The Feedback Gap – Why Good Intentions Aren’t Enough

Most managers I work with are not avoiding feedback because they don’t care. They are avoiding it because they care too much and don’t quite know how to begin.

The cost of that avoidance is higher than most managers realise.

A story that stayed with me

During a team coaching session some years ago, one participant said something that stopped the room. Feedback she received in her annual review had completely blindsided her. She thought she was performing well, but the message she received was quite the opposite. What made it worse was learning that her colleagues had known and said nothing. Their intention was to protect her. The effect was the opposite.

It wasn’t just the surprise of the feedback. It was the months she had spent wondering why something felt off. Why she wasn’t being included in certain conversations. Why her confidence had quietly started to erode. She had been trying to make sense of signals she didn’t have the information to read. The feedback, when it finally came, at least gave her something to work with. But the cost of the delay was real to her confidence and her trust in the people around her.

That is what the avoidance of feedback actually does. It doesn’t protect people. It leaves them in the dark, making their own meaning from incomplete information and that meaning is rarely kind to themselves.

Why we avoid it

The biggest barrier to giving direct feedback is rarely a lack of caring. Most managers who avoid these conversations care deeply about the people they lead. That is often precisely why they avoid it.

The reasons run deeper than discomfort. There is the fear of damaging a relationship that matters, the worry about getting it wrong or handling the reaction badly. There is sometimes a quiet imposter syndrome at play: who am I to tell this person they are falling short? And there is the seductive logic of waiting for the right moment, which has a habit of never quite arriving.

So instead, the difficult conversation gets deferred. And in its place, managers work through every possible explanation for the performance concern, carrying the weight of a problem that isn’t fully theirs to carry while the employee is denied the information they need to take ownership of their own development.

This is what I call the Responsibility Trap.

Accountability versus responsibility

One of the most common areas of confusion I encounter with managers centres on the difference between accountability and responsibility, particularly when it comes to employee performance.

Here is the distinction that matters: as a manager, you are accountable to the organisation for the performance of your team. But accountability is not the same as responsibility. Your employees are responsible for their own performance. And the only way they can exercise that responsibility effectively is if they know clearly what is expected of them and how they are performing against those expectations.

When a manager tells me they have concerns about someone’s performance, my first question is always: does the employee know? The answers I hear are revealing. “Well, sort of.” “Not directly.” “Now isn’t the right time.” What follows is often a detailed account of everything the manager thinks might be going wrong and what they are planning to do to fix it, all without ever having a direct conversation with the person at the centre of it.

Some questions I find useful to prompt reflection are: if it were you, would you want to know? Would you want the opportunity to understand what the concerns are and a chance to address them? Would you want someone else deciding how to fix your performance without ever asking you?

And yet we struggle to extend that same respect to the people we lead.

Getting ahead of the problem

The most effective approach to performance is not reactive, it is preventative. Before a concern becomes a problem, it is worth asking yourself how well each member of your team is genuinely positioned to succeed. Four areas are worth examining regularly:

Direction: Do they understand their role and what they are expected to deliver? Do they know how their work connects to the wider goals of the organisation? Unclear expectations are one of the most common and most avoidable roots of underperformance.

Skills: Do they have the tools, knowledge and capability they need to perform effectively? If someone is struggling, it is worth asking whether the gap is in their will or their skill because the response to each is very different.

Motivation: Are they engaged and energised? Disengagement rarely announces itself. It tends to seep quietly into performance over time.

Culture: Do they understand how things get done in this organisation, the unwritten rules as much as the written ones? A person can have all the skills and motivation in the world and still struggle if they haven’t found their footing in the culture around them.

If the answer to any of these is unclear or no, the performance conversation needs to start there not with what the employee is doing wrong, but with what conditions are making it harder for them to do it right.

What good performance conversations look like

Effective performance management is a two-way conversation. It is not something done to an employee, but with them. It requires setting clear expectations, providing timely and honest feedback, and creating the conditions for the person to take genuine ownership of their own development.

This is where a coaching approach changes everything. Rather than arriving at a performance conversation with a diagnosis and a solution already formed, a coaching mindset arrives with curiosity, genuinely interested in the other person’s experience and what they believe they need to move forward. It shifts the dynamic from judgement to growth and makes it far more likely that the employee leaves the conversation feeling empowered rather than diminished.

The most important thing is that the conversation happens honestly, respectfully and in time to make a difference.

A final thought

You are accountable for the performance of your team. That accountability carries real responsibilities, amongst them, the responsibility to be honest. That includes telling people where they stand and give them the information they need to grow.

Protecting people from difficult feedback is not kindness. It is a disservice to them, to the team and ultimately to yourself as a leader.

The most effective leaders I have worked with are not the ones who find feedback easy. They are the ones who have learned to do it well, even when it is hard. In doing so, they create something rare, a team where people feel genuinely seen, supported and equipped to do their best work.

Developing the skill of honest, effective performance conversations is at the heart of our Coaching Skills for Managers programme. If this resonates and you’d like to explore what that could look like in your organisation, we’d love to talk.