You will be able to give useful feedback to a peer or to your manager without damaging the relationship.
Giving feedback to someone who reports to you has a clear script: it's part of the job. Giving it to the colleague at the next desk, or to your own boss, feels different. You have no authority, you'll work with them tomorrow, and with your manager you're aware that they write your appraisal. So most people say nothing, and the same problem comes round every week.
This lesson covers both directions: across, to a peer, and up, to your manager. The situation, behaviour, impact structure from lesson 7.1, Describe the behaviour, not the person, still does the heavy lifting. What changes is how you open the conversation and where you have it.
Feedback from a peer can feel like an ambush if it arrives unannounced. You're not their manager, so they haven't agreed to hear your views on their work. The simplest fix is to ask permission before you start.
"Marcus, can I share an observation about the handover on Friday?"
That one sentence does three things. It tells him feedback is coming, so he isn't caught off guard. It names the topic, so he knows it's about one thing, not his whole performance. And it gives him a choice. Almost everyone says yes, and having said yes, they listen differently.
Then give the feedback in SBI form, and finish with a question:
"When you handed over the SME survey on Friday, the notes didn't say which clients had already been contacted. On Monday I called two of them again, and one asked if we talk to each other. Could we add a 'contacted' column to the handover sheet?"
Priya, the bank analyst from lesson 1.2, kept it about the sheet and the clients, and ended with a practical suggestion. She didn't say "you're careless with handovers", and she didn't save it up until the third time it happened.
If the answer to "can I share an observation" is "not now", respect it and ask when would suit. Pushing ahead after someone has said no defeats the point of asking.
Feedback to a manager carries more risk, so it helps to frame it around two things: a goal you both care about, and the effect on your own work. You're not assessing your manager's performance. You're asking for something that helps you do the job they need you to do.
The phrase "it would help me if" is the core of it. Compare:
Before: "You keep changing priorities at the last minute."
After: "I want the client reports to be right first time, and I think we both do. Last week the priority moved from the Lim account to the audit pack on Wednesday afternoon, and I had to rush the Lim report on Thursday. It would help me if we could agree the week's top two priorities on Monday, and flag any change as early as possible."
The second version starts from a shared goal, describes one specific situation, talks about the effect on your own work and asks for a concrete change. Your manager can agree to it without feeling attacked, because nothing in it questions their judgement.
Kim Scott's book Radical Candor makes a useful point here. She argues that good feedback combines caring personally with challenging directly, and that most people fail by holding back the challenge to protect the relationship. With a manager, the caring part shows in the shared goal and the respectful tone. The challenging part is still there: a clear request for a change.
Where and when you give feedback matters as much as how. Choose a private moment, soon after the event. A one-to-one, a short call, or a quiet word after a meeting all work. Waiting weeks makes the details fuzzy and the feedback feel like a grudge.
Never give critical feedback to anyone in front of their team or their client, whatever your relationship. That applies to peers and doubly to managers. Even mild criticism in public can cost someone face, and a person who feels embarrassed rarely hears the content. It also makes you look like you're scoring points.
Chat and email are poor channels for critical feedback, for the reasons in lesson 2.3, Why your message sounded ruder than you meant. If it can't be in person, a video call is the next best thing.
In some teams and cultures, even a carefully framed direct statement is too blunt, particularly when giving feedback upward. Erin Meyer, in The Culture Map, describes how cultures vary in how directly they give negative feedback. In more indirect settings, criticism is often softened, given privately and wrapped in suggestions.
In those settings, an indirect route can work better: a question or a suggestion that lets the other person reach the conclusion themselves.
"Would it help if we fixed the week's priorities on Monday? I find I do better work when I know the order early."
That carries the same request without stating the problem outright. Your manager understands, and nobody has to acknowledge that anything went wrong. Lesson 8.1, Low-context and high-context communication, covers how to tell which approach a colleague will read the way you intend.
Direct or indirect, the request must still be specific. "Maybe we could communicate better?" is so indirect nobody can act on it.
Think about your manager and one thing they do that makes your work harder. Before you work out the words, find the goal you both genuinely share, because that's the sentence the rest of the feedback hangs from. Then consider how your manager usually takes suggestions, directly or indirectly, and whether a one-to-one is coming up soon.
Write how you would give one piece of feedback to your manager, framed around a shared goal and your own work.
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