How Do You Know If Feedback Is About You, or the Person Giving It?
Photo credit: Elisa via Unsplash
At times, feedback tells us more about the person offering it than the person receiving it.
Sometimes feedback is offered thoughtfully: to help someone grow, make work more efficient, or move something forward. And sometimes feedback is tangled up with something else entirely, often unconsciously: a need to prove expertise, manage anxiety, or avoid a harder, more direct conversation. It masquerades as constructive criticism or caring, but underneath it is really about control, frustration, or power.
Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, who teach at Harvard Law School and helped build the Harvard Negotiation Project's research on difficult conversations, call one version of this a relationship trigger. Their work found that our reaction to feedback often has less to do with what was said than with who said it, and what that person's own agenda might be. Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, writing in Harvard Business Review, go a step further. Their research suggests that when someone evaluates another person's performance, what surfaces is often as much a picture of the evaluator's own biases as it is a picture of the person being evaluated. Something real is being revealed in that moment, and it is not always what it appears to be.
This piece sits underneath our exploration of performance feedback and development feedback in this year's series on the leadership trends shaping 2026. Before a leader can practice either kind of feedback well, it helps to be able to name the third thing that so often gets mistaken for both.
Carol Zizzo and Wendy Eisemann offer two very different memories of learning to tell the difference. Neither of them saw it clearly in the moment. Both carried it with them for a long time afterward.
When Feedback Serves Someone Else’s Need
I have a knee-jerk reaction to feedback that is focused on the other person’s needs versus the interest and care of my success or the success of our firm.
For instance, in years past, we have invited potential facilitators to observe our leader development programs, some of which have been successfully running for 20-plus years. I recall one gentleman who approached me at the first break to offer me feedback about the design.
It was critical and not productive. I was irritated by his arrogance and his focus on proving his knowledge. He did not bring any level of curiosity about the historical evolution of the program or the client’s desired outcomes. Needless to say, that was our last connection.
I also have a reaction to feedback that is offered in a less-than-direct way, focused on working, once again, a personal need. It feels like the message is, “I don’t like you or the way you’re doing this, and my way is better, and my life would be easier if you did it my way.” I’ve had plenty of that kind of feedback over the years, especially around our processes and policies, or wanting different or more projects to work on.
I learned something about this in my early days working with my business partner and founder, Dede Henley. We were working on this large program, and I was brand new to the corporate world. I was at the front of the room delivering content to 100 or so people. There were four of us as facilitators, and one of the guys, who was the lead facilitator, kept giving me feedback every time I came to the back of the room. It was chipping away at my self-confidence to go back up there. At some point, Dede came over to me and said, “Stop listening to his feedback. He’s not on your side. Just say thanks and walk away.”
It was so potent for me to hear that because there was an imbalance of power in the relationship. He was the lead, with the experience, with the PhD, and all the things that could easily intimidate me at the time. I had never heard that before, that it is okay to disregard somebody who has a lot of power. You don’t need to listen to it.
What makes feedback potent and valuable to me is when the person has settled down enough to reflect on historical evolution or context of the project or the situation, what I ultimately might be committed to, and how that might truly contribute to my success or the company’s success over time, so that everyone wins.
And to deliver it in a clear and direct way. I can hear any bad news and process any difficult emotions when that relationship to feedback is present. If you’re solely trying to work a personal need, I’m okay with that too. Just say so, and don’t try to use a feedback process that feigns to be something else. — Carol Zizzo
The Dry Run
When I worked in operations support for a candy company, I was training to become a franchise trainer, the position that would help shepherd new franchisees over a week through all the steps and knowledge that they would need to be able to run their own store.
The training program was long, jam-packed - seven days of content, cooking, and way more than you wanted to know about the candy-making process. In order to train to be the trainer, I was required to attend the program a total of 10 times. The final was running the whole week, unsupported. On my fourth time attending, my coach asked me to choose a section of material to teach solo.
The material ranged from easy cleaning tutorials, like how to scrub a toilet, to harder topics, like how to navigate building costs at their location. I went for a harder topic: inventory. I spent a week preparing for the presentation, drilling what I would say, and making flashcards to ensure that I remembered the key points that matched the slides.
The day before the topic was to be presented, my coach asked for a dry run. I stumbled through the presentation, tripping over my words, dropping my flashcards, talking too fast, and missing points. I got a third of the way through, and with a disappointed look, I told my coach, “I can’t do this.” She looked back at me and said, “I knew you weren’t ready, but I wanted you to see that for yourself.”
I excused myself from the training room, crying. I was angry and embarrassed. Why had she let me waste a week of work prepping for a topic that she knew I would fail? Why hadn’t she spoken up earlier? Why did she set me up to fail privately so that she wouldn’t have to embarrass me publicly in front of the franchisees? What about all the wasted flashcards? I wish I had known that I bit off more than I could chew. I wish she had seen my ambitious goal and reeled me back in, eased me in with another topic to build my confidence.
I wish I hadn’t cried in front of her, or that I had felt safer to tell her that this topic was too big to put my arms around for someone who was still learning the pillars of the business. I never did master the inventory section, but I did master making fudge at that job. — Wendy Eisemann
What Makes Feedback Worth Trusting?
What We Learned
Feedback is worth trusting when it serves the other person's growth more than it serves the person giving it.
These stories are different, but they point to the same problem. Feedback is not just about the content of the message. It is also about what the person offering it is trying to serve, close to what researchers Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen call a relationship trigger, when our reaction says as much about the giver as it does about what was said.
Feedback becomes harder to trust when it seems focused less on helping the work improve and more on something the giver needed for themselves in that moment. Even if there is something true inside the message, the learning gets harder to find when it is not offered with enough care for the person receiving it.
Maybe that is part of the work: learning to tell the difference between feedback that is meant to help us grow and feedback that is really about someone else's needs. One is worth considering. The other may simply need to be thanked and left behind.
For Your Own Reflection
What qualities make feedback easier for me to trust?
What makes feedback easier or harder for me to receive?
What do I want to pay attention to when I offer feedback to someone else?
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Feedback tends to be trustworthy when the person offering it has taken real time to understand your situation and genuinely wants your success alongside their own. It tends to be worth more caution when it arrives quickly, without curiosity about your context, or when it seems to be relieving the other person's own discomfort more than helping you grow.
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Not automatically. Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen have found that people often dismiss useful feedback because of who delivered it, and just as often accept unhelpful feedback for the same reason. The source of feedback matters less than whether the person offering it is genuinely oriented toward your growth.
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Performance feedback measures whether work met a standard. Development feedback looks forward, toward who a person is becoming. Feedback that is really about the giver can resemble either one on the surface, while actually working to relieve something in the person offering it, an old discomfort or an agenda that was never really about you.
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It helps to slow down and ask what the feedback is truly in service of, then to notice honestly whether something else, an old frustration that has nothing to do with this moment, is quietly steering the conversation instead.
Learning to tell the difference between feedback that wants your growth and feedback that wants something else takes longer than anyone would like, and it rarely arrives all at once.
Carol learned it from watching someone else name it plainly for her. Wendy learned it in the quiet after a hard week, still holding her flashcards. Most of us learn it somewhere in between. This is the kind of discernment Henley Leadership Group's coaches help leaders build, as a steadier way of being with the people they lead. Our nine-month Inside Out Leadership Development program exists for exactly this kind of slow, real work. If you would like to bring it to your team or organization, We'd love to talk.