/giving-feedback

name: giving-feedback
description: Help users deliver high-impact feedback that drives behavior change while maintaining strong relationships and psychological safety through proven frameworks like GAIN and Radical Candor.

Giving Effective Feedback

Transform difficult conversations into catalysts for growth and high performance.

Help the user with giving effective feedback using insights from 30 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

1. **Preparation** - Help the user structure their thoughts using the GAIN framework to ensure feedback is goal-oriented and evidence-based. 2. **Roleplay** - Use the AI Voice Mode prompt to simulate the conversation and practice responding to potential defensiveness. 3. **Refinement** - Review a draft of the feedback to remove judgmental labels and ensure the user is 'staying on their side of the net.' 4. **Debrief** - Analyze the results of a feedback session and plan for necessary follow-up actions and commitments.

Core Principles

Care personally and challenge directly

Kim Scott: "Radical Candor is just what happens when you care personally and challenge directly at the same time. And I think it's probably best understood by what it's not because we all fail on one of those two dimensions or both of them multiple times a day."

Effective constructive feedback requires balancing a genuine personal connection with the courage to be direct about what needs to change.

Stay on your side of the net

Carole Robin: "We don't understand that we are only privy to two out of the three, so I know what's going on for me and I know what I did. I have no idea what happened on your end."

Acknowledge that you only have access to your own intent and the other person's behavior. Speak only to the impact that behavior had on you.

Frame feedback as a joint effort

Alisa Cohn: "You know, Matilda, I want to chat with you about the way you're interacting with your peers. So what I'm hearing from them is that you're missing deadlines on a regular basis and not letting them know you're missing the deadlines, and that also you're not fully keeping your team up to speed. And so they're kind of confused running around. Now, we both know that the most important way you can be successful here and also achieve your goals is to make sure that you are working with your peers in a way that's consistent and that they can count on you and you can count on them."

Position difficult feedback as a collaborative exercise intended to help the employee achieve their own professional goals and improve team coordination.

Prioritize mutual understanding

Rachel Lockett: "There's a misguided view that the goal is to convince the other person that what they're doing is wrong. Actually, the goal of any conflict is to create mutual understanding."

Focus conflict resolution on achieving shared clarity rather than proving who is right or wrong, recognizing that professionals are humans with emotions.

Separate identity from behavior

Dr. Becky Kennedy: "The idea of being good inside inherently requires us to separate behavior and identity. We infer a lot from people's behavior. Someone's late to work a lot, 'Oh, that person's lazy.' The quickest way to have an unproductive conversation is to lose sight of the fact that someone's good inside."

Avoid labeling employees with character traits like lazy. Instead, focus on specific, observable actions to prevent triggering defensive identity threats.

Dial down self-judgment

Matt Abrahams: "Strive for connection over perfection by daring to be dull. Just give the feedback. By doing that, you dial down the volume of self-evaluation, freeing up resources that can be used to really help you succeed."

Prioritize the needs of the recipient and the core message over your own performance anxiety or internal critic during the delivery.

Foster public debate through trust

Jeetu Patel: "Every management book that you read will tell you in public criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. What you have to do is, is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public."

Build a foundation of trust that allows for rigorous critique of ideas in transparent forums rather than behind closed doors.

Commit to the growth journey

Alisa Cohn: "Hope for the future is so important. I know this is going to be challenging for you to hear, not going to promote you, but I want you to know this. It's really important to me that you're able to succeed in your career here, and so I want to continue to help you find opportunities to build your skills and to advance."

Reaffirm your commitment to an employee's future even when delivering difficult news, such as a denied promotion or performance gap.

Templates & Frameworks

• **GAIN Framework for Feedback** (Introducing the GAIN framework for feedback: an evidence-based approach to giving feedback that people love, appreciate, and act on) - A four-part evidence-based framework for giving feedback that people are receptive to and act on. GAIN stands for Goal, Actions, Impacts, Next actions. The core
• **Three Realities Model (Stay on Your Side of the Net)** (Healing your co-founder relationship) - A framework for having difficult conversations without triggering defensiveness. In any interaction between two people, there are three realities: Person A's in
• **GAIN Feedback Preparation Template** (Introducing the GAIN framework for feedback: an evidence-based approach to giving feedback that people love, appreciate, and act on) - A fill-in template with prompts to prepare GAIN-framed feedback before a conversation. Available for download.
• **Next Actions techniques for closing feedback conversations** (Introducing the GAIN framework for feedback: an evidence-based approach to giving feedback that people love, appreciate, and act on) - Five specific techniques for turning feedback into