A few weeks ago, Jennifer Houle and I published The Polite Way To Avoid a Hard Conversation, focusing on how the feedforward technique often gets misused.
Feedforward, in Marshall Goldsmith’s framing, asks you to offer or invite suggestions about future behaviour rather than judgements about past behaviour. When something specific has gone wrong (imagine a missed deadline or a mishandled client), the future-oriented frame risks removing the very thing that needs to be acknowledged. As a result, the technique can become a way of gesturing at the problem without dealing with it.
Today, we sat down for our third live to dig into the subject properly, and the conversation went well beyond the article. Jen opened with a line that framed the whole hour:
Everyone in the leadership world quotes Brené Brown’s “clear is kind”, but the second half of that statement tends to get dropped: “unclear is unkind.”
We argued that withholding clarity from your team members, however gently you do it, is frankly mean. Jen sees the vague-feedback pattern constantly in her HR work, and she was emphatic that it almost never comes from bad managers. It comes from thoughtful ones trying to preserve trust, who badly underestimate how much employees would prefer a respectful, difficult conversation over a confusing one that leaves them with more questions than answers.
In practice, the employee always pays first, and the cost can be steep: they’re robbed of the specific information they need to improve, and an issue that was genuinely simple to fix in the moment can compound into performance improvement plans and a derailed career. Jen’s reminder throughout was that most of these conversations are far lower-stakes than people have built them up to be in their own head, so it is a true shame that they don’t get resolved.
Something we explored in our conversation is the fact that having serious conversations is genuinely hard work. You do need to prepare! Jen’s suggestion (and she acknowledged that people roll their eyes at role-play) was to rehearse the opening of the conversation out loud, in the mirror or to your cat, in your own natural voice. The opening is the hardest part. So once you have a couple of go-to first sentences that sound like you, the rest tends to flow. A script in someone else’s voice fails because the receiver can feel it. “You don’t normally talk to me like this” is not the reaction you want.
I shared my own version of this. Faced recently with a difficult conversation with a family member, I described the situation to Claude and asked for sensitive ways to broach it. And then I spent days rehearsing in the shower and the car, because whatever an AI gives you needs to be turned into something that will sound like you when you say it out loud. By the time the conversation happened, it came out naturally and with empathy rather than as a recitation.
And one free tip from me that got a laugh: never open with “may I have a word?” From the receiving end, it sounds like a threat.
We also kept returning to repair. If you catch yourself circling mid-conversation, you can simply say so and start again: acknowledging the thing lowers the temperature in the room rather than raising it, because the receiver almost always already knew. Jen widened this beautifully into parenting. She and her partner practise it with their son: when a conversation comes out harsher than intended, they go back and say “I don’t like the way I said that, let’s try that again.” I do something similar with my own child, and we agreed the workplace version earns the same response. Revisiting a conversation you handled badly tends to earn respect from your team, because both of you have had time to think.
The audience questions took us somewhere the article never went:
Can feedback be weaponised? Yes, sometimes deliberately. For Jen, the marker is feedback with nothing actionable in it: telling someone something with no path to improving is feedback being used to break a person down. I described two further shapes: “pretend feedback”, which is really just frustration delivered in a nasty tone and dressed up afterwards as candour; and the slower, more corrosive pattern where a senior person uses a steady drip of criticism to keep a junior colleague small until they stop putting themselves forward at all. We agreed that the person doing the weaponising is rarely receptive to being asked to stop. Document the instances, use the proper channels, and seriously consider getting out.
Motivational versus developmental feedback? Jen drew the line cleanly: motivational feedback builds confidence, developmental feedback expands capability, and both are necessary. The trap is treating feedback as something you only deliver when things go wrong. I shared two practices from my firm: opening team meetings with “good news stories” of recent client praise, and giving “what went well” its own box in performance reviews alongside “what could improve”. Jen described something richer from her organisation, which is Indigenous and Native-led: colleagues sit in circle and name the “medicine” each person brings to the work. Hers is relational. Because everyone knows it, colleagues notice when her medicine seems diminished, and that becomes a human entry point for a check-in. Feedback, in that framing, can be as simple as “You don’t seem quite yourself.”
And the feedback sandwich? (Or, as our questioner Des Kennedy cheekily called it, the S sandwich) We were unanimous: absolutely not. Burying the important message between two slices of praise feels like talking to two people at once, underestimates the receiver’s intelligence, and serves the giver’s comfort rather than the receiver’s understanding. Jen offered the best analogy of the hour, from her early career with Chanel: when applying blush, the first touch to the cheek carries the most pigment. Similarly, the first thing you say in a conversation leaves the deepest impression. Decide what most needs to land, and lead with it. The right time for good feedback is when good things happen, not three weeks later as packaging for bad news.
That's a wrap on live number three. If you enjoyed it, the original piece is here. And do subscribe to Jen's publication, Uncompliant, for more on what's broken in HR and what to do about it.
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