3 Things Feedback Frameworks Don't Prepare You For
What I wish I'd known before I had to learn it the hard way.
Last week I wrote about the engineer’s side of feedback: how to receive it, process it, and act on it. If you missed that article, here is the link.
I talked about why behavioral feedback is harder than technical. I shared the stories of two engineers who received the same difficult feedback and went in completely different directions.
I promised to come back this week with the manager’s side.
This article is for managers. But if you’re an engineer, read it too. Understanding what good feedback looks like from the other side is one of the best things you can do for yourself - it’ll help you evaluate the quality of what you’re receiving, and understand where you stand in the process.
Before the framework: a story
In the 13 years I’ve been managing engineers, I have genuinely loved the job. Helping the team solving hard problems, turning chaos into order and direction, the promotions, the people who grew into roles I never imagined for them, the hires that changed the culture of a team. Almost every part of it.
There was one time, though, when I questioned whether this was the career for me.
I had an employee I needed to manage through performance. I approached it the way I approached everything else in the job - figure it out as I go. Pretty soon, I discovered I had no idea how to do it effectively, while the stakes were as higher than ever.
So I made every possible mistake.
I had conversations I wasn’t prepared for. I went in without the right words, without the right data, and left the employee with mixed signals. They didn’t know where they stood. I thought I had delivered something hard. They thought we’d had a normal check-in.
I created confusion with the sandwich technique - something good, the hard feedback, something good. The employee left not knowing if I was praising them or telling them they weren’t meeting expectations.
Luckily, when things got to their worst, I got help. The company brought in an executive coach - someone who had been a VP of Engineering at several organizations, who knew the process and the nuance. Not from books or coaching classes, but from lived experience.
They walked me through each step, and I corrected the course.
Not every manager gets that. So if you’re navigating difficult conversations right now, this article is my version of it.
Why giving feedback is hard
The internet is full of feedback frameworks. You’ve probably seen most of them.
Popular feedback models:
SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact): Helps separate facts from opinions. Useful for performance reviews.
Situation - Clearly describe the context and be specific
Behavior - Describe the observable behavior without interpretation
Impact - Explain the effect on the team, project, or organization
STAR (Situation-Task-Action-Result): Connects feedback to specific tasks and outcomes. Useful for encouraging motivation and learning.
Situation - Describe the event as objectively as possible
Task - Describe the responsibility involved
Action - Explain what the person did or didn’t do
Result - Talk about the outcome and its impact
DESC (Describe-Express-Specify-Consequences): Designed for difficult conversations addressing performance issues or behavioral expectations.
Describe - Describe the issue or behavior as objectively as possible
Express - Talk about how it affects you or the team
Specify - Give suggestions on what could change
Consequences - Discuss the impact of making or not making the change
SKS (Stop-Keep-Start): Promotes self-reflection on what to change, continue, or begin doing. Used for performance improvement conversations.
Stop - Identify behaviors that should stop because they are ineffective or counterproductive
Keep - Recognize positive behaviors to continue
Start - Suggest new actions or improvements to encourage growth
Popular feedback techniques:
Active listening - encourages trust and makes the receiver feel heard and valued
Sandwich technique - aims to make constructive feedback easier to digest by placing it between two positive remarks
Open-ended questions - encourages dialogue, self-reflection, and critical thinking
Feedforward - focuses on future improvements rather than dwelling on past mistakes
Mirroring - helps the receiver become more self-aware by reflecting their own words or behaviors back to them
Here is the problem: you can read all of these and still struggle. Because there are three things nobody tells you:
Nobody prepares you to use them live. In the room, with another human being - their feelings, your doubts, the timing, the words coming out wrong.
Nobody teaches you what quality feedback actually looks like in practice. Not the model. The words, the intent, the specificity.
Nobody talks about the relationship you need to build before any of these techniques will work.
Those are the three things I want to cover in the article today.
#1 - Timing: when to say something, and when you’ve already waited too long
Technical feedback is hard to hear, but it’s easier to deliver.
The rollout skipped lower environments. The deadline was missed. These map to documented expectations. You can point to something concrete.
Behavioral feedback is more nuanced. What does good collaboration actually look like? What counts as a dismissive tone?
Those standards, many times, live in the manager’s head. Which means you’re holding someone accountable for expectations that were never written down.
This is why behavioral feedback accumulates quietly. It’s harder to point to, harder to frame, harder to defend. So managers wait. And while they wait, the behavior continues, the team gets impacted, and what could have been a two-minute coaching moment becomes a six-month performance process.
My test: behavior becomes a problem when it is a repeated pattern that has impact on the team - not when it violates an abstract standard.
Is the behavior affecting specific people? Are things not getting done because of it? Are people working around this person, coming to you quietly? That’s your signal.
And is it a pattern? Everyone has a bad day. The question is whether the same behavior keeps showing up. A behavior that happened once is an instance. The same behavior three times is a pattern. In that case it’s not a bad day. It’s a gap.
#2 - Wording: what makes feedback actually land
In my experience, good feedback has five components. Use this as a checklist before your next difficult conversation.
Clear. The employee knows exactly what you’re talking about. Not “you need more ownership” - but what ownership looks like, where they’re missing it, and what a correction would look like.
Fair. Expectations should be consistent for everyone at the same level. This is an important nuance, that many people miss. A junior engineer who doesn’t define the right problem statement is not as problematic as a Staff Engineer who misses the mark on which problem actually needs to be solved.
A path to correct. This is what managers skip most often. Pointing at the problem without saying what good looks like isn’t actionable feedback. It’s a verdict.
Names the impact. The employee needs to understand what happened because of this behavior - for them, for their career, for the team.
Timely. It’s not fair to bring up something someone did three months ago. If you saw it, you should have said something then. The sooner you address it, the easier it is to connect the feedback to the behavior - and the better your shot at turning it around.
If you do all five, you’ll significantly increase the chances of not having to have the same conversation twice.
#3 - The relationship: the infrastructure everything else runs on
This is the one I had to discover the hard way.
Being a manager is a specific kind of tension. You need to be close enough to your team so that people trust you. They must feel comfortable coming to you with real problems, things that are hard to say. That trust is what makes the job work.
And you also need to be the person who tells them when something isn’t right.
The managers who do this well aren’t the ones who find the perfect balance between being friendly and being firm. They’re the ones who are consistent. Their team knows they’re in their corner - and also knows they’ll be held accountable to high standards.
Pro Tip: The groundwork is in the early conversations. When you first notice a behavior, before you’re labeling it as a problem, show up curious. What’s going on? What am I not seeing? Is there context I’m missing?
This does two things. Sometimes you find out there’s something real happening - an interpersonal conflict, a rough season, a blind spot the person genuinely didn’t know they had. That matters. And even when the behavior still needs to change, the employee knows you tried to understand first. That makes the feedback land differently.
If you get to the third or fourth conversation and the pattern hasn’t changed, the tone shifts. You’re no longer exploring. You’re naming where you are.
“We’ve talked about this. I’m not seeing the change I need to see. I want to be honest with you about where this is heading.”
That’s a hard conversation. But if you’ve built the relationship along the way, they won’t be surprised by it.
My framework
The thing that has helped me most is not a model or a technique. It’s a mindset.
Every time I go into a difficult feedback conversation, I remind myself: I’m doing this for the best of the employee.
That one shift changes everything. It changes how I prepare. It changes how I show up. It makes me less defensive when they push back, because I know why I’m there.
During the coaching phase - when I’m naming the behavior for the first two or three times and hoping to correct it - my driver is helping the employee see something they can’t see themselves.
When we get to the harder conversations - performance improvement, separation - I’m still acting in their best interest. Keeping someone in a situation that isn’t working for them is not kindness. Getting them out of it honestly is.
On the conversation itself:
Lead with the feedback. Do not sandwich it. If you open with positives and close with positives, the hard thing in the middle disappears. They’ll remember the good parts and leave confused.
Don’t rush. Make it clear this is important. Give them space to process.
Have it written. I put my feedback directly in our shared 1:1 document and share my screen while we walk through it together. Written feedback is harder to misremember, and it forces you to be precise.
Pro Tip: Hold a get-to-know session with each employee - ideally when you hire them or you join a team as a manager. Ask how they prefer to receive feedback. Some want to read it first and come ready to discuss. Some prefer to hear it verbally, then see it in writing. Some want to read it together in real time.
It seems small. It’s not. If the goal is for the feedback to land, removing the delivery barrier is worth the ask.
Need a lifeline?
Everyone I know who gives feedback well made a lot of mistakes before they got there. Managing performance is a self-discovery path for the manager, not just the employee.
The managers who get good at it aren’t the ones who feel comfortable. They’re the ones who do it anyway, despite the discomfort.
If you’re one of those managers who can map a framework to a situation and pull it off - congratulations. Keep going.
If you’re more like me - someone who struggled with the timing, the wording, or how to build the kind of relationship that makes hard conversations possible - I’m happy to help.
I offer a Clarity Call: one hour, 1:1, focused entirely on your specific situation.
As always: if something resonated or you have a question, reply directly. I read every one of your comments.