Feedback is Mostly Crap.

Yep, I said it.

We have a feedback problem, and it is not the one most people think it is.

The problem is not that people are getting too little feedback. It is that we have collectively decided that feedback is the answer to career development, and the research says otherwise.

A study published in Harvard Business Review found that more than half of the way you rate someone else's performance actually reflects your own characteristics, not theirs. Your experiences, your gaps, your biases, your personal definition of what "good" looks like…all of it gets projected onto the person sitting across from you. You think you are giving them insight. You are mostly giving them a mirror of yourself.

And Gallup found that only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive actually helps them do better work. We have built entire performance cultures on something that only works for one in four people.

So why do we keep doing it?

Because giving feedback feels productive…like leadership….like…helping people.

I have been in rooms where a senior person tells someone they need to get better at mentoring….when I have never once seen that senior person sit down and develop another human being. I have watched people tell others to sell more, network harder, be more strategic….from a person that has never done any of those things of them themselves.

That is not feedback. That is projection wrapped in authority. And, it’s annoying. The people receiving the email can see right through it.

Neuroscience tells us about what happens when you receive feedback list this…your brain shifts into a threat response. Your learning center shuts down. You either become defensive or you become compliant, and neither of those outcomes produces growth.

The people we are trying to develop deserve better than that.

What actually works

When you stop telling people what you see and start asking them what they see, something different happens. They have to think. They have to reflect. They have to arrive at their own conclusions….which means those conclusions actually stick.

You are not opening the path for people when you lay out the plan for them. You open the path when you hand them the compass and trust them to find their own way.

The leaders who shaped me most were not the ones who told me what to do differently. They were the ones who asked me questions I could not stop thinking about long after I left the room.

Here is what I believe sits at the center of great development: every person has a genius…something they do that is effortless for them and genuinely difficult for others. And they have an application…the way they are currently directing, or using that genius. When those two things are aligned and pointed in the right direction, their value multiplies. When they are not, it does not matter how much feedback you give someone. You are adjusting the wrong variable.

Genius x Application = Value. That is the equation. And you cannot solve it for someone else. You can only ask questions that help them solve it for themselves.

If you want to actually develop someone, trade the feedback for these questions.

To help them find their genius:

"When do you feel like you are operating at your very best? What is different about those moments?"

"What do people come to you for that they do not seem to go to others for?"

"What feels obvious or easy to you that you notice others find hard?"

To help them assess their application:

"Where are you spending the most energy right now, and does that feel like the right place for it?"

"What would you do differently if no one was going to judge the outcome?"

"What are you tolerating that you know you should address?"

To help them see the value they are creating (or missing):

"If you fast-forward three years to where you really want to be, what is the hardest thing you would have had to do to get there?"

"Where do you think your presence actually changes the outcome of something…and where are you spinning your wheels?"

"What do you already know is true about this situation that you have not said out loud?"

These questions do not give people answers. They give people access to answers they already have but have not been asked to find yet. That is where real development lives.

The real cost of feedback culture

When we default to feedback, we teach people to look outward for direction. They wait for a review. They measure their progress by what someone else noticed about their work or effort. They calibrate their confidence based on how much praise they receive.

And then we wonder why so many smart, capable people struggle to self-direct when no one is telling them what to do.

We built that. We built it one performance review at a time.

The goal of great leadership is not to make people better at responding to your assessment of them. It is to develop people who understand their own genius, know how to apply it, and can see where it creates the most value….without needing someone else to tell them.

That’s the good stuff - that’s what leadership development is all about. And the only way to help someone solve it is to ask them questions until they stop looking outward for answers and start trusting what they already know.

You do not build future leaders by telling people what you see in them.

You build them by asking the right questions until they finally see it in themselves.