How to give feedback to your superior

Karl -

Wes Kao wrote an interesting piece on how to be able to give feedback to your manager or a higher-up in the organisation's hierarchy. She starts off by saying that you should only resort to giving feedback to a higher-up if you have exhausted all options, including making sure that you cannot solve the problem by yourself.

If you really need to give feedback to your superior, she proposes the following techniques and examples:

The 'Even more' technique

🚫

You: “We might need to give guidance to new hires.”

Senior leader: “You think I don’t know that I need to give new hires guidance? I obviously gave them guidance. GTFO.”

✅

You: “We may need to give even more guidance to new hires.”

Senior leader: “Hmm yeah. I gave them some guidance, but that probably wasn’t enough.”

Using yourself as an example

🚫 “You should try X.”
✅ “I used to struggle with this, and when I tried X, it really helped.” 

Adopting "diplomatic, curiosity-forward" language

Using phrases like these:

"We might want to try…”
“I wonder if...”
"Perhaps we could...”
“What are your thoughts on...”
“One approach might be...”

Brig data and examples to support your point

Example 1: Guidance during projects 

🚫 “We need to give more feedback during projects.”

✅ “I noticed when we reviewed the design mockups weekly with the client, they loved the final result. For this project, early check-ins could help us make sure we’re aligned before going too far down a certain direction and could prevent rework.”

Example 2: Setting priorities 

🚫 “The team needs clearer priorities.”

✅ “The team made amazing progress when we all focused on the website update last month. It might help to have one or two clear priorities for the team this month that everyone can rally behind.”

Example 3: Training new hires 

🚫 “We should spend more time training new people.”

✅ “When we were able to dedicate that first week to training Steve, he got up to speed pretty quickly. The bit of upfront time seemed to have paid off, and taking a similar training approach for our next hire could help them ramp up just as fast. What do you think?”

You can read her explanation on how to better use these techniques here.