Feedback Can Be a Gift

In misaligned organizations, feedback is not a neutral tool. It becomes an instrument of power.

As a leader, you cannot view any organizational dynamics as zero-sum games. This tends to happen when perception is valued over context and there is no source of truth. Your remit is to make the pie bigger for everyone in your orbit. Instead, in the case of poor leaders, they design incentive structures that result in everyone earning nothing.

When the wrong people are put in leadership positions for optics or based on nepotism, the feedback they bestow creates a vicious loop that can tank an entire organization.

People who are not meant to be leaders tend to give feedback to resolve their own discomfort or insecurities about what you’ve made or achieved; they turn what is meant to be professional feedback into personal feedback.

One way to address this inequity is to introduce a feedback loop for the feedback itself.

The moment feedback from a manager starts rewriting your identity, it stops being a gift.

For example, my team was given one month’s notice that a major product would launch without any meaningful feedback mechanisms. We had to rebuild critical pieces under extreme time pressure just to meet baseline requirements. We delivered in a matter of weeks. Instead of recognizing the work, the response was distortion. I was asked why I was “so slow.”

When feedback is tied to incentives that determine your livelihood, even top performers are forced to accept every “gift.” Otherwise, there is no pathway to fair recognition or compensation.

If you accept all feedback, your work dissolves. If you reject it, you risk losing access to opportunity. That tension is where most careers quietly get shaped.

People don’t fail from lack of feedback. They fail from the over-acceptance of it.

A real gift should cost the giver something too. Most feedback is free. That is the problem.

People who give inappropriate feedback should face disciplinary action when it is to the detriment of an organization’s success. This is negative reinforcement learning.

How this works online: On Snapchat, feedback for Creators comes in the form of Story Replies. Creators can report the content of the messages they receive that are contextually relevant or block the user inline. Additionally, they can stand their ground and “quote” people; this turns a fan's text-based Reply into a sticker that the Creator can add to his or her Story with a video or photo reaction to it. In addition to automated spam and bad words filtering, Creators can even mute things they just don’t want to see in their in-app Creator Settings, often to avoid known trolls or bullies.

I wish the real world worked like this.

Not all gifts should be opened. Some should be returned. And if the feedback loop is broken often enough, the system itself is telling you something.