Why Is Feedback So Difficult?
Every year organisations spend budget running employee surveys and then pour the results into striking presentation slides. Most of the time no real culture change follows. Feedback is one of the practices organisations claim most strongly and deliver least.
The root cause is treating feedback as a tool rather than a culture. Culture is a collective habit that shows up in a thousand separate decisions. You cannot build it with one meeting or a single training session.
Psychological Safety: The Foundation of the Foundation
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson's finding, confirmed again and again over the years, is this: feedback only happens when individuals feel that speaking up carries no serious cost. What removes that cost is psychological safety.
Psychological safety is the organisation-wide sense that “whatever I say, I am safe here.” Leaders are the first and strongest carriers of that feeling. A manager who does not share their own mistakes openly should not expect honesty from their team.
“People do not give feedback to a leader they think is strong. They give it to a leader who makes them feel safe.”
A Structured Model: The SBI Framework
Culture is abstract, but there are practices that make it concrete. One of the most useful frameworks for the practice of feedback is the SBI (Situation–Behavior–Impact) model:
- Situation: State the context of the feedback. “In last Tuesday’s 2 p.m. meeting…”
- Behavior: Describe the concrete behaviour you observed. Observe, do not interpret.
- Impact: Share the effect that behaviour had on you or on the team. “What that left me feeling was…”
Teaching managers this framework matters; making sure they use it regularly and consistently matters more. A one-off training is not enough.
Turning Feedback into Routine
Culture is made of repeated behaviour. A few practical suggestions for turning feedback into culture:
- Make regular 1:1s standard. Thirty minutes a week — not only to discuss the work agenda, but to discuss the relationship.
- Introduce a post-project retrospective ritual. Asking “what went well, what could be better?” at the end of every project makes feedback ordinary.
- Reward feedback. Recognise the people who share constructive feedback, not just the positive kind.
- Have leaders model it. Managers should say openly that they want feedback from their teams — and then report what they changed because of it.
Measuring and Sustaining
An annual survey is far too blunt an instrument for measuring feedback culture. Monthly pulse surveys — especially ones with specific questions such as “Did you receive constructive feedback this month?” — produce far more valuable data.
At Derin Akademi we have observed this: what organisations that successfully build a feedback culture have in common is consistency in leadership behaviour. Behaviour shapes culture, not words.