Is Feedback Always Correct? Why the Quality of Feedback Matters More Than Its Quantity

Feedback is the operating principle of most coaching and leadership development. The assumption is straightforward: tell people what they are doing well and what they are doing poorly, and they will adjust accordingly. Organisations build elaborate feedback systems, 360-degree surveys, performance conversations, peer reviews, and structured debrief processes, on the basis of this assumption. And yet feedback, deployed at volume and with sincerity, frequently fails to produce the behaviour change it is designed to produce. The question worth asking is not whether feedback is important, but whether feedback, as it is typically constructed and delivered, is correct.

Feedback has two structural limitations that constrain its effectiveness as a behaviour change mechanism. The first is that it is backward-looking. It describes what happened. It does not prescribe what should happen next or create the conditions in which a different behaviour becomes possible. A leader who receives feedback that they need to listen more has received an observation, not a development intervention. The observation may be accurate. It does not, by itself, produce any change in the listening behaviour.

The second limitation is that feedback is filtered through the relationship, power dynamics, and perceptual biases of the person giving it. When a manager gives feedback to a direct report, the feedback reflects the manager’s own standards, preferences, and interpretive framework, not a neutral assessment of performance. When feedback is gathered through 360-degree surveys, it reflects the collective perceptions of a group of stakeholders who each bring their own frameworks, their own relationships with the recipient, and their own agendas to the rating process.

None of this makes feedback useless. But it does mean that feedback, treated as objective data about performance, is systematically misrepresented. The leader who receives feedback that 360 raters found them insufficiently collaborative may be receiving accurate information about how their behaviour landed with those raters. They may also be receiving information about the raters’ preferences for a different kind of collaboration than the context requires. The feedback does not distinguish between these possibilities.

“Feedback tells you what others experienced. It does not tell you whether what they experienced was a function of your behaviour, their expectations, the relationship between you, or the context you were both navigating. Treating it as objective data is the first mistake.”

Feedforward, as a coaching orientation, shifts the conversation from what happened to what is possible. Instead of asking a stakeholder what the coachee did wrong, it asks what the coachee could do differently that would make the greatest positive difference to their effectiveness in this specific context. The question is forward-looking, constructive, and grounded in the stakeholder’s direct experience of what works.

This shift matters for several reasons. It removes the defensiveness that backward-looking feedback frequently activates. A leader who is told what they did wrong has a natural response to contextualise, explain, or defend. A leader who is asked what they could do differently that would make the most difference has no defensive position to take. The conversation is about the future, not the past.

It also produces more useful information. A stakeholder who is asked what one change would make the coachee more effective is providing specific, actionable input grounded in their direct working experience. This is qualitatively different from a rating on a 5-point scale that aggregates across months of interactions and compresses the specific into the statistical.

ProventusHR’s coaching practice uses the feedforward orientation as a core mechanism within the Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centred Coaching method. The coachee does not receive feedback from stakeholders and then work to respond to it. The coachee asks stakeholders what specific behaviour change would make the greatest difference, commits to practising that change, and then returns to those same stakeholders to ask whether the change was observed. The stakeholder is not a rater. They are a co-developer of the coachee’s leadership capability.

There are specific conditions under which feedback not only fails to produce development but actively impedes it. The most common is when feedback is delivered in a way that activates the threat response rather than the learning orientation. A leader who experiences feedback as an attack on their competence or character does not process it as information. They process it as a threat to be managed. The response is defensive rather than reflective, and the defensive response calcifies the very behaviour the feedback was attempting to change.

The second harmful condition is when feedback is given without context for change. Telling a leader that they are perceived as aggressive without providing any mechanism for developing a different approach produces awareness of a problem without any pathway to solution. The leader is now more self-conscious about a pattern they cannot change through self-consciousness, and the awareness creates a new anxiety that frequently makes the pattern more pronounced rather than less.

The third harmful condition is inconsistent feedback from stakeholders who have genuinely different standards for the same behaviour. A leader who receives contradictory feedback from different stakeholders has not received useful developmental information. They have received a map of the political landscape around their role, which is a different kind of information and requires a different kind of processing.

ProventusHR’s coaching practice is designed to navigate these conditions. The initial stakeholder process is designed to distinguish developmental feedback from political feedback, to surface the specific behaviour changes that will make the greatest impact, and to create the commitment architecture that converts that information into sustained behaviour change rather than temporary adjustment.

“The coaching conversation that produces lasting change is not the one where the coach delivers the most accurate assessment of what the coachee is doing wrong. It is the one where the coachee discovers, through encounter and reflection, what they are actually doing, why they are doing it, and what they would need to believe differently in order to do something else.”

About the Author

Rama Krishna (RK)

Founder Director, ProventusHR  ·  MGSCC Master Coach  ·  NDA Alumnus

Founder of ProventusHR and principal architect of ExperienceLearning and REEL|Life. 25+ years across leadership advisory, executive coaching, and experiential design across 14 industries. 9x Brandon Hall HCM Excellence Award winner (2022 to 2025).

Full Profile ›