Why Giving “Feedback Sandwiches” to Your Employees Doesn’t Work
By: Adrienne Parkhurst
Tags: Work, Leadership, Management, Coaching

We’ve been doing this “feedback thing” all wrong.

In a Gallup article, Feedback is Not Enough, a study found that only 26% of employees feel their managers’ feedback helps them do better work.

Employees often feel like feedback “happens” to them. While well-intended, it’s an event that tends to feel critical and condemning. And worse, research shows that it only improves performance about one-third of the time, while actually making it worse one-third of the time.

Managers know feedback is important, but too often we don’t make it a priority until all hell breaks loose. Then, we find ourselves in a situation where we must give difficult feedback.

And when we give the feedback, it’s not effective — it’s just as likely to negatively impact performance as it is to positively impact it.

I’m sure the feedback I gave Gina made her less productive. I looked like an ass too. Maybe it’s a customer complaint or an error-laden report that requires us to counsel an employee on their performance.

Regardless of the reason, our feedback approach tends to be reactive rather than proactive.

When we try to hide our negative message between positive statements, we lose trust.

You might be thinking, Wait. If giving hard feedback is a part of managing people, shouldn’t we balance the negative with the positive? Yes and no. We must give feedback for growth. And yes, we need to provide more positive feedback than negative to our teams.

But here’s the thing — your goal should be to build trust before you give negative feedback, not while you give it.

When you sandwich the negative feedback with positivity, your employee thinks the only reason you are saying something positive is because you’re saying something negative.

Stephen Covey introduced the emotional bank account metaphor in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He explains that you need to invest in relationships with others and make “deposits” into their emotional bank accounts to earn trust. This takes time, you can’t do this in one day. And you certainly can’t do this in one feedback conversation.

Covey explains the importance of building up the emotional bank account with deposits before you make withdrawals. Anytime you share negative feedback with an employee, it’s a withdrawal from their emotional bank account.

So if you never give positive feedback on its own, you’re always going to be emotionally bankrupt as far as the employee is concerned. When we feed our employees a “feedback sandwich” we’re canceling out our positive comments (deposit) with our negative comment (withdrawal).

This approach doesn’t build trust, it erodes it.

Create a proactive feedback routine.

As a hospital director, I participated in a High-Reliability Organization (HRO) Leadership Program focused on safety and quality. One of the program’s key principles was a “deference to front-line expertise.”

In other words, highly reliable leaders get out into the field with their teams.

Schedule shadowing sessions.

I built a shadowing schedule for my three departments. During these sessions, I sat and observed a specific employee or process for at least an hour.

Initially, my goal was to understand the process from the employee’s perspective. Yet, I quickly realized that these sessions provided an excellent opportunity to give specific and meaningful feedback to my teams.

It took me longer than I’d care to admit to figure this out. But, once I got my butt out of the office on a regular basis, it took my team relationships to a whole new level.

Seek to understand the process and praise your people.

During one of my observations, I watched a hospital scheduler maneuver through 5–6 applications, while helping a patient schedule a mammogram. After she finished her call, I gave her immediate feedback on how confident she sounded on the phone and how well she problem-solved on the spot.

I also realized how convoluted the scheduling process was for my team. I asked lots of questions about how the system could be improved.

These sessions were a feedback goldmine for me.

Employees want to do well. They’re hungry for actionable feedback. They don’t want fluff, they want the real deal. But, we’ve got to be in their world to give meaningful feedback, not ours.

Once they trust you, they’ll ask for your feedback.

At first, employees may be cautious when you begin this routine. And that’s completely understandable, especially if you’ve never sat in their space and watched them work.

They may question your motives and think you’re trying to catch them make mistakes. But, once you show them that you’re trying to understand the process and get their feedback, they’ll slowly let their guards down.

Once you build trust with this process, they’ll start to request your presence — that’s when you know it’s working.

How to set up a feedback routine

When you start to shadow your team, avoid giving any corrective feedback. Just seek to understand their workflows and catch them doing the “right” thing.

You want to make deposits in their emotional banks, and when you point out what they could do better, it’s a withdrawal, not deposit.

Here’s how you do it.

Schedule

Block off one-hour on your calendar to observe one team member.

Contact the department manager (if this is a skip-level observation) and let her know your objectives.

Make it a priority, don’t cancel unless absolutely necessary.

Observe

Show up and watch the team work.

Don’t interrupt their flow, if you have a question, write it down and ask them later.

Give them feedback on what you thought they did well.

Reflect

Think about what you could do to improve their process.

Share your feedback with the manager and thank them for their time.

Follow up on any action items you took from the observation. Often you’ll get ideas from team, your follow up builds trust.

The Big Takeaway

As managers, it’s our duty to coach our team members and help them improve. And that may require some hard conversations. Giving feedback takes courage. It’s hard to do, especially when we haven’t cultivated a relationship yet.

In order to build a successful coaching relationship, we need to put in the time to understand our team’s individual needs. Then, when we have hard conversations, we know how to best communicate with them.

Some employees will respond to humor, some will respond to brevity. You need to get to know them as individuals to know what works best for them.

When we shadow our team’s work with genuine curiosity, we show them that their contributions matter. We demonstrate that we “get it.” We learn about them as individuals.

Then, when we need to give feedback due to a mistake, we can treat the situation as a teachable moment, rather than a punitive one.

And our employee trusts us to coach them through it.