Why do one in five managers never give negative feedback?
One manager in five would rather stay silent than tell someone on their team, “you need to do this differently.” The reason is not laziness; it is real anxiety.
The findings of Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman’s research, published in Harvard Business Review, are striking. In a survey of 7,631 people, 44% found giving negative feedback stressful or difficult. In a separate self-assessment of 7,808 people, 21% admitted that they avoid giving negative feedback altogether.1
- find giving negative feedback stressful or difficult
- 44%
- admit they avoid negative feedback entirely
- 21%
- admit they do not give positive feedback either
- 37%
A sleepless night, sweating hands
Why? The authors say they keep hearing the same kind of remarks from the managers they talk to about feedback:
“I did not sleep the night before.” “My hands were sweating and I was nervous.” “I just wanted to get it over quickly.”
This comes not from laziness but from real anxiety. In a study of 2,000 people in the UK, the most common fear about a difficult conversation is exactly this: for 43% of respondents, the biggest fear is not knowing how the other person will respond.2
That uncertainty makes you rehearse the moment in your head again and again before it happens. Yet most managers try the conversation for the first time with a real employee, with real consequences.
It is not only criticism they avoid
The study’s most surprising finding lies elsewhere: 37% of those who took the self-assessment admitted they do not give positive feedback either, even more than those who avoid negative feedback. For many managers, what they avoid is not criticism but feedback itself.1
Yet teams judge a manager’s feedback mostly by how willing they are to give praise. When Zenger and Folkman compared 328 managers’ self-assessments with 360-degree feedback results, the strongest influence on whether others said a leader “gives honest feedback in a helpful way” was the leader’s comfort with giving positive feedback.1
Three habits of good feedback
Be specific.
Instead of “good job,” say what went well. It can be brief, as long as it is not a generic remark.
Say it in time.
Praise works best when it comes soon after the moment that earned it.
Be on their side first.
When people know you want them to succeed, criticism becomes less stressful for you and more effective for them.1
Before you walk on stage
Atlas Talks exists for exactly this gap: before the real meeting, you rehearse that difficult conversation out loud with an AI-driven character. You find out how the other person might react, and which sentence works and which one backfires, somewhere safe. You do not have to be an actor walking on stage without a rehearsal.
Giving feedback is not a talent but a skill. Like every skill, it grows with practice.
Sources
- Harvard Business Review, “Why Do So Many Managers Avoid Giving Praise?”, 2 May 2017hbr.org/2017/05/why-do-so-many-managers-avoid-giving-praise
- Chartered Management Institute, “The best strategies for difficult workplace conversations”, 29 July 2015managers.org.uk/knowledge-and-insights/article/the-best-strategies-for-difficult-workplace-conversations