How to give difficult feedback without the relationship falling apart

“It’s nothing serious, it’s just … you know, maybe you could be a bit more …”

The sentence hangs in the air. Your colleague looks at you and waits, and you realise that in the car on the way to work you rehearsed a completely different opening three times. Clear, calm, concrete. Now that he is sitting in front of you, it all softens into something nobody will understand — least of all him. He leaves the office feeling that everything was fine. You are left feeling that you said nothing. And in two weeks you will have to start the same conversation again, only by then you will be angrier.

Giving difficult feedback is one of those skills we all need and almost nobody was ever really taught. Managers need it every week. Colleagues need it when someone else’s work is suffering. Parents, partners and friends need it too. This piece is about giving — about how to say something the other person will not want to hear without bringing the relationship down. I have written about the other side, receiving, in How to take criticism without falling apart.

Why we put it off for so long

People rarely put off a difficult conversation because they do not know what is wrong. They put it off because they are afraid of what will happen to the relationship. What if he takes offence? What if she cries? What if they stop liking me? What if I come across as the kind of boss I once hated myself?

Behind this fear there is often a belief we rarely say out loud: that closeness and honesty are opposites. That you can have either a good relationship or a clear word, but not both. Anyone who believes this will keep choosing between two bad options — staying silent and quietly fuming, or gathering courage for so long that they eventually explode. I have devoted a piece to managers who care more about being liked than about being clear, The leader who wants to be liked: what conflict avoidance costs.

In reality, relationships in which hard things get said are not weaker. They are safer. Someone who knows you will tell them when something is wrong can also believe you when you praise them.

What research shows: feedback is not always helpful

The most sobering finding in this field comes from an extensive meta-analysis published in 1996 by Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi. They reviewed several hundred studies of how feedback affects performance at work. On average it helped. But in more than a third of cases, performance fell after feedback — it did not stay the same, it got worse.

What mattered was where the feedback directed attention. When it was about the task — what was done, what was missing, what needed to be different — it helped people. When it shifted attention to the person themselves, to their worth, ability or character, it often did harm. Once someone starts asking “Am I any good?” instead of “What do I need to fix?”, their energy moves from the work to self-defence.

This fits well with what we know about shame. Guilt says “I did something wrong”; shame says “there is something wrong with me”. Feedback that triggers shame does not move a person forward. It shuts them down.

Feedback is an event in a relationship

As a therapist in training in marriage and family therapy, I look at what happens between people systemically. Feedback is not a parcel you send and the other person receives. It is an event in a relationship that has a history and a future. How it is heard depends on everything that has happened between you before: whether you have ever told them anything good, whether you have ever stood up for them, whether they know you care about them.

It also matters who else is part of the event. In teams it is very common for hard things not to go straight to the person but around them. A manager complains about a team member to another team member. The team talks about the manager over coffee. HR finds out before the person concerned. In family therapy we call this triangulation: the tension between two people spills over onto a third, because that is less uncomfortable than a direct conversation.

Triangulation calms things for a short while, but in the long run it does two things: the person being talked about finds out last, and when they do, it is not only the content that hurts but the fact that everyone knew. The most respectful thing you can do is to tell the hard thing to them first.

Radical candour — and why to handle it with care

In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott described a simple framework that has become very popular with managers. She places feedback on two axes: how much you care personally about the person, and how willing you are to challenge directly by saying what is wrong. When there is plenty of both, she speaks of radical candour. When you care but stay silent, she calls it “ruinous empathy” — a kindness that takes away the person’s chance to improve. Directness without care is aggression. When there is neither, it is manipulative insincerity: a friendly face and a conversation behind someone’s back.

The framework is useful because it shows that warmth and clarity are not opposites. Many people who think of themselves as kind are actually in the ruinous empathy quadrant: they are so afraid of hurting someone that they do not tell them what they need to hear.

But here is my caution. In practice the word “radical” is easily misused. I have heard people use it to justify ordinary rudeness: “I’m just being candid.” Scott herself stresses that candour without care is not radical candour but aggression. And care is not proved by words just before the criticism. It is proved over time, in the relationship. If that is missing, no framework will help you — you will simply be someone who speaks harshly.

The SBI model: situation, behaviour, impact

For the structure of the conversation itself there is a simple, well-tested tool. The Center for Creative Leadership calls it SBI — situation, behaviour, impact.

• Situation: when and where it happened. “At yesterday’s meeting with the client …”
• Behaviour: exactly what the person did or said — what a camera would have recorded, not your interpretation. “… you interrupted Maja twice while she was presenting the figures …”
• Impact: what this led to — for you, for others, for the work. “… and afterwards the client only directed questions at you. After the meeting Maja said she didn’t see the point of coming at all.”

The key is the difference between behaviour and interpretation. “You were arrogant” is an interpretation. “You interrupted her twice” is behaviour. You can argue about an interpretation forever. About behaviour you mostly cannot — it either happened or it didn’t. That leaves room to talk about what matters: why it happened and what now.

Many people add a fourth element: a question or a request. “How did you experience the meeting?” or “Next time I’d like Maja to finish her presentation.” Without it, SBI remains a description that does not say where to go next.

How to prepare: a five-step exercise

Most difficult conversations do not go wrong during the conversation but before it — because we go into them angry, unprepared or with the wrong goal. Before your next conversation of this kind, take fifteen minutes for this preparation.

1. Check your own state. How angry are you on a scale of 1 to 10? If you are above 6, postpone the conversation. Anger is not forbidden, but if it leads the conversation, the other person will hear the anger, not the content.
2. Write down what you want to happen. Not “that he realises how wrong it is”, but something concrete: “that the report arrives on time”, “that Maja gets to finish her presentation”. If you cannot write down the goal, the conversation is not ready yet.
3. Write down the situation, behaviour and impact. One sentence for each. Cross out every adjective about character and every “always” and “never”.
4. Write down what you don’t know. Perhaps they have a sick child at home. Perhaps they didn’t know about the deadline. Perhaps nobody told them what was expected. Prepare at least one question that you will genuinely ask.
5. Choose the time and place. One to one, not in front of others; in person or at least by phone, not by email; not on a Friday at four, when the other person has the whole weekend to chew it over. And don’t wait for weeks — the closer to the event, the less room there is for guessing.

If you do this preparation a few times, you will notice that most of the work is done at the second step. A clear goal makes the conversation shorter, calmer and fairer.

What it can sound like

This is how a conversation between a team manager and a colleague who keeps missing deadlines might begin (composite, not a real person):

“I’d like to talk to you about the reports. The last three came in a day late, and each time Nina had to put together the summary for management over the weekend. I’m interested in how you see it.”
“You know I’ve got a huge amount of work. Nobody else does half as much as I do.”
“I know you’ve got a lot of work, and I can see it. That’s exactly why I want to understand what’s going on. Is it the deadline, the volume, or something else?”
“… Maybe the deadline. I don’t get the data from finance until Thursday.”
“I didn’t know that. Then let’s talk about whether we move the deadline or find another way to get the data.”

Notice what happened. The first response was defence — and it almost always is. The manager did not take fright and did not start trying to convince him. She acknowledged what was true and went back to the question. Only then did it become clear where the problem lay. If after the first defence she had closed the conversation with “well, all right, just try”, everything would have repeated itself.

What you bring from home

In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we look at how we carry patterns from our family of origin into all our later relationships. The way we give feedback is very often one of those patterns.

If criticism in your family was always loud, humiliating or unpredictable, you may be so afraid of becoming like that that you would rather say nothing. If problems were never talked about at home and tension could only be felt in the silence, a clear word may feel almost violent to you. If you were the child who had to calm your parents down, you may wrap criticism in so much cotton wool that nobody recognises it. And if you grew up with someone who got attention by criticising others, you may catch yourself criticising more harshly than you want to.

In his research with couples, John Gottman showed that the first minutes of a difficult conversation strongly predict how it will end: a conversation that starts with an attack rarely ends well. This holds outside relationships too. Criticism of the person, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling — what Gottman calls the four horsemen — are just as destructive in the office as in the living room.

You do not need to resolve everything from your childhood to be able to say something difficult. But it helps to notice when an old fear speaks up — and to tell yourself in that moment: “This is my old pattern. Now I’m here, in this office, with this person.” If you find it hard to say what you need more generally, you may find Assertiveness: how to say what you want without aggression or apology helpful.

When the other person reacts strongly

Even the best-prepared conversation can trigger tears, anger or silence. That does not mean you did something wrong. It means something important was heard.

Don’t take the message back. When someone starts to cry, it is tempting to say “it’s not that bad, forget it”. That takes away information they need and tells them you cannot cope with their feelings. Better: “I can see this has hurt. Take your time. I still think it’s important that we talk about it.”

Don’t answer an attack with an attack. Defence is almost always the first response. If you answer it with another argument, the conversation turns into a contest. It helps to hear the defence as a sign that something hurts, and to return to the question.

Let the conversation continue later. You do not have to resolve everything in one conversation. Sometimes the most you can do is to say the message clearly and come back a day or two later: “How is it now that you’ve had time to think?”

If you yourself have high standards as a manager, it is worth checking whether difficult conversations are happening too often. I have written about how your expectations affect people in A perfectionist at the head of a team.

Where this advice falls short

Everything above assumes a reasonably healthy relationship and a reasonably healthy organisation. That is not always the case.

Feedback upwards is different. When you tell your manager something difficult, you risk more than they do when they tell you something. The SBI structure helps here too, but it is fair to assess the risk realistically and not to be the only one carrying the burden.

Not everything is an individual problem. If three people in a team are late with the same reports, the answer is not the same conversation three times. In that case the problem probably lies in the system — in deadlines, the flow of information, the number of people — and needs to be addressed there.

Feedback is no substitute for action. If it is a matter of harassment, humiliation, discrimination or systematic bullying, it is no longer a topic for a development conversation. Such things need to be documented and reported through the route the organisation provides; for legal questions, seek help from a trade union or legal advice, not from me.

Safety is a precondition, not a result. Amy Edmondson showed that teams in which people feel psychologically safe learn more — they talk about mistakes instead of hiding them. If every criticism in a team means danger, no technique will help you until the climate changes.

If you would like to look at where your own difficulty with hard conversations comes from, I also work with English-speaking clients in person in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• Feedback is not always helpful: in Kluger and DeNisi’s meta-analysis, performance got worse in more than a third of cases — most often when the feedback was aimed at the person rather than the task.
• Talk about behaviour, not character. Situation, behaviour, impact and a question are enough.
• Warmth and clarity are not opposites. Silence out of kindness takes away someone’s chance to improve.
• Say the hard thing to the person first, not to others about them.
• Defence is a normal first response. Don’t take the message back, and don’t answer with an attack.