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Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a frie…
A few weeks ago, I led a leadership workshop for a group of executive women leaders in Birmingham, Alabama. Before I begin leadership workshops, I ask the participants what they want out of our time together. This year, one answer has emerged consiste…
Everybody loves the idea of feedback, defined broadly as information provided to someone about their performance, behavior, or actions.
This makes a great deal of sense.
Indeed, many studies have consistently shown that feedback from others plays an important role in helping us understand who we are, including how we differ from others. It is vital for improving managers’ and leaders’ performance and for helping people evolve and develop, both professionally and personally. Conversely, being feedback-deprived, or having a tendency to ignore it, increases the gap between how good you think you are, and how good you actually are—at times, to painfully delusional levels.
And yet, people often fail to accept and internalize feedback. This is particularly true when the feedback is misaligned with how we view ourselves or at odds with what we think about the situation. Contributing to this failure is often the poor quality of the feedback, due to factors ranging from sender expertise and intention to the politics and bias of subjective character evaluations. Unsurprisingly, meta-analytic evidence suggests that 1/3 of feedback interventions are ineffective, and another 1/3 actually worsen recipients’ performance.
Feedback, in short, has a poor track record. And especially poor for more senior leaders.
High-quality feedback is thus particularly scarce where it is needed the most—for those whose decisions and actions have the most far-reaching impact: in senior leadership. Why is this the case?
The reasons
First, when someone is powerful, others will go to great lengths to avoid upsetting or confronting that person, aware (consciously and not) that leaders have some power over their future, which explains why it is far more common for leaders to hear praise and compliments from subordinates than constructive criticism. A darkly comic illustration appears in Armando Ianucci’s movie The Death of Stalin. When Stalin collapses, his inner circle hesitates, panics, and second-guesses itself, terrified of acting without explicit permission. No one dares to take responsibility, question assumptions, or deliver unwelcome truths. The satire works precisely because it exaggerates a real dynamic: when power is concentrated and fear is high, feedback disappears, initiative dies, and silence becomes the safest strategy.
Second, hierarchical cultures and traditional leadership archetypes conspire against leaders’ ability to create the necessary psychological safety for candor. Unless effort is put into creating these conditions, team members will perceive a negative cost-benefit analysis when it comes to voicing issues—especially with their leader’s decisions or behaviors—versus holding back and staying silent. While this may boost leaders’ egos, fostering self-enhancing and delusional estimates of their own talents—it will severely limit their ability to improve and get better. How can anyone, including a manager or leader, get better if they are unaware of a gap between their self-views and their actual performance? Why would anyone, including a manager or leader, seek to change and evolve if their perception is that everything is fine?
Third, when someone seems devoid of self-awareness, to the point of being not just immune to feedback, but almost un-coachable, people will see no point in providing them with feedback, as it would be wasted on them. Unfortunately, when others are of the opinion that leaders are incompetent, and that, on top of that, they are totally unaware of this fact, they lose respect for that leader and approach their interactions with them as they would with a delusional narcissist or mad person.
What to do
Fortunately, there is a booming industry (at times comprising science-based instruments like evidence-based 360-degree feedback surveys and personality assessments) to tell leaders what they need to hear, especially when that’s not what they want to hear. Even in the absence of such instruments, here are five simple ways leaders can get better at receiving—and ingesting—constructive feedback.
- Ask for disconfirming data, not general impressions
Instead of “Any feedback for me?”, ask narrowly framed questions that invite contradiction, such as “What is one decision I made recently that slowed the team down?” or “Where did my involvement add least value this quarter?” Research on feedback seeking shows that specific, behavior-linked requests increase both the honesty and usefulness of responses, while vague requests elicit politeness and noise rather than signal. - Separate ingestion from reaction, deliberately and visibly
High-status leaders often kill feedback not by rejecting it, but by reacting too fast. A defensive facial expression, explanation, or “contextual clarification” is usually enough to shut people down. Evidence from self-regulation and feedback intervention research shows that feedback is more likely to improve performance when recipients force themselves to pause evaluation and treat feedback as data, not judgment. One practical move is to explicitly say, “Thank you. I won’t respond now, so I can think about what you’ve said, and I’ll come back to you,” and then actually do so. - Triangulate patterns, ignore anecdotes
Single pieces of feedback are typically biased, idiosyncratic, or situational. Leaders should resist reacting to one voice and instead look for recurring themes across sources, time, and contexts. Meta-analytic work on 360-degree feedback consistently shows that behavior change is most likely when leaders focus on convergent signals rather than isolated comments. Treat feedback like data analysis, not testimony. - Outsource truth-telling when power gets in the way
At senior levels, the social cost of honesty becomes prohibitive. This is precisely why structured mechanisms such as anonymous upward feedback, external coaching, or validated personality and derailment assessments outperform informal conversations. Research on power and voice shows that hierarchy systematically suppresses upward dissent unless safeguards are in place. Leaders who believe their “open-door policies” are adequate are usually the least informed. - Publicly act on one small piece of feedback, fast
The strongest signal that feedback is welcome is not just saying “thank you,” but visibly changing something. Even a modest adjustment, communicated explicitly (“Based on your feedback, I’ll stop doing X and start doing Y”), recalibrates the perceived cost-benefit of speaking up. Evidence from psychological safety research shows that follow-through, not receptiveness rhetoric, predicts future voice behavior. Feedback cultures are built behavior by behavior, not intention by intention.
Taken together, these practices treat feedback less as a moral virtue and more as an imperfect but essential data stream. Leaders who learn to filter, metabolize, and act on that data gain something far rarer than praise: a realistic picture of their impact.
“I think there’s a little bit of smoke and mirrors there,” said NYU Stern’s Robert Seamans.
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