Years of psychological research show that leadership—the ability to coordinate collective human activity to turn a group of people into a high-performing team or unit—can be effective only if leaders are capable of providing people with constructive feedback. This means telling them what they need to hear to improve their performance, especially when it is not what they want to hear to boost their egos.
In fact, in a world that champions fake positive feedback and is increasingly optimized for self-belief and confidence rather than self-knowledge and competence, the need to provide people with a reality check and align their self-views with their actual capabilities has become a fundamental skill for managers and leaders.
Unfortunately, most people find it hard not just to give but also receive negative feedback; managers and leaders are no exception. Perhaps managers are right to be nervous: One of the largest meta-analyses ever conducted on feedback found that although it improves performance on average, more than one-third of feedback interventions actually lower performance.
The reasons are rooted in a mix of deep psychological insecurities (compared to other species in the animal kingdom, normal humans are rather more neurotic creatures, so we question ourselves and feel embarrassed about appearing as inadequate as we feel—this is the best case scenario, called depressive realism) and a unique ability to distort reality in our favor (we have even invented a sycophantic machine to lubricate our self-esteem by telling us that even the most mundane or trivial question we ask is indicative of our remarkable curiosity and brilliant ingenuity).
To be fair, we have come a long way since medieval times: Particularly since the Enlightenment, our world has become more prosocial, less violent, and more cordial and agreeable; we worry about microaggressions and unconscious biases, encourage people to engage in constructive dissent, and struggle with an epidemic of positive thinking and niceness, finding chief happiness officers, and providing employees with consumer-like experiences, all of which are truly first world problems.
Additional problems
Managers and leaders face a few additional problems. First, their performance is often measured via 360-degree feedback and employee engagement surveys, and their firms often ascribe to the notion that “a happy worker is a productive worker,” making it risky to upset their direct reports (to some degree, teachers and university professors face the same battle with students and their evaluations and feedback).
Second, there is generally little training on how to become better at giving negative feedback, though a surplus of frameworks and models exist on this.
Finally, unless you are really good at giving negative feedback, the likelihood that you will drive significant improvements in others is minimal, so it is not surprising that many leaders simply give up on this, preferring instead to replace people or focus on praising their high performers—after all, there is always a Pareto effect, so making your top 20% (who account for 80% of your team’s results) as strong and happy as possible may be smarter than wasting time trying to make the remaining 80% better.
Harder to receive than give
And if you think giving feedback is a problem for leaders, their ability to receive it is often more limited, especially in the case of negative or critical feedback. In a rational world, leaders would know that receiving honest feedback from their reports, peers, and bosses is essential to calibrate their behaviors and improve their performance, with extensive research highlighting the critical value of self-monitoring (being aware of how you impact others) and psychological safety (creating the conditions for others to speak up, even when this means having junior people critique you).
But in the real world, most bosses surround themselves with people who are either like them or good at sucking up to them (the two overlap to some degree, though the latter may just be astute). So they end up deprived of any constructive or critical feedback, and constructing a self-serving or self-enhancing positive feedback bubble akin to ChatGPT or the previous iteration of AI algorithms that served only self-serving content personalized to our existing beliefs and optimized for amplifying our biases on social media. This is particularly common in bad bosses, so, to put it bluntly, the more you suck, the more you surround yourself with people who avoid telling you how much you suck.
In fairness, there is a benefit to being good at ignoring negative feedback, namely perpetuating your self-deceptive fantasies of talent, which feels good per se, as well as convincing others that you are as talented as you think (if you really believe that you are a stable genius, you will likely convince some other people to believe the same), which is why the optimism bias, overconfidence, and narcissistic tendencies are far more common than they should be given the benefits to realism, self-awareness, and the capacity to make accurate interpretations of reality (including ourselves).
So, in a world that is increasingly complex and where even understanding why we do the work we do is harder than it ever was, an unwarranted sense of certainty or security will get you further in life than a justified sense of uncertainty. If, as Voltaire noted, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd,” absurdity appears to be not just compatible with leadership, but a suitable pairing to it.
How to tell
Importantly, the science of personality reliably and consistently predicts salient individual differences in leaders’ propensity (and ability) to receive and give critical feedback, including fascinating nuances that ought to be considered when selecting and developing leaders for the skill of giving and receiving feedback.
For example, leaders who over-index on neuroticism will be overly sensitive to criticism, to the point that they will see even neutral or positive feedback as negative. But leaders who under-index on neuroticism may be immune to negative feedback, seeing even criticism as a form of praise or simply attending to positive feedback while ignoring negative feedback.
On the other hand, extreme agreeableness may impede leaders’ ability to provide people with negative feedback, leading to conflict avoidance and an excessive desire to please and maintain harmony—ironically, leaders who obsess over avoiding conflicts tend to generate a great deal of conflict in the long run, because the fake positive signals they convey cause much misunderstanding, and false alignment is a short-lived strategy for effective team cooperation.
Finally, disagreeable people may struggle to provide any form of feedback: Their praise may be felt as criticism and their criticism may be experienced in such a blunt and negative way that it can hurt or paralyze, as opposed to improving other people. While there’s no such thing as a good or bad personality, every leader has their own personality, and being aware of it, especially their weaknesses (or, in HR euphemistic language, “opportunities”), is key to navigating high-stakes interactions effectively, mitigating one’s shortcomings while learning to display a wider range of adaptations, including those that are not a natural behavioral preference or habit.
This is perhaps the main reason it’s important to learn how to receive feedback: Unless you know that you are bad at something, you will continue to be bad at it without even realizing that you’re bad. This makes those individuals who are courageous enough to provide leaders with the constructive feedback they need an integral part of their development process: They may be coaches, colleagues, advisers, direct reports, or managers, not to mention romantic partners, friends, or spouses.
Ultimately, the problem with feedback is not that we don’t know how important it is, but that knowing and wanting are very different things. Leaders need enough self-awareness to understand how others experience them, enough humility to accept that other people may see them more accurately than they see themselves, and enough courage and skill to tell others what they need to hear rather than what will keep them happy. Personality matters because some leaders are naturally too sensitive to criticism, others remarkably immune to it, while some would rather preserve harmony than risk an uncomfortable conversation.
But these tendencies are not destiny: The point of self-awareness is precisely to manage the parts of our personality that are least helpful to others. This is why the most valuable people in a leader’s orbit may not be those who make them feel smartest, strongest, or most talented, but those willing and able to tell them when they’re wrong.
Unfortunately, power has a remarkably efficient way of removing precisely those people from the room. So perhaps the simplest test of leadership development is not whether leaders have learned to give better feedback, but whether anyone around them still dares to give it to them.
