The 12-Week MBA Chapter 13: Adventures in Feedback - How to Give It Without Destroying Trust

Your manager writes “Fantastic work!” at the top of his email. You feel great for about three seconds. Then you open the attached document and see a bloodbath of red tracked changes. Entire paragraphs crossed out. New text everywhere. Maybe ten of your original words survived. So which is it – fantastic or terrible?

This is post 15 in my 12-Week MBA retelling series.

Chapter 13 is about feedback. Not the annual performance review kind. The everyday kind that happens whether you plan for it or not. The authors argue that feedback is the single most important thing a people manager does. And most of us are doing it badly.

You Cannot Not Give Feedback

Here is something that sounds obvious but most people miss. You are always giving feedback. Always. Even when you say nothing.

The authors quote communication theorist Paul Watzlawick: “No matter how one may try, one cannot not communicate.” Your silence, your body language, your delayed response to an email – all of it sends a message. If someone finishes a big project and hears nothing from you for a week, that is feedback. It says: your work does not matter enough for me to comment on it.

Daniel Pink calls corporations “feedback deserts.” And he is right. In big organizations, your work gets chopped into tiny pieces. You do your part and send it off. Did it work? Did the customer love it? Did the next team use it well? You might never find out. The authors compare it to learning to ride a bike in thick fog. No wind in your face, no skinned knee. Just silence. And that silence says something brutal: your contribution is meaningless.

One of the most important jobs of a manager is to fill that silence with useful feedback.

The Two Goals That Fight Each Other

Why is feedback so critical? Because managers have two goals that constantly pull in opposite directions.

Goal one: Get great results right now. Ship the project. Hit the quarterly numbers. Deliver for the client.

Goal two: Build your team’s ability to deliver great results in the future. Train people. Develop skills. Keep them from burning out.

These two goals fight each other all the time. Push too hard for today’s results and people burn out and leave, taking their knowledge with them. Spend too much time on training and development, and this quarter’s projects fall behind.

Feedback is the bridge between these two goals. Good feedback takes what someone did today and turns it into a lesson for tomorrow. It connects the present work to future improvement without pulling people away from their actual jobs.

The authors make a nice point: nobody learns to ride a bike from a lecture. You learn by trying, falling, and adjusting. Most learning at work happens the same way – between the big training events, in the daily work. But you only get better if someone tells you what worked and what did not.

Why “Positive” and “Negative” Are the Wrong Words

Most people talk about positive and negative feedback. The authors deliberately avoid those words. They use “praise” and “corrective feedback” instead. Why? Because the words positive and negative are misleading.

Consider two statements:

1. “I did not think you were capable of baking such a tasty cake.”
2. “This cake is not quite up to your usual sky-high standards.”

Which one is positive? Which is negative? The first one is technically praise but feels insulting. The second one is technically criticism but feels like a compliment. Whether feedback lands as positive or negative depends on way more than whether you are saying something nice or something critical. It depends on the relationship, the history, the trust level, and the expectations that were set beforehand.

The authors reference psychologist John Gottman’s research on marriages. Gottman found that lasting marriages have a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions. Management consultants jumped on this and started recommending five praises for every criticism.

But here is what they missed: Gottman’s definition of “positive interaction” is complicated and context-dependent. A piece of corrective feedback delivered with respect and good intentions can absolutely be a positive interaction. And vague, lazy praise can feel hollow or even insulting.

The Feedback Sandwich Is Stale

You know the feedback sandwich. Say something nice, then deliver the criticism, then say something nice again. The authors are not fans.

It works maybe once. After that, your people see the pattern. Every time you start with praise, they brace for impact. Worse, they learn to discount all your praise because it is just the bread around the bad news.

One of the authors’ collaborators put it perfectly: “People do not like being techniqued.” When you apply a feedback formula with a catchy name, people can tell. And it damages trust instead of building it.

What Actually Works: Be Specific

If there is one rule all the feedback models agree on, it is this: be specific.

“Your room is a mess!” does not help your teenager clean it. What exactly is wrong? Clothes on the floor? Dishes on the desk? Old pizza under the bed? The same applies at work.

But here is where most managers mess up. They are specific with criticism and vague with praise. Remember the manager from the opening story? He wrote “Fantastic work!” at the top and then filled the document with very specific corrections. So the employee gets a detailed map of everything wrong and a generic pat on the head for everything right.

What exactly made the work fantastic? Which sections were strong? What approach should they repeat next time? If you cannot answer those questions in your praise, your praise is not doing its job. And when the only specific feedback is critical, even genuine praise gets undermined.

Timing and Setting Matter

Feedback is a dish best served hot. Not saved up for the annual performance review. If someone did something great on Tuesday, tell them on Tuesday. If someone made an error in the morning meeting, talk to them that afternoon. Do not wait three months and then dump a list of accumulated grievances on them.

Setting matters too. Public praise can work for some people, though not everyone likes the spotlight. But corrective feedback? Always in private. Always.

Set Expectations About Feedback Itself

Here is a smart move the authors recommend. Before you start giving feedback on a project, talk about how the feedback will work.

When you give someone a stretch assignment – a task just beyond their current abilities – ask them: “What kind of feedback do you think you will need, and when will you need it?” Then build that into the plan. Set checkpoints. Carve out time to address the feedback.

You can also set expectations about the type of feedback coming: “Because this is a stretch assignment, I expect to give you a lot of corrective feedback. That is part of the development plan, not a sign that you are failing.”

Beyond specific tasks, you and your direct report can set general feedback rules. How often do they want it? New employees might want feedback every week. Experienced people on routine tasks might prefer once a month. Ask. Do not assume.

The Really Hard Part: Feedback on Behavior

Feedback on work tasks is relatively easy. Most professionals expect it and want it. Tell me I could have saved half a day by using pivot tables? Great, wish I knew sooner.

Feedback on workplace behavior is a whole different beast. Tell someone to clean up after themselves in the break room and you might hear: “Not in my job description. And how about telling Jane not to chew with her mouth open?”

We expect criticism of our work. We want to improve at our jobs. But behavioral feedback hits different. It feels personal. It touches habits formed over decades. It can feel like an attack on who we are, not just what we did.

But managers have to address disruptive behavior. If you let a skilled but disruptive team member get away with bad behavior because they deliver good work, you will destroy the team’s ability to perform long-term.

The authors are honest that there is no magic recipe. Some behaviors cannot be changed. Some should not be changed – the book mentions a global insurance company that realized it was better to help the team adapt to neurodivergent colleagues than to force those colleagues to act neurotypical.

The SBI Framework: Situation, Behavior, Impact

For when you do need to give behavioral feedback, the authors recommend the SBI framework from the Center for Creative Leadership. It stands for Situation, Behavior, Impact, and sometimes Intent.

Here is how it works with a real example – the break room mess:

Situation: Describe when and where it happened. Not “you always” or “you never.” Specific time and place. “When you used the break room yesterday afternoon…”

Behavior: Describe exactly what happened, without judgment. “You left a sandwich and a coffee mug on the floor.” Not “you trashed the place like a wild animal.”

Impact: Explain how it affected you. Frame it in terms of yourself, not others. “I would not have enjoyed using the break room in that condition, and I would have felt disrespected if I had to clean up after someone else.” Bringing other people into it usually backfires.

Intent: Give the person the benefit of the doubt. “I know you did not mean to disrespect anyone” or “Were you in a rush?” This signals that you see them as a decent person who made a mistake, not someone who deliberately makes life worse for everyone.

SBI works because most people are genuinely unaware of how their behavior affects others. The embarrassment of finding out is what triggers the defensive reaction. A graceful, specific, nonjudgmental approach makes that embarrassment easier to handle.

The Story of Nate Learning His Own Lesson

The chapter circles back to Nate, the manager from the opening story. Turns out his own manager told him that team morale was low because people only heard critical feedback and felt like they were doing terrible jobs.

Nate’s first reaction? “What the heck? I say nice stuff all the time!” Sound familiar?

After sitting with it, Nate realized his praise was always vague – “Great job!” – while his corrections were painfully specific. The math did not work. Detailed criticism plus generic praise equals people feeling criticized.

Nate tried to fix it by making his praise more specific. But he discovered something about himself: he was just bad at delivering praise. The harder he tried, the more forced it sounded, and the less people believed it.

So he did something clever. With every new hire, he set expectations upfront: “I am great at giving corrective feedback. I am terrible at delivering praise. When I do try to praise you, it may sound insincere because I have to work hard at it. That is my personal failing, and I hope you will help me get better.”

That simple act of honesty changed everything. It built trust. It set the right expectations. And it led to productive, lasting working relationships.

Key Takeaway

Feedback is not optional. You are giving it whether you plan to or not. The question is whether you give it well or badly.

The biggest mistakes managers make with feedback are: being vague with praise but specific with criticism, saving feedback for annual reviews instead of giving it in the moment, and using clever techniques that people see right through.

The best approach is simple. Be specific with both praise and corrections. Deliver feedback quickly. Set expectations about how feedback will work before you start a project. And when you have to address behavior, use the SBI framework: describe the situation, the behavior, the impact, and give the person the benefit of the doubt about their intent.

Most importantly, know yourself. If you are bad at some aspect of feedback, own it. Tell your people. That honesty builds more trust than any feedback sandwich ever could.

Book: The 12-Week MBA by Nathan Kracklauer & Bjorn Billhardt | ISBN: 978-0-306-83236-9

Previous: Chapter 12 - Trust and Expectations

Next up: Chapter 14 - Engagement and Motivation - What actually motivates people at work.

Part of the 12-Week MBA retelling series