We crave it. We fear it. We give it badly and receive it even worse.

Feedback is one of the most powerful tools we have for growth as leaders, as colleagues, as human beings. And yet, in most organizations, it is one of the most misused.

I’ve spent years studying what helps people flourish at work. What I keep coming back to is this: you cannot grow without data. And feedback, at its core, is data. It tells you the distance between where you are and where you want to be.

Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Brodie Riordan on my Flourishing Edge podcast, a deep expert on the science of feedback and author of Feedback Fundamentals and Evidence-Based Practices. Brodie has dedicated her career, including a PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and decades of research, to one question:

what actually makes feedback work?

What she shared added important new layers to how I think about the entire feedback conversation. I want to share the highlights here,  but I’d strongly encourage you to listen to the full episode. There is so much richness in what Brodie unpacks, and this article can only scratch the surface.

The Two Biggest Mistakes We Make

Before we get to the framework, let’s name what’s going wrong.

On the giving side: Over-functioning.

Most feedback providers feel compelled to diagnose. They try to explain why someone did something, what their intentions were, and what they should do to fix it. Brodie’s invitation is to stop. Your job is simpler and more powerful: hold up the mirror. Share what you observed. Share why it matters. Then give the other person space to process and decide what to do with it.

I’ve seen this play out so many times. A leader builds a story about a team member, “she doesn’t care,” “he’s always distracted”, without ever actually asking what’s going on. I had a coaching client who was about to take drastic action with a colleague who was perpetually late to a standing meeting. Weeks of frustration had built up. When he finally asked, rather than assumed, he discovered the person was a single dad with a school drop-off that clashed with the meeting time. They changed the meeting. The relationship transformed.

That never happens when we diagnose instead of sharing data.

On the receiving side: The victim mindset.

Feedback is happening to you, that’s how most people experience it. But Brodie is clear: you are an equal participant. You have autonomy. You have a choice about what you accept and what you do with it.

The problem is we feel pressure to hear feedback, process it, accept it, and respond all in real time. Our brains don’t work that way. Especially when the feedback is surprising or triggers vulnerability.

Give yourself permission to process. It may take hours or days. That’s not weakness. That’s neuroscience.

Brodie’s Four-Part Framework for Better Feedback

In her research with Paul Levy at the University of Akron, which became the foundation of her book, Brodie distilled every feedback exchange, regardless of context, into four core components. Understanding each one changes how you approach every feedback conversation.

  1. The Provider
  • Who is giving the feedback? It could be a person, a system, even self-generated self-talk. We are surrounded by feedback signals all day, and recognizing the source matters
  • Before you say a single word, check your intention. Ask yourself honestly: am I sharing this to help this person grow and perform better? Because if the answer is anything else, if there’s a trace of wanting to exert authority, to put someone in their place, to release your own frustration, pause. That is not feedback. That is something else, and it will do damage
  • Once your intention is clear, your job is actually quite narrow: share what you observed, and share why it matters. Not why you think it happened. Not what you think the person should do to fix it. Not your interpretation of their character or motivation. Just the data
  1. The Message
  • Focus on observable behaviors, never on inferences or character judgments
  • The distinction matters: “You were late turning in your last three deliverables” versus “You are disorganized and unreliable”. One opens a conversation, the other shuts it down
  • Use the Situation-Behavior-Impact model: What was the situation? What was the specific behavior? What was the impact?
  • Be as specific as possible. Vague feedback is hard to act on
  • Avoid what Brodie calls ’empty calorie feedback’. Praise like ‘great job’ or ‘well done’ that feels good in the moment but gives the other person nothing useful to hold onto or build on
  • Drop the feedback sandwich. The format of something positive, then the real message, then something positive again. The problem is twofold. Firstly, people leave the conversation confused about whether what they heard was good news or bad news. Secondly, it conditions people to distrust every compliment they receive. If they’ve only ever experienced positive feedback as a setup for criticism, they stop being able to hear it for what it is. You waste the gift of genuine praise.
  1. The Recipient
  • Receiving feedback is a skill, and most of us haven’t been taught it
  • Brodie’s seven-step process for receiving feedback well: hear it, let the initial emotional reaction pass, give rational thought time to catch up, identify what’s missing or unclear, decide whether to accept it, translate it into implications, and then take intentional action
  • You always have a choice about whether and how you act on feedback even when there are consequences for ignoring it
  • If you’re emotionally charged, say so. “I need some time to process this, can we reconnect?” is a powerful and generous response for both parties
  1. The Context
  • Even the most perfectly crafted message will fail in the wrong context
  • Always give feedback in private. The research on “public self-consciousness” is clear: when people receive feedback in front of others, cognitive resources get diverted inward, to managing emotions and worrying about what others think, rather than actually hearing the message
  • Timing matters. Give feedback as soon as possible after something happens. While it’s fresh for both parties. Waiting three months communicates that you didn’t care enough to say something sooner
  • One important exception: if the situation is emotionally charged, for either party, wait until things cool down. A promotion announcement and developmental feedback in the same breath means the developmental feedback won’t land at all

Rethinking Positive and Negative Feedback

“Positive” and “negative” feedback are technical terms, not emotional ones. Positive feedback tells you you’re on track or have exceeded your goal. Negative feedback tells you there’s still a gap. Neither is inherently good or bad, they’re both data.

What matters is how we use them:

  • Build the relationship bank account first. Meaningful positive feedback, behavioral, specific, evidence-based, creates the credibility foundation that allows hard messages to land. Leaders who only ever give corrective feedback eventually lose the ear of their team
  • Separate positive and negative feedback. Don’t combine them. When you have positive feedback to share, share it fully and clearly. When you have a gap to address, address it directly don’t cushion it or dilute it
  • Prioritize process feedback over outcome feedback. Brodie’s research shows that people value negative process feedback, real-time course corrections, far more than summative end-of-year reviews. Give people data they can actually use, while they’re still in the work

Three Things You Can Do This Week

Brodie closed our conversation with three actionable invitations. I’m sharing them here exactly as she offered them.

If you have feedback you’ve been holding back: Write it down. Say it out loud before you deliver it. Make sure it’s focused on behavior, evidence-based, and specific. Then say it and stop talking. Give the other person space to process.

If you want more and better feedback: Use the pre-ask. Before an important presentation, a key meeting, or a high-stakes deliverable, ask a trusted colleague to pay close attention to specific things you’re working on. Ask them for feedback afterward. You’ve opened the door. You’ve lowered their anxiety. You’ll get far richer data.

If you want to understand feedback better: Pick one day. Write down every feedback moment every time you give, receive, ask for, or use feedback. Most feedback doesn’t come in dramatic performance conversations. It comes from self-talk, from technology, from small interactions we barely notice.

The Real Invitation

Feedback is not a performance management tool. It is a dialogue, it is data, and it is a gift, if we know how to give it, and how to receive it.

Feedback helps you assess the distance between where you are and where you want to be. When we share data instead of diagnoses, when we receive it with curiosity instead of defensiveness, when we create environments where it flows freely, people grow and teams flourish.

This is one of those conversations I keep returning to. Brodie’s depth on this topic is rare, and her ability to make decades of academic research genuinely accessible is a gift in itself.

If this resonated, listen to the full conversation with Brodie on the Flourishing Edge podcast. We go deep on the seven-step receiving process, the nuances of process versus outcome feedback, the research on feedback environments, and a lot more.

Learn more about Brodie Riordan on LinkedIn.

Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Brodie Riordan below, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.

Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.

Make Flourishing Your Competitive Edge.