walked in really set the tone for the room, and the point you made about (that topic) was something I had not considered before — it added a lot to the points you were making”. Suddenly, the person knows exactly what landed and why. They can visualize the moment, understand the impact it had, and consciously bring the same energy next time.
The same principle applies to areas for improvement. Telling someone they need to “communicate better” leaves them guessing. But pointing to a specific moment, a point in the meeting where key information was not elaborated enough, or a message that created confusion, gives them something they can reflect on, target, and improve — instead of feedback that is vague and just creates anxiety without direction.
This is why specificity is at the heart of useful feedback. It respects the person’s ability to grow by giving them the raw material to actually do so. Specific feedback does not just tell people what they did, it tells them why it mattered.
A Framework That Works: CLEAR
Specificity tells you what to say, but structure tells you how to say it. Brené Brown puts it simply: "Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind." Her research on tough conversations found that we often dress up vagueness as tact — softening a message, hinting instead of stating it outright — telling ourselves it's the considerate thing to do. In practice, it just delays the discomfort and leaves the other person guessing. Real kindness is saying the clear thing, directly, the first time.
At Harbinger, we built a simple framework around that idea. Effective feedback should be CLEAR:
Context: What situation or moment are you referring to? Without this even specific feedback can feel abstract.
Learning: What led to the issue, and what can be learnt from it? Understanding the root is more useful than just describing the symptoms.
Effect: What impact did the behaviour have? On the team, the project, the client, or the culture? People are more receptive when they understand why something matters, not just that it does.
Action: What specifically should change or continue? Make it concrete and achievable.
Review: Check in. Growth does not happen in a single conversation and following up shows that you care about the outcome, not just the delivery.
Strengths-Based Feedback
Specificity applies to praise and criticism alike. But some researchers argue that we should go even further and build feedback entirely around strengths rather than weaknesses. Marcus Buckingham — author and workplace researcher whose work with Gallup helped popularize strengths-based management — is one of the most vocal supporters of this approach.
The theory is intuitive once you hear it. When you highlight someone’s strengths, you are not just building their confidence — you are helping them understand a moment of excellence, so they can deliberately recreate it. Strengths-based feedback asks: what did you do that worked, and how do we do more of that? It leans into momentum rather than fighting against failure. It is about making a singular moment of success into something consistent, because you have already proven you can do it.
This does not mean ignoring problems. If something is genuinely broken and the person is unaware, say something. But if they have already recognized the mistake, or you have seen them do it well before, there is no need to dwell on it. Move forward and speak about the positives.
This does not mean strengths-based feedback is about avoiding hard conversations. Kim Scott, the former Google and Apple executive behind the Radical Candor framework, argues that the best feedback combines “caring personally” with “challenging directly.” Leaning on strengths only works if the person can still trust you to be honest when something genuinely is not working. The two ideas are not in tension; a strengths-based approach simply chooses where to spend most of that honesty.
Knowing Your Audience
Feedback is not one-size-fits-all. The same message delivered in the same way to two different people can be transformative for one and devastating for the other. Culture, personality, seniority, and context all shape how feedback lands and should be given.
In many Canadian and North American workplaces, there is a stronger norm towards the “feedback sandwich”: a positive observation, followed by the critique, followed by encouragement. If you look instead at German workplace culture, directness is the norm instead. There, feedback is expected to be clear, specific, and straightforward. Business cultures in some Asian locations, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, differ again — often high-context, where criticism is expected to be read between the lines rather than stated outright, and where hierarchy and face-saving shape not just how feedback is delivered but also who is permitted to deliver it. Researcher Erin Meyer maps this exact terrain in The Culture Map, showing how directness in feedback varies sharply not just between North America and Northern Europe, but across Asia as well. None of these approaches is universally right. What matters is reading the person in front of you.
Timing matters too. Even the most well-crafted feedback can fall flat if the moment is wrong. Avoid giving critical feedback in front of peers, when someone is visibly stressed, or immediately after high-stakes situations, when emotions may still be running high. The same words, in the wrong moment, can feel like an attack rather than support.
Empathy is at the core of feedback. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s position and ask: how would this land for them is key. Once you can do this, you will find the feedback you give is more effective and people will come asking for your advice.
Power Dynamics
Feedback does not exist in a vacuum; it travels along the lines of power. Feedback from a manager to a direct report carries a different weight than feedback among peers. The individual receiving feedback may feel they cannot push back, even if the feedback is unfair or poorly stated. If you are in a position of authority, you have a responsibility to create a safe and fair environment when giving feedback. Be intentional about tone, framing, and creating an open space for the other person to respond.
Frequency and Trust
The foundation of effective feedback comes from trust. Employees need to feel that feedback is offered in good faith, and it is meant to help them grow, not to expose or diminish them. Without that trust, even well-intentioned feedback gets received defensively.
Frequent feedback matters more than you would expect. The conventional wisdom of quality over quantity needs a caveat when it comes to feedback: quantity often becomes quality. The more frequently you give feedback, the more specific it becomes. A weekly check-in can address an issue that surfaced yesterday. A yearly review can only gesture at patterns.
Consistency matters: it is what makes feedback reliable and meaningful. However, balance is crucial here. If feedback comes too frequently or feels nitpicky, it stops feeling like support and starts to feel like scrutiny.
The ultimate goal is an environment where people do not just receive feedback, they seek it out. That is where real growth lives, not in the feedback given, but in the culture of asking, and the desire to learn and improve.
Receiving Feedback
Feedback is a two-way street; you can give someone good feedback, but if they are not willing to hear it, it is meaningless.
Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, authors of Thanks for the Feedback, argue that receiving feedback well is genuinely difficult because of three triggers: we question the truth of what we are told, we question the person telling us, or we feel it threatens who we are. Naming which trigger is firing, in the moment, is often the fastest way to hear the feedback for what it actually is.
Receiving feedback well requires a few things:
Separate your ego from your work. The feedback is about what you did, not who you are as a person.
Listen to understand, not to respond. Resist the urge to defend or explain before you have fully heard what is to be said.
Ask clarifying questions. If you do not understand something, do not be afraid to ask for clarification or a specific example. This also shows engagement and helps you act on what you have been told.
Let feedback marinate. Not all feedback will land immediately. Give some time to reflect before you decide if it was useful or not.
Final Thoughts
Feedback, at its best, is an act of generosity. It takes time, thought, and a genuine investment in someone else’s growth. Done properly, it builds the trust that makes teams thrive, strengthens relationships, and makes individuals better at what they do.
Bad feedback does the opposite, and the gap between the two is almost never about intention. It is about awareness — knowing your audience, earning your credibility, following a structure like CLEAR, and caring enough to follow up. The idea is not complicated, but it is easy to skip when feedback feels uncomfortable or inconvenient.
In change management, that is crucial. Change is uncomfortable by nature. People are being asked to think differently, work differently, and let go of the ways of doing things they have used for years. In that environment, feedback is not something to be done lightly, it is one of the most powerful tools for keeping people moving forward rather than pulling away.
While you may not be able to give perfect feedback all the time, the goal is to become someone who cares and takes it seriously, in doing so creating an environment where others feel safe enough to do the same. In a change process, safety is everything. When people trust that the feedback they receive is valuable, they engage. They ask questions. They adapt. This is what successful change looks like, not a single decision made at the top, but a culture of honest, human conversation all the way through.
If your organization is navigating change and wants feedback to be part of how that change takes hold, Harbinger can help. Get in touch to start the conversation.
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