Feedback only works when your team feels safe enough to hear it and accountable enough to act on it. Lia walks through three moves that make feedback land: sharing your own mistakes first, setting crystal-clear expectations before the conversation, and openly holding a high bar while signaling you believe your team can meet it. If you manage anyone and have been softening or avoiding feedback, this episode is the reset you need.
This episode is part of the Feedback & Hard Conversations series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…feedback is critical. It is the lifeblood of your team. It is the way that people understand how they’re doing, where they stand.”
“That one conversation that might be uncomfortable is not worse than the damage that is being created on the team by not dealing with it.”
“…we cannot withhold information that someone needs to have.”
“The more we’re having these harder conversations, the easier they get.”
Episode highlights
The reason feedback feels like confrontation (and why that cannot stop you)
Feedback triggers something primal. When someone in authority tells you that you fell short, it fires off every imposter-syndrome alarm available. Lia maps three common reactions: the “I am never good enough” spiral, the shame spiral (how many times did I do that thing?), and the defensive “you do not have all the information” response. Knowing this going in is not a reason to avoid feedback. It is a reason to prepare. The discomfort you feel before the conversation is not a signal to back off. It is part of the job description.
Pitfall one: letting it ride because you do not like conflict
The most common trap Lia sees is simple avoidance. You do not like upsetting people. Your team is already stretched thin. You want them to feel appreciated. So the issue sits. What happens next follows a predictable pattern: you start picking up extra slack, your own work suffers, or you quietly ask other team members to cover the gap. That second option is the one that quietly destroys trust. The people who are pulling their weight see exactly what is happening, and they are watching you do nothing about it. One uncomfortable conversation is not worse than the slow-burning resentment building across your whole team. Reframe it that way and it becomes easier to take action.
Pitfall two: waiting until it is too late to say anything
Lia draws on her performance improvement coaching work with smaller business clients to make a point that keeps coming up: in many cases, the team member who was not delivering had simply never been told. What is obvious to you as the owner or leader, someone who thinks about the business around the clock, genuinely did not register for that person. Putting someone on a formal performance plan without ever giving them clear corrective feedback is not just ineffective, it is unfair. Lia heard the same response repeatedly from team members in these situations: “I did not even know this was happening. Why did nobody say anything?” The manager’s honest answer was usually that they had been too busy, did not want the confrontation, or assumed the person should already know. None of those reasons hold up when someone’s job is on the line.
Why “they should already know” is a dangerous assumption
This mindset is one of the quietest ways performance problems escalate. When expectations live only in your head, there is no shared standard to return to. Lia points to a real example: a leader who was too slammed to have a hard conversation with someone missing key deliverables. While the leader stayed silent, other team members started noticing and talking. That person developed a bad reputation on the team without ever knowing there was a problem to fix. A few specific, timely conversations could have changed the outcome entirely.
The documentation fix most leaders skip
After a hard feedback conversation, most leaders move on and assume the issue is handled. Then it happens again. And again. And by the time you are ready to escalate or make a bigger call, you have nothing on paper. Lia’s fix is straightforward: after any corrective conversation, send a recap email. Here is what we talked about. Here is what I am expecting. Here is when we will check in. It creates a shared record, resets clear expectations, and gives you something concrete if the situation does not improve. You do not need to be an HR expert to know this is a step worth taking.
How to escalate without making yourself look like the problem
When you bring team concerns to your own manager or to HR, vague themes and extreme language (“they are always like this”) will not land. Leaders at higher levels need specific examples, and the first question anyone is going to ask is what feedback you have already given. If the answer is that you have not said anything yet, the conversation shifts to you. Lia is direct here: that is not the position you want to be in. Go with specifics, go having already addressed the issue with the team member, and go ready to describe how they responded. That is the version of the conversation that leads somewhere productive.
The real cost of staying silent
Avoiding feedback, waiting too long, escalating without examples, letting things slide: each of these individually is a problem. Together they create disengagement across the whole team. The people who are performing at a high level are watching. They notice when someone is not pulling their weight and they are looking to you to handle it. Lia closes with the reminder that hard feedback gets easier the more you practice it. The tools exist. The frameworks are there. But none of them matter if you are not willing to have the conversation in the first place.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 226: How to give feedback without it turning into a laundry list. When you have a lot of corrective feedback to give, rattling it off item by item erodes trust and trains your team to do the bare minimum. Lia’s fix is to categorize feedback into themes, connect each theme to a clear company why, and balance corrections with specific, concrete recognition. This episode is especially useful for small business owners and team leads who feel buried in constant corrections.
- Ep 214: How to give feedback after you’ve waited too long. It is never too late to give feedback, and avoiding it only makes the problem worse for your team. Lia walks through how to own the delay, contextualize the conversation, and deliver the message in a way that reduces defensiveness and rebuilds trust. Most useful for founders, owners, and team leads who have been carrying unspoken feedback and need a practical script to finally move it forward.
- Ep 194: Your team member isn’t performing. Have you actually given them feedback?. Most performance problems are not about a bad hire. They are about a feedback vacuum where expectations were never clearly set. Lia walks through a simple framework: set explicit expectations, give specific constructive feedback, and only then decide whether someone can turn it around. This episode is essential for any owner or leader who has ever thought ‘they should just know this.’
- Ep 178: How to give feedback that actually works (without your team shutting down). Feedback only works when your team feels safe enough to hear it and accountable enough to act on it. Lia walks through three moves that make feedback land: sharing your own mistakes first, setting crystal-clear expectations before the conversation, and openly holding a high bar while signaling you believe your team can meet it. If you manage anyone and have been softening or avoiding feedback, this episode is the reset you need.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Can we really talk about communication without talking about feedback? I mean, that’s the hardest part of communication as a leader, giving feedback, difficult feedback in that sense. Feedback is not just the hard stuff. It’s also recognition and appreciation. And I know I talk about that a lot on this show. But today, in terms of avoiding pitfalls in communication, we’re talking all about how to avoid some of the common challenges I see leaders fall into when it comes to communicating difficult feedback.
Because feedback is critical. It is the lifeblood of your team. It is the way that people understand how they’re doing, where they stand. It’s the way that you can be driving improvement on your team. So it is so important that we talk about it, that we get more comfortable with it, that we figure out, well, what traps are we falling into so that we can avoid those and really develop ourselves as a leader? And just like with communicating vision and strategy, this is a challenge leaders at every single stage of their career fall into.
If you’re newer at giving feedback, yeah, well, it’s sure going to be hard, right? But I have seen so many leaders avoid working on this and not get better at it. And it’s at the expense of their team because people never quite know how they stand. Or it’s a situation where you know, oh, like, yeah, that person is, they’re this way. And you don’t want to be labeled that way. You want to be a compassionate, empathetic leader that can deliver a direct message effectively.
Like, that’s what you want to be known as. Not, oh, they get really upset and like fly off the handle or everything’s fine and then it’s not, right? This is not how you build trust. This is not how you build engagement on your team. We want to be strong communicators that, where feedback doesn’t scare us. Where we don’t think, ah, confrontation, no thank you. And then we’re picking up extra slack because we didn’t have a hard conversation.
That is why episode two around communicating with confidence is all about delivering hard feedback. I’m Leah Garvin, and this is the new manager playbook where I’m on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. And feedback’s the hardest. It’s the hardest. And why is it the hardest? Because typically people get defensive when they’re on the receiving end. And I’m just going to call that when, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that 50%, maybe 80% of the time, depends on the makeup of your team, but folks are going to be defensive when you give them feedback.
Because let’s think about from the receiver’s standpoint. I’m being told by a superior, someone that has control over my career, my pay, my livelihood, this person has visibility, I’ve been working really hard, this person is telling me something that I did wasn’t right, didn’t go well, wasn’t good enough. It literally triggers every imposter feeling possible because it’s like, what? In my book, Unstuck, I talk about the different reactions that come up. For some of us, it’s feeling like I’m never good enough.
It’s this not enoughness thing. For others of us, we might be thinking, oh my God, it’s a shame feeling. We’re thinking, oh my God, they just noticed this thing and I must have been doing this before and how many times did I do that thing or I not do that thing? And we start spiraling. Others of us get triggered because we’re thinking, no, you don’t have all the information, it’s not fair, it’s not this. So our team members, they often, feedback triggers something that may have very little to do with the message you deliver.
So we’ve got to know that going into the conversation that this is like, yeah, we’re sort of like creating a confrontation for lack of a better frame of that, but we don’t avoid it because we don’t like confrontation. And the first pitfall that I want to talk about, manage to make is avoiding giving feedback because I don’t like confrontation. I don’t like upsetting people. I want people to like me. My team is overloaded. I want them to feel like they’re doing a good job.
So we just let it ride. And once we’ve let things fester as managers, maybe we start having to pick up extra slack. We start having to be covering for our team members more. We’re doing extra work. Then our own work starts suffering. And that’s a huge problem. You can imagine how quickly that spirals. Other times, and really more often than not, we’re asking others of our team members to pick up the slack. And that creates so much freaking resentment towards you as the manager and that person that’s not picking up their slack, that you are not helping that person at all.
Letting things slide and letting them just be a lesser contributor on the team when people are spread thin, when people are tired, this is not helping that person. That one conversation that might be uncomfortable is not worse than the damage that is being created on the team by not dealing with it. You’ve got to think about that that way, right? It’s a perspective shift. Yeah. It might have a painful, uncomfortable one conversation. I’m just going to, like, that’s that.
That is why you are a leader. You are here. You are going to be having to have uncomfortable conversations. You’re going to have to talk about things that you might like. You’re going to be on the receiving end of someone that is defensive. Someone that may say, well, I’m going to HR. Someone that may say, well, I don’t feel appreciated. I’m quitting. You might be on the receiving end of that. Mic drop, right? That’s part of it.
So we can get better at feedback where that’s less of a likelihood. But I’m not going to sugarcoat it. A lot of folks, they don’t want to hear anything about the way they’re working. Literally anything. Or they say they’re really open to feedback. That was my favorite. I love feedback. I love it. Give me feedback. And then I share with a team member. And then they’re immediately like, well, you this and that. And it’s like, oh, OK.
I like feedback. This happens to all of us. I have been there so many times that, like, I can’t even, it can’t even count. I think all of us have where we have prepared and we have thought about it and we have the most empathetic, supportive message. And someone still has a bad reaction. That is part of what is there. We cannot avoid giving feedback. We cannot avoid it. The other flavor of avoiding is avoiding until x, y, z.
And then we blow up or it’s too late or really having to have a hard conversation. And that person, again, they had no opportunity to course correct. They had no opportunity to fix it. One of the ways I’ve been supporting some of my smaller business clients this year is doing performance improvement coaching and setting up a plan for, OK, if someone is not delivering at 100% and we want to give them a chance, which I encourage, we want to give all our team members a chance.
Because what I see more and more and more is that the team member that wasn’t quite delivering had never gotten the feedback. They didn’t realize it. And what is so obvious to you as a leader and especially obvious to you as a business owner, if you’re thinking about your team 23 hours a day, it just didn’t occur to the team member. And that might be frustrating. We might think, OK, well, are they a fit? If they don’t think about this thing, it seems obvious to me, whatever.
That’s another conversation. But if they were never made aware of the expectation, if they missed it and were not aware that that was a big deal or that that can’t happen again, or that this is why that thing didn’t land, or this is how that thing needs to be adjusted, if nobody ever told them and now they’re on a performance plan, that’s rough. You wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that, right? You wouldn’t want to be in that position where nobody told you something.
And behind the scenes, they have been thinking about how you’re not a fit and they got to replace you and all this stuff, but you didn’t even know. And so we just can’t wait till it’s too late, because it’s first, it’s just not fair to that team member. Even if there’s some big misses, we’ve got to share with them, because what I saw in many, not all, but many of the situations where we made this performance plan, folks worked really hard to turn it around.
And the response from the team member was like, God, I didn’t even know this was happening. Why didn’t anybody say anything? And when I went back to the manager or the business owner or whoever and said, well, it seems like some of this feedback never got to them. They say, yeah, I know, it’s been busy, or I didn’t really want to have a hard conversation or confrontation, or they should know better and they should really do this.
It was a lot back on them. And I understand that, definitely. And we’ve got to give the feedback. We’ve just got to do it. We cannot avoid it. And on this show, I have many, many episodes on how to give hard feedback. So I’m actually not going to get into the teaching on that today, because I know I talk about that all the time. The quick TLDR is to be specific, to be empathetic, to talk about in a context of where things are going well-ish.
I think it’s not the compliment sandwich, but it sort of is. I think people need to have the context around, hey, there’s been some wins here, but this thing is still really struggling, and then get specific on that. But the point here is to be doing it, is to not avoid it, to get support, to think about how can you bring empathy into the conversation, even if you’re frustrating? How can you be more specific? And how can you be giving feedback in a timely manner?
Those are the best practices of feedback. So avoiding it, letting it go too long, all those things are hurting that team member, hurting your broader team, and hurting yourself as a leader. And you got big goals for next year. We all have big goals every day, right? It’s not like a New Year thing at all. But if we’re going to get there, we cannot withhold information that someone needs to have. And I heard an example recently of a leader, and he was really, really slammed.
He just did not have the time to have this hard conversation with someone. That person was working hard, but there were some really big things getting missed. And then other people on the team started talking about, hey, this person’s really not pulling their weight. And then they were seen as a problem, and they didn’t even know it. And so this manager hasn’t dealt with it, and the team member is kind of getting a bad reputation more broadly because this wasn’t dealt with.
And we talked about it and how important it is to make sure that person’s aware of these small shifts that they could be making to be able to be delivering, right? And that is what part of being a manager is about. So it’s so critical to be doing that, again, for you, for the broader team, for that team member. Simple thing, I think what we don’t do all the time is we don’t document it. We have a conversation, and maybe, especially with hard feedback, we’ve had it once.
We don’t really reset clear expectations. And then it happens again, it happens again. And then we’re like, oh, god, I think it’s time to make a move, and we have nothing to show for it. So really simple thing that we get wrong that is a quick fix is when you have a hard conversation, especially with very specific corrective feedback, sending a recap email and saying, hey, here’s what we talked about. Here’s what I’m expecting. Let’s meet about this next week or whenever to touch base on it.
And having that, because if things are pretty bad, you’re going to want a paper trail. I’m not an HR expert. I’m not an employment lawyer. I am a team management and operations expert where I’m saying, this I know is what HR is going to tell you to have. So we’re not going to talk about firing and logistics with that, but it’s something that you’re going to want to have. Another thing I’m seeing come up with feedback is when we’re escalating it to our own manager or our own leaders or even someone as a sounding board.
And we’re bringing big themes up, but we’re not bringing specific examples. And I remember this when I was managing back working in big tech. I had some frustrations with a team member, and I talked to my manager about it. And then she was like, oh, my god, is this a huge issue? And I was like, oh, wait. I was just kind of venting about it. And I think we don’t, when we’re talking about our team members or escalating things, we want to be very specific.
So our own management chain, they are worried about the broader health and the broader priorities of the organization. That’s not the person to kind of vent to your team members about, just to be really candid about that. And it’s not someone to go with these extremes, they’re always doing this or they’re never this, because that person doesn’t have a lot of evidence to hang on to, because they probably don’t have direct visibility. And so when you’re sharing with a higher up or you’re going to HR with a challenge or something like that, it’s really important to have specific concrete examples and to have already given the feedback, because I will tell you, the first thing anybody’s going to tell you is, well, what feedback have you given?
What has their response been? You know, how has it gone as they’ve been working through this challenge? And if you say, well, I’m really frustrated, I haven’t said anything. It kind of just looks bad as a leader. Like, why didn’t you say anything? Because I don’t like confrontation. That’s not the conversation you want to be in with your own manager, right? Just like, honestly, it’s not. You want to have taken some action. So these are the pitfalls with giving hard feedback that will not only jeopardize that team member from ever being able to come back from that, but starts to create disengagement and dissatisfaction on your broader team.
Because if there’s someone that’s not pulling their weight, everybody notices it. And they’re looking to you to be doing something about it. So avoiding it, waiting until it’s too late, not talking about it, not dealing with it, escalating it without examples, letting things go. These are things that are going to create such stress for you on the team. And being a leader, giving hard feedback that is par for the course, having hard conversations, you know, there’s so many tools out there for getting better at it.
Send me an email, hello, at leahrovan.com. We can talk all about it. In New Manager Playbook, I talk about feedback. In the Unstoppable Team, I talk about feedback. In Unstuck, feedback is a topic I have talked about more than any other topic in the world because, in my world, because it is something that is so terrifying. There are so many resources out there. So I don’t want to leave you hanging on tools. But this is really, again, on the reasons we want to get better at it.
And if you’re seeing this as a broader issue on your team, I do a lot of workshops on giving, receiving feedback, especially with managers, really practicing the nuts and bolts of feedback. So here to support too. All right, we’ve got this. We cannot avoid it. The more we’re having these harder conversations, the easier they get. Got to do them with empathy. Got to be specific. Got to show your team members that you’re here to support them through it.
We can’t avoid it. All right, see you next time.
Questions this episode answers
What happens when a leader keeps avoiding giving tough feedback to an underperforming team member?
When you avoid the conversation, the problem doesn't stay contained. Other team members start picking up the slack, resentment builds toward you and the person not pulling their weight, and that person quietly develops a bad reputation they don't even know about. You end up doing extra work, your own performance suffers, and by the time you finally address it, the damage is already done. One uncomfortable conversation is never worse than the slow harm created by staying silent.
How do I avoid getting caught off guard if I need to put someone on a performance plan?
After any hard feedback conversation, send a recap email right away. Write down what you discussed, what you expect going forward, and when you'll follow up. This creates a paper trail that HR will ask for if things escalate. Most leaders skip this step and then find themselves with nothing to show when a situation gets serious. Documenting the conversation protects the team member too, because it gives them a clear record of what was asked of them.
Why do team members get so defensive when I give them feedback even when I try to be nice about it?
Receiving feedback from someone who controls your pay and career triggers deep feelings that often have nothing to do with what you actually said. Some people spiral into shame, some feel like they are never good enough, and some immediately feel it is unfair. Going in knowing defensiveness is likely, maybe 50 to 80 percent of the time, helps you stay steady. It does not mean your delivery was wrong. It means feedback hits something personal for the receiver, and that is just part of the territory.
What should I do before escalating a team member issue to my own manager or HR?
Before you escalate, make sure you have already given the feedback directly and have specific concrete examples ready, not just general themes or frustrated venting. The first question anyone above you will ask is what feedback you have given and how the person responded. If the answer is that you have not said anything yet, it reflects poorly on you as a leader. Go to your own manager or HR after you have taken action, not instead of taking it.
Is it ever okay to wait before giving someone critical feedback?
Waiting almost always backfires. What feels obvious to you as a leader genuinely may not have occurred to your team member at all. If someone lands on a performance plan and was never told what was going wrong, that is not fair to them, and it usually shows. In many cases, when people finally learned what was expected, they worked hard to turn things around. Timely, specific feedback gives people a real chance to course correct. Waiting until it is too late takes that chance away.