How to Give Feedback to Employees Without Breaking Them

The best way to give feedback to employees frames the person as better than the thing they just did. It happens in private, close to the event, from someone who has earned the right to say it, and it ends with the person working out what they'd do differently rather than being told. Done well it raises performance. Done publicly, or saved up for a review, it teaches people to hide problems from you.

I've been on both sides of this. The best manager I ever had corrected me in a way that made me want to be better for months afterwards. And I once corrected someone so badly he nearly punched me. Here's what I've taken from both.

The line that changed how I work

I spent years at a skydiving operation with a manager who was exceptional at this, and his method was simple. If you'd done something he didn't like, he took you aside. Privately. No public dressing down, no being made small in front of your peers.

And then he'd say a version of this:

"I had a higher expectation of you than this."

That sentence did more for my performance than any KPI ever has.

It didn't shame me. It didn't argue with me about what happened. It reminded me who he thought I was, and left a gap between that person and the one who'd just stuffed up. I always wanted to close that gap. I always did.

Why does that approach work?

Because it corrects the behaviour without attacking the person. In fact it does the opposite of attacking them. It tells them you hold a high opinion of them, and that today didn't match it.

Almost nobody argues with that. If you tell someone they're careless, they defend themselves. If you tell them you expected better because you think they're better, they've got two options: agree with your good opinion of them, or argue that you're wrong about them. In my experience, people are far more likely to take the first.

The other half of why it worked is harder to copy. He'd earned the right to say it, and so had I. There was history there. Out of the wrong mouth, "I had a higher expectation of you" is just a guilt trip with better manners.

How do you give feedback to employees when you're new and haven't earned that yet?

You use the same mechanism, and you build the credibility into the sentence rather than assuming it. Something like:

"We have high hopes for you here and we want to support you to do your best. What happened today, I don't believe that was you at your best. What could have been done better?"

Four things are happening in there.

• High hopes establishes the expectation before the correction lands

• We want to support you tells them this is help, not punishment

• I don't believe that was you at your best separates the person from the event

• What could have been done better? hands them the diagnosis instead of delivering a verdict

That last one matters more than people think. When someone works out the improvement themselves, they're more likely to own it. When you simply hand them the answer, you're more likely to get compliance. Those produce very different behaviour six weeks later.

The time I got it completely wrong

I once had a disagreement with a less experienced instructor. I had a point. He had a point too, though I couldn't see that at the time.

Instead of sitting down calmly and working through what happened and what we'd both do differently, I made an off-the-cuff comment in front of his peers. He came very close to punching me.

To his credit, he didn't hold a grudge and we moved on. But nothing useful came out of it. No one improved. The thing I was actually right about got completely lost, because the moment I said it publicly, it stopped being about the work and became about status.

That's the real cost of public correction. It's not that it's harsh. It's that it converts a performance conversation into an ego contest, and once ego is in the room nobody learns anything.

You can't control someone else's ego. You can only put yours aside to get the best result. That's the whole lesson, and it's the same one the skydiving manager understood instinctively when he took people out the back rather than doing it on the floor.

How do managers usually get correction wrong?

All of the classics are real and I've seen them all. Saving it for the performance review, months after anyone can do anything about it. The compliment sandwich, which people see coming and mentally discard the bread. Sending it by email so you don't have to watch the reaction. Avoiding it altogether and letting it fester.

But the worst one I've experienced is subtler than any of those.

You do a great job 99 percent of the time. Then you have a bad day, one thing goes wrong, and that's the only thing that gets mentioned. No acknowledgement of the ninety nine. Just the one.

What that teaches a good employee is that consistent work is invisible here and only mistakes get attention. It's a fast way to lose the people you least want to lose, and it is entirely avoidable.

The good managers handle that day completely differently. They notice it's out of character, because they know what your character is. They check in. They ask whether you're alright, at work and outside it. Then they help you find a way to stop it happening again.

That isn't softness. It's accuracy. A one-off from a reliable person and a pattern from an unreliable one are different problems, and treating them the same way gets both wrong.

Where's the line between support and being too precious?

This is the genuinely hard part, and you can't be precious about it either. A culture where nobody can ever be held to anything isn't an ideal culture, it's just a different kind of failure. (I've written more about that balance in what an ideal workplace culture actually is.)

The way I'd think about it: ideally you have staff you trust enough that when something does go wrong, it's a signal, not a habit. Too much on at work, too much on at home, workload and stress stacked up. That's worth digging into. When it's every week, that's a different conversation.

And here's the practical problem most managers hit. Working through a genuine performance issue with someone takes time, and most managers don't have any, because they're buried in operational problems that should never have reached their desk.

This is where a proper improvement system pays for itself twice.

Toyota launched its Creative Idea Suggestion System in 1951, and by 1973 its 43,000 employees were submitting more than 250,000 suggestions a year, with over 70 percent of them adopted. The point was never just cost saving. It was that the person doing the job is best placed to see how it could be safer, easier or better, and to fix it themselves. (It's the same reason Toyota beat Ford with the very same suggestion system: the tool matters far less than the culture around it.)

The first payoff is obvious: thousands of small improvements compounding. The second is the one nobody talks about. When the floor is solving the floor's problems, the manager gets their time back, and time is exactly what you need to work through something properly with one struggling person while the rest of the team keeps moving. (That only works if the feedback actually goes somewhere, which is the whole difference between a real feedback system and a suggestion box.)

Use that time. Apply the same improvement logic to the person as you would to a process: what's actually going wrong, what would good look like, what will we try, when will we check. Keep a written record as you go. And if you genuinely work at it together and no solution appears, it might be time for them to move on. That's a fair outcome after a fair process. It's not a fair outcome after six months of silence followed by a surprise.

The short version

• Correct in private, close to the event, never in front of peers

• Frame the person as better than the behaviour they just showed

• Ask what could have been done better rather than telling them

• Notice when something is out of character, and check on the human before the performance

• Don't let 99 percent good work disappear behind one bad day

• Build a system that handles the small stuff so you have time to handle the people stuff

• If it's a genuine pattern, work it properly, write it down, and be prepared to part ways

None of this costs money. All of it costs attention, which for most managers is the scarcer resource. If people have gone quiet on you, it's usually worth understanding what causes a lack of psychological safety in the first place.

If you want to know where your team currently sits, our free Team Culture Scorecard takes about five minutes.

And if you'd like to talk about building the conditions that make these conversations easier, click here to enquire.

Culture that drives performance.

Sources and further reading

• Toyota Motor Corporation, Toyota Company Suggestion Program Vigorously Supported by Employees (22 October 1973)

• Art of Lean, Creative Idea Suggestion System, TPS Encyclopedia

• Yasuda, Y., 40 Years, 20 Million Ideas: The Toyota Suggestion System (Productivity Press, 1991)