De-Stressing Feedback

7 Lessons I Learned as a People Manager

May 20, 2025

I came to management and leadership roles as a perfectionistic high achiever—not an uncommon story. And as a new manager, dealing with team members’ performance issues was one of my least favorite parts of the role.

When I encountered team members who weren’t as attentive, detail-oriented or concerned about work, it was a challenge for me. As someone who’d grown up always wanting to exceed expectations and do my very best, it did not compute when team members had different priorities.

Working in environments with limited resources, it felt like a double whammy: there were usually negative impacts from the performance issue and on top of that, it added more work to my plate to address the problem.

If it came time to escalate action around persistent issues, I would often feel anxious that I hadn’t done enough on my end to address things. Or I’d worry about how the person would react to being put on an improvement plan or being told that termination of employment was a possible outcome. My anxious and perfectionistic tendencies often led me to assume that others shared my same personality traits, or to overthinking that got in the way of taking productive action.

According to my CliftonStrengths assessment, “Achiever” and “Responsibility” are two of my top strengths:

“Your Achiever theme helps explain your drive. Achiever describes a constant need for achievement…By the end of the day you must achieve something tangible in order to feel good about yourself.”
“Your Responsibility theme forces you to take psychological ownership for anything you commit to, and whether large or small, you feel emotionally bound to follow it through to completion.”

Looking back, I can see how managing a team created tension with my “Achiever” tendencies. I couldn’t rely only on myself to check things off a list or get things done. While a team increased capacity and allowed us to do more, it also created more complexity and relational dynamics, and added different kinds of work to my plate: work that wasn’t so easy to neatly check off a list as completed.

It also challenged my “Responsibility” tendencies. My “psychological ownership” of management responsibilities were especially challenging because the stakes were objectively high if I messed up as a manager. How I performed in my role had real, big implications for people’s lives and livelihoods, not to mention team well-being and workplace culture.

For all of these reasons and more, people management was challenging for me. And over time, I’ve seen how giving feedback, especially, can be a fraught experience—one of the most difficult and stressful parts of a manager’s role.

I look back with regret at ways I missed the mark, especially as a newer manager without much training or experience. And because I’ve been there, I’m sharing seven lessons I’ve learned along the way about how to de-stress the practice of feedback for everyone involved.

There are three types of feedback to consider.

When we think about feedback, our minds may jump to the negative or critical. But according to The Management Center, there are three kinds of feedback to regularly practice: positive, developmental, and corrective.

Positive feedback isn’t flattery. It’s acknowledgment of where employees are meeting and exceeding expectations. It’s an opportunity to let them know that their hard work and contributions are seen and valued. Sharing positive feedback can also build confidence and trust in a working relationship.
Developmental feedback is at the core of the growth mindset. It highlights what someone has done well and opportunities for continued growth or improvement. When reviewing work projects or performance, it’s a powerful practice to focus on both what the employee did well and how they may continue to improve or develop skills.
Corrective feedback is what we share when someone is not meeting expectations. When we avoid having feedback conversations about what’s not working, the employee may never know that they’re not meeting expectations and about the potential consequences for themselves and others. Corrective feedback, when done well, is a kindness.

Giving positive feedback may be a snap, while delivering developmental and especially corrective feedback can be tougher. Or we may tend toward providing corrective feedback while skipping over the positive and developmental kinds. Reflecting on how (and how frequently) we deliver each kind of feedback can help us identify where we need to flex our feedback muscles.

Have feedback conversations.

One of the most useful strategies I’ve found for de-stressing feedback is by shifting my approach from “giving feedback” to “having feedback conversations.”

I was never comfortable with sitting someone down and simply telling them what they were doing wrong. Approaching a team member with a baseline of respect meant that when it came to delivering feedback, I also needed to ask questions and invite them to share their perspective (as I also shared mine), while rooting the conversation in the impacts on the team as a whole.

By getting curious and asking questions as a manager in feedback conversations, I’ve created space for employees to identify barriers that they themselves are encountering, whether from experiences with neurodivergence (e.g. ADHD), a lack of trust, or needing skill development to meet expectations. By getting curious as a manager, I have been better able to identify the root cause of the issue at hand, to clarify expectations, and to provide individualized support for team members to improve.

Framing feedback as a two-way conversation creates more opportunity for learning and perspective-sharing that can build trust and lead to more effective collaboration to resolve issues. The Management Center’s CSAW framework offers a structure for feedback conversations that allows everyone to be heard while also getting clear on expectations and next steps.

Make feedback conversations routine.

One cause of stress around giving feedback can be the practice of saving corrective feedback for annual reviews. In this scenario, the annual review conversation can be built up as a stressful, uncertain event—for everyone involved. Issues that have been going on for months may be brought up for the first time in this formal setting, breaking trust and putting an employee on the defensive.

This is one of the reasons I’m such a big advocate for regular 1-1 meetings between managers and their team members: making feedback conversations a standing part of the agenda supports it as a routine practice. (And remember, this can include positive, developmental, or corrective feedback as needed.)

Making feedback conversations a regular practice throughout the year also builds a shared understanding that feedback is an expected part of work, which makes it less stressful to broach such conversations. And by not saving corrective feedback for the high-stakes annual review, we decrease stress and build trust in relationships between managers and team members.

Review and reflect on the data.

Sometimes as a manager, I would get the feeling that there was a problem, but tell myself it wasn’t that bad, not too severe of a pattern, or that it was mainly in my head. Especially when I had too much on my plate already, it was easy to convince myself to avoid dealing with an employee’s performance problem by telling myself it wasn’t really a problem. Making the time to look at the hard data helped me to see how much of a problem something was.

Whether it’s timesheets, meeting notes, or emails, reviewing documentation is essential. Having data not only backs us up as managers, it protects staff from our potential biases, too. It’s a way of ensuring we’re having feedback conversations based on facts, not vibes or perceptions.

After all, the employee may be telling themselves the same things. They might think that they occasionally mess up but it’s not a big deal, or that they’ve been working on a certain issue and shown improvement. However, if there’s still a gap between performance or behavior and expectations, data can support shared recognition of the problem that allows for collaborative problem-solving and further improvement.

Provide feedback that is actionable, high-quality, and rooted in organizational expectations.

It is human to judge others, but our personal judgment of others’ personality traits has little-to-no place in feedback conversations. High quality feedback is actionable and constructive, helping employees to develop professionally. According to this Forbes article:

“Actionable feedback is specific feedback that gives recipients examples to learn from and advice to act on in the future…An example might be a manager calling an employee unreliable versus pointing out a specific deadline they missed and how they can better manage their time in those scenarios.”

If you’re bothered by an employee’s real or perceived personality trait, reflect instead on what specific expectations they’re not meeting related to their job description or behavioral expectations laid out in organizational policies, and make space to discuss that. Staying grounded in formal, written expectations is another way to limit bias, practice fairness, and support employee development. If written policies and formal expectations are lacking, that’s an opportunity for organizational development.

Communicate potential consequences in advance.

Sometimes, after addressing an issue in 1-1 supervision, it becomes necessary to put someone on an official performance improvement plan. Sometimes, all efforts at performance improvement aren’t sufficient, and it’s necessary to let someone go from their job. Escalating accountability practices or firing someone can be highly stressful for people on all sides of the equation. One way to de-stress these experiences is by being very clear about both expectations and potential consequences when having feedback conversations.

Letting an employee know that if things don’t improve, they will be put on an improvement plan or that termination is a possibility, is essential to both treating the employee fairly and setting oneself up for less stress if those potentialities become reality. Ideally, the moderate amount of stress generated by communicating potential consequences will lead to appropriate action, but if not, you’ve at least been honest and direct about possible impacts, which can lessen guilt and stress later on.

People aren’t perfect, but they can grow.

One of the biggest lessons that management taught me is that I had to let go of my expectations of perfection for myself and others. As a manager, I was going to mess up and miss the mark sometimes. So more than being perfect, it was important for me to build trust with team members, to invite and listen to feedback, and to own where I was still learning.

It was also important that I learn to have hard conversations and push through discomfort for the greater good. I began to accept that it was a core part of my job to address performance and conflict issues as a manager, and to take the time to support team members’ growth. Despite my initial struggles, over time I came to hear consistent feedback that I excelled at supporting people’s growth and development at work.

Management is hard, especially when you care. This is why it’s so important for managers to have access to training, coaching and ongoing support to navigate the tough, stressful aspects of people management.

And as much as I support minimizing work-related stress, it’s also important to listen to our stress and learn from it. Our feedback-related stress may be telling us that accountability policies and processes need to be clarified, that we need to review the hard data, that communication needs improving or trust needs to be built.

Stress is a teacher if we welcome the lesson, and effective, high-quality feedback is essential to fostering open communication and accountability at work.

What have your struggles with feedback been? What strategies would you add to this list? What’s the best or worst feedback you’ve ever received? Join the conversation:

De-Stressing Feedback

7 Lessons I Learned as a People Manager

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