Clear is Kind, Unclear is Shame Spiral: The Art of Effective Feedback

Having worked with managers on performance for my entire career, I wanted to share the most unhelpful feedback that I’ve heard a manager provide.

When a manager says, "I'm not sure what I want, but you're not performing at the level I was hoping," they're essentially saying, "You're doing it wrong, but I don't know what right is." This vague criticism doesn't just fail as feedback—it launches employees into an emotional tailspin.

Telling someone they're falling short without specifics is like handing them a ticket to the shame spiral express. You're essentially saying, "You suck... somehow!" When you can't articulate your expectations, how can you legitimately claim they aren't being met?

The real victim here is growth. Without clear direction, your team member is left to anxiously dissect their every move, wondering where they've gone wrong.

Three Ways to Transform Vague Disappointment into Actionable Feedback:

1. Examine the assignments you've given. What specific outcomes did you need? Identify the gap between what you're seeing and what success looks like.

2. Name the qualities you're missing. Is it thoroughness? Regular updates? Strategic thinking? Create a concrete list of behaviors you want to see, then have an honest conversation about how these qualities show up in their work.

3. When truly stuck, research role standards. Look up typical OKRs for similar positions. Use these as a starting point to establish clear, measurable expectations together.

Remember: Clear feedback is an act of kindness. It shows respect for your team members' time, effort, and emotional wellbeing—and it's the only path to genuine improvement.

Even Problematic Humans Deserve Love

Ever since the election, I’ve consumed far less news and news-adjacent content. It’s a decision I had to make for my mental health after noticing a direct correlation between the amount of time I was spending reading news and hot takes and the length and severity of my anxiety spells and depressive episodes. Recently, I’ve come up with another reason to avoid this type of content: I realized that it makes it much harder for me to see people as human beings and much more likely that I will reduce a person’s entire humanity down to one or two opinions that I either fully agree with or fully detest.

I didn’t think much about this until my recent concussion. Even though it was a mild head injury, during my early recovery I started having visions of more constructively handling encounters with people whose worldview I disagree with or even find threatening. It occurred to me that I was bringing a lot of judgment into these encounters, whether they were happening in person or as a result of hearing or reading about a person or something they said or did; I was deciding that the entire person was good or bad based on an opinion or behavior.

Reality is messy and complicated. I like to think of myself as a good person, but I’ve messed up in all kinds of ways big and small throughout my life. I have done things that are outside my values, and I have hurt people I love as well as people I didn’t even know that well. Many folks who consider themselves good people have made similar mistakes. So what’s the difference between a bad person and someone who has made terrible mistakes?

For one thing, I’ve realized that it’s not my place to say who is “good” or “bad”, and that’s not a productive or meaningful way to look at the world anyway. No one is all good or all bad. We are human; we are inherently flawed, and yet we can strive to be better. What I do think is true, however, is that I can have beliefs and opinions about right versus wrong - for example, it’s right to stand up for someone who’s being bullied, it’s wrong to hurt people on purpose - and I can create and maintain boundaries between myself and others for psychological safety, all without making some kind of evaluation or judgment about a person’s goodness.

People who mess up bigtime are still human beings. They have stories and circumstances that led them to where they are now. They have pain and trauma, just like us. Maybe we didn’t handle our circumstances the way they did; maybe we handled things better or less destructively. Instead of feeling a rush of self-righteous indignation when someone else does something I think is terrible, I’m trying to channel my feelings into boundaried compassion.

Here’s how this looks:

Instead of saying to myself, “I cannot believe they did that. What an awful person. I would never do something like that,” I’m now trying to say, “I am so disappointed in the choice that person made. It’s against my values and seems harmful to others. I will not behave like that, and I won’t accept that kind of behavior in my close relationships. Whatever pain and suffering that person experienced that led them to where they are today, I hope there comes a time when they can make different choices.”

Yes, I know the world is on fire. I know there are all kinds of bad actors with malicious intent who are deliberately inflicting pain and harm on innocent people. The problem is, these folks don’t see those they are trying to harm as human beings, instead reducing their humanity to a set of talking points about their identities, beliefs, or opinions that they’ve decided are “bad”. It’s dehumanizing. So if I participate in this kind of dehumanization too, how am I making the problem better? While I might be on the “right” side of an issue, I’m not doing anything to reduce the amount of dehumanization in the world.

It’s not really about whether someone deserves to be judged as “good” or “bad”; it’s more about what kind of person I want to be and what kind of energy I want to put out into the world.

Truffle Hunting in the Face of Criticism

I will never forget the worst performance review I’ve ever had.

The company I was working for at the time didn’t believe in titles, job descriptions, or formally defined processes. It was a small startup where, even though we had specific roles (software engineer, account executive, etc.), everyone wore many hats and was generally trusted to figure out what they needed to do to further the mission of the company. It was the kind of place where you could expect disagreements to get heated, language to get colorful, and feelings to get hurt; but you also had creative freedom to try new things, and in many ways you felt like you were part of a (albeit slightly dysfunctional) family. It was the first job that made me feel like I truly belonged, and I loved it there. That’s probably what made this hurt so much.

I can’t remember if this was my first or second official performance review, but I know that formal reviews were new to the company and we were still figuring out how to do it well. I’d had a difficult review in the past, but it was at a job that I hated and wasn’t good at no matter how hard I tried. At this company, I was a consistently high performer and was often praised for things I created, so I expected my performance review to be a cake walk. It wasn’t.

It was many years ago, so I don’t remember the details of how it all went down, but here are some things I remember very clearly.

For one thing, my manager didn’t perform the review. He was there, but the CEO led the review and did most of the talking. I assume that my manager had contributed to the evaluation in some way, but it wasn’t clear to me how at the time.

There was little talk about my work product; so little that I don’t remember anything at all that was said, good or bad, about the work I was doing. Most of the review focused on my interpersonal style. I recall the CEO saying that I was perceived as so negative and combative that he often felt anxious if he needed to talk to me about something because he “didn’t know which Jess [he] was going to get.” He informed me that, during one meeting several months earlier, my attitude had been so bad that he decided to withhold a bonus that he was about to give me. And, he said that I walked around looking pissed off all of the time and was making it hard for people to approach me.

I immediately went into a shame spiral - a bad one. I had tunnel vision, my hands were sweaty, my heart was racing, and I was biting my lip hard, saying to myself, “Do NOT cry. Do NOT cry!” as the tears welled up and I held my eyes open wide so that they wouldn’t drip out. In the moment, it didn’t feel like he was saying, “There are some interpersonal communication habits you have that I’d like to address,” it felt like he was saying, “You’re terrible at your job, everyone here hates you, and you make things insufferable for those who have to work with you.” I. Was. Shooketh.

It felt unfair to me because the culture we had at the company was one of brutal honesty, open disagreements, and speaking up when something didn’t sound right, or so I thought. I was observing people around me behaving in much the same way I had been, in many cases much more abrasively or even rude. Additionally, no one including the CEO had ever conveyed to me in any way that my communication style was offputting. I felt blindsided and attacked, and hadn’t yet learned how to dig into critical feedback to find the gems of truth. And, I was furious that I was being perceived so negatively that money was withheld from me, but no one bothered to communicate any of this to me at the time. They let it sit and fester for months, and by the time I was made aware, I didn’t even remember which meeting he was referring to. I felt angry, humiliated, and ashamed.

This moment was the catalyst for me to start learning how to be a better communicator, listener, leader, and person in general. It was the beginning of what I hope will be a lifelong journey to always be better today than I was yesterday.

Here’s something I realize now that I wish I had known then:

Sometimes, listening to criticism or “constructive feedback” is like truffle hunting. You might have to dig through a lot of shit, but if you can stand to dig through it for long enough, you’re going to find valuable nuggets.

The truth is, there was a lot about that performance review that was unfair: the complete absence of feedback in the months leading up to it, the characterizations of me as a person instead of descriptions of the behaviors of mine that needed attention, and the emphasis on how my face looked, among other things.

However, as years have passed and I’ve done more work on myself, I recognize that there were some nuggets of truth in there. I did get defensive when people would question my ideas. If I was passionate about something, my tone often veered into confrontational (I know this was true because it was something I had to address in my personal life as well). When being approached with a new product idea, if I didn’t immediately know how it would work, I would assume it couldn’t be done and shoot it down instead of focusing on possibilities. And, I wasn’t very skilled when I was delivering constructive feedback of my own to others.

The lesson I’ve learned is that we usually can’t control how the giver of feedback delivers their message, and frankly, many folks giving the feedback have plenty of room for improvement. But it’s still on us to listen for the nuggets, be accountable for the energy we are bringing into work or any other interpersonal setting, and do whatever work is required to grow and improve. Now, when I get negative feedback, I tell myself, “This is a truffle hunt, which is a gift. I will find the truffles.”