FIELD GUIDE NO. 4
Feedback
Making Your Feedback Count
You give feedback. You make a point of it. But if your team had to describe your standards using only the feedback you’ve given them, could they? Most feedback fails — not because it’s wrong, but because it’s too vague to act on, too late to matter, or too one-sided to trust. This guide breaks the practice into five workable pieces, hands you a diagnostic to find where yours is leaking, and gives you one piece of real feedback to deliver within 48 hours.
Every practice, taken apart.
Each of the five practices follows the same anatomy: the pattern I see most in coaching, what builds it and what erodes it, how to know it’s working — and how to know it isn’t — a before-and-after gallery of real feedback rewritten, the coaching questions that expose the gap, one experiment to run within 48 hours, and a 30-day build. Plus the real rooms where each one shows up or falls apart.
THE GAP IS THE PROBLEM.
TWO SENTENCES, 48 HOURS.
IT GOES BOTH WAYS.
Most leaders aren’t withholding feedback. They’re giving warmth instead of signal — and their team is left guessing at what good looks like. The diagnostic names your pattern: vague, delayed, corrective-only, one-way, or comfortable.
The behavior, then the impact — delivered inside the window, while it’s still data instead of history. Feedback isn’t a review-season event. It’s a metabolism, and this guide rebuilds yours.
Two of the five practices cover the part most guides skip: receiving feedback without defending it away, and making it safe for the people below you to tell you the truth.
How to use it.
This is a practice, not an event. Don’t overhaul how you give feedback in one week — find the practice where you break down, read that one entry, run the experiment, and say the two sentences to a real person. One practice. 48 hours. Come back. Then the next one.
Part of The Right Altitude Field Guides — see the full series or start with the flagship The Right Altitude