Feedback Strategy
Be intentional about the what, the when, and the how
I remember a reorg that ended with me getting five additional direct reports. I immediately set up introductory 1:1s with each of these individuals. For four of them, I came away with a positive feeling about their addition to the team. But for the fifth one, I left the 1:1 scratching my head. “How in the world is Keith (not his real name) going to work with our team? He is struggling both at work and at home, and his previous manager was about to put him on a performance improvement plan before the reorg. In just our first 30 minutes together, I’m seeing a laundry list of problem areas that Keith has to work on.”
The solution wasn’t to take the first four and tell Keith “pass.” It was to invest in his improvement. Over the course of the next 9 months, I delivered timed-release doses of feedback that helped him right the ship and become an asset to our team. Now, decades later, Keith is successfully operating as a Director of Engineering, and his home life is equally thriving.
My last post1 focused on the receiving end of feedback. Now I want to give equal time to the delivering end.
A core part of your job is elevating the team around you2. You have to contribute to the growth of your colleagues. As a manager, this responsibility is codified in your job title. But even as an individual contributor, your role as a leader establishes this commitment. If you don’t consider yourself a leader yet at your company, then please refer to my “When do you become a leader?” question in Play Your Part3.
Your contribution to the overall growth of the team will include the need to give constructive feedback. It’s not easy, but it’s important. The best way to set yourself up for success as a feedback provider is to be in the right mindset. What is the motivation for your feedback? If you’re seeing the feedback as a rite of passage for the person to endure, just as you had to endure it, then step back and reassess. If, instead, you are focused on the long term growth of the person, then your head’s in the right place.
Feedback should never be about making someone else feel bad or making you feel superior. It should be about supporting an individual’s growth with carefully framed feedback delivered in a setting conducive to receiving it.
The job of delivering feedback should not be taken lightly. Every individual is different in terms of how receptive they are to feedback and how capable they are of taking action based on that feedback. You need to formulate an individualized feedback strategy for each team member. And then you need to carefully execute that strategy. Here is the approach I’ve had the most success with.
Capture all feedback
At work, my External Brain4 had a Team section in it. In that section, I had a page for each employee under me. Each individual has three subpages:
Topics - My backlog of topics I would like to discuss with this person. Most of the time, these are work-related. But that wasn’t a requirement. I remember having “hammer throw” for one of my employees, because she was training for the Olympics in the hammer throw event, and I learned much more about her by listening to her stories around this.
Strengths - The attributes and behaviors of this person that stand out to me. These are the aspects of this individual that will best serve them at work, not only for their current execution but also for their long term growth. This is most helpful to reference when trying to figure out additional responsibilities for this team member to take on.
Areas of Development - The attributes and behaviors of this person that may be currently holding them back, or may hinder them in the future.
After any interaction with a given team member, I would add relevant notes to these pages. Ahead of any 1:1 with this individual, I would scan through these notes. I would directly pull from Topics to bring a manageable number of items to our 1:1 agenda. For Strengths, I would see if there were any timely kudos or congrats to also bring int our 1:1. And for Areas of Development, I would see if the time was right to tackle the next area.
Develop a strategy
Imagine if the approach I took with Keith was to start off the next 1:1 like this: “Keith, from my observations in our first 1:1, I have built a list of the 17 problem areas that I think you should try to tackle.” How would that go?
There’s a 1% chance that Keith had read and embraced Nietzsche’s ideal: “The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”5
Outside of that 1% case, the far more likely alternative would be for Keith to just completely shut down. Completely overwhelmed by the mountain of feedback, with no trust established between us yet, he’d probably just quit.
Just because my External Brain had captured 17 different weaknesses for Keith, he didn’t need to know any of this. There would be time to cover all 17 of these (and any more we uncover in the process). The most important thing for me to do was to prioritize these and develop a strategy for slowly rolling them out.
Having a more complete list of opportunities for improvement sets you up to be able to organize these into an ideal progression. As you prioritize, take into account both the relative weight of the feedback and the relative significance of the problem.
Individualize the approach
Every individual is different, and so your feedback strategy needs to be individualized. The pace and directness of the delivery of feedback should be case-by-case. Each person is at their own place on the Nietzsche truth tolerance meter. Some examples:
For people that are new to team or role, I’m going to start slow on the delivery. And then, as they get more familiar with their role, I will slowly turn up the rate of delivery.
For more senior engineers, they want feedback sooner, so their Areas of Development list may end up staying short because I’m delivering it as soon as I observe it.
But still, even for senior engineers, some feedback regards behavior trends, which takes time to spot and articulate. That’s a “forest for the trees” situation where instead of giving the employee multiple pieces of seemingly disjoint feedback, it becomes more beneficial to provide upleveled feedback.
Keep in mind that the long term goal for everyone on your team is to be increasingly receptive to feedback. Every person that is giving feedback plays a role in increasing this receptiveness. No pressure. 🙂
Delivering the feedback
When it comes time to deliver feedback, keep the following two things in mind:
Set Context; Don’t Rush
Give Them a Feedback Sandwich
1) Set Context; Don’t Rush
This really applies to all communication., but with the significance of the feedback conversation, it’s important to stress it. As the person starting the conversation, you are already fully ramped up on what you are going to say. But the recipient isn’t. It’s very easy to rush through your delivery because you yourself already have all the context. You need to realize that up until the moment you approached that person, their thoughts were somewhere else. You need to ease the transition from their other train of thought to yours. Recognize the amount of context that needs to be set. This is very dependent on both the recipient and on the topic.
2) Give Them a Feedback Sandwich
I learned the term “Feedback Sandwich” from my days as an IISA skating instructor many moons ago. And I have gotten a lot of mileage out of it. A feedback sandwich looks like this:
Positive feedback
Constructive feedback
Positive feedback
The constructive feedback forms the “meat” of this sandwich, and the good feedback forms the “bread.”
By starting off with good feedback, you are demonstrating that you value this person. You are putting them in a more receptive state. This makes it more likely that the constructive feedback that follows won’t be deflected by their brain’s natural defense mechanism: amygdala. And then, to reward their reception of this constructive feedback, and to reinforce that you value them, you soften the mental blow with more good feedback.
The Feedback Sandwich metaphor also gives a healthy ratio to aspire to. Make sure you’re giving twice the amount of good feedback as you are of constructive feedback.
“Yes! That!”
There’s a terrific article in the Harvard Business Review called “The Feedback Fallacy”6. I read it shortly after it was published in 2019. and there was one key takeaway that I immediately incorporated into my Grand Synthesis7, with great success. I summarize it as, “Yes! That!” The golden feedback that you can give, which will always be well-received, is to recognize something good that someone is doing and should continue to do.
Keep your awareness level8 high so you can be vigilant for laudable behavior. Then call them out positively for this. A colleague of mine, Saba, always uses the phrase, “exemplary behavior.” As a leader on the team, this was a huge energy injector in the room when he would interrupt to lay down this blessing.
The two quotes from this article that capture the two vital ingredients of “Yes! That!” are:
“Our strengths are our development areas.” It’s easier to further hone what you’re already good at than it is to try to develop what has been a blind spot for you.
“Feedback must meet us in our moments of flow.” Don’t put this positive message on the person’s review to be read four months from now. Right when it happens, call it out and celebrate it.
Footnotes
The introductory section of Earning Trust
The introductory section of Play Your Part
The Feedback Fallacy (Harvard Business Review) … this has a paywall, but I’m also seeing open PDF versions of this article available online
I heard a while back there was some research that was showing the feedback sandwich might not be ideal. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-compliment-sandwich-longer-effective.html is one recent example. You can find a few others with some alternative approaches recommended.
Fair. And, I also think I heard certain personality types react better to the sandwich than others, so knowing your audience is also really important for what tools you use.