Giving effective feedback is a topic that comes up regularly in my coaching and leadership development work, including some recent work I delivered for a leadership team in a government department..

So I thought I would share some of the key take aways from this session for your reference.

The reason humans tend to struggle with feedback is down to our egos.

We all have egos. Healthy egos keep us alive by assessing genuine risk and stop us from doing daft things such as walking in front of a moving bus.

I don’t know about you but I have been on the receiving end of some terrible feedback. And I don’t mean terrible because of what I had done/or didn’t do.  Terrible in that it was unclear (I literally didn’t understand what they were saying), it lacked specificity (it was a general kind of statement not grounded in anything tangible), wasn’t actionable, felt personal (like it was a fundamental flaw in my character rather than about whatever action I mayor may not have taken) and was solely about the personal preferences, and more to the point, the unhealthy ego of the person giving the feedback.

My example is NOT good feedback and in this article I’m going to share what is.

 Let’s tackle an unhelpful assumption that we often make about giving and receive feedback and our performance overall.

There is no such thing as a perfect person or employee and that means that any expectation that we should be doing things “perfectly” is entirely false.  So the more we can accept that there will always be things we can all do differently, depending on the situation and desired aims, then the easier it is for feedback to be delivered and received as part and parcel of working life.

Feedback isn’t a slight on our person.  It’s an invitation to explore with objective curiosity where we can learn something new and try something different.

All that any employer or line manage can ever ask of their team and colleagues is that they do their best.  And giving and receiving feedback is an integral part of trying our best.

But when it comes to being on the end of receiving feedback from another person, worse still someone we work with and may look up to or be in competition with or envious of, or whom we may otherwise not even like or respect, the stakes for our fragile egos get higher.

Conversely, if we are the one to deliver feedback, we may also feel uncomfortable.  If empathy is one of our core traits, we can relate to the other person and empathise with how it feels to receive negative feedback so being the one to dish it our can make us feel extremely uncomfortable.

But what if there was a way to overcome these feelings and deliver feedback in a way which is not only constructive to the outcome that is being sought but comfortable to deliver and receive?!

I’ve taken my top tips, insights from working with leaders and teams and added them together with some coaching principles to create this simple guide for effective feedback.

You can access my FREE resource here:

Try these out and let me know how you are getting on.

Do you have other people or performance issues in your business?  Why not book in for a discovery call to explore how I can help: