The Feedback You’re Not Giving, and What It’s Costing Your Team

Most university leaders believe they give honest feedback. Ask them directly and they’ll tell you: yes, I have hard conversations. Yes, I address performance issues. Yes, I tell people where they stand.

Their teams would often tell a different story.

This isn’t about bad leaders or bad intentions. It’s about a gap that exists in almost every institution I work with: the space between what leaders mean to communicate and what their people actually hear. That gap is where potential gets lost, problems compound quietly, and talented people start looking for the door.

The Feedback That Doesn’t Happen

There are two kinds of withheld feedback in academic leadership, and both carry real costs.

The first is feedback that gets softened into meaninglessness. A conversation happens, but the actual message never lands. The leader feels they’ve addressed the situation. The employee leaves the room unclear that anything needs to change. Weeks pass. The pattern continues. The leader grows frustrated. The employee is blindsided when the frustration eventually surfaces.

The second is feedback that never happens at all. Not because the leader doesn’t see the problem, but because the environment makes candor feel too costly. Higher education is particularly prone to this. Shared governance structures, long-tenured faculty relationships, institutional politics, and the fear of grievances or retaliation claims create real friction around direct conversation. And so leaders stay quiet. They work around the issue. They reassign responsibilities without ever explaining why.

What Silence Actually Communicates

Here’s what most leaders miss: silence is never neutral. When feedback doesn’t come, people fill the void with their own interpretation. Often, they conclude things are fine. Sometimes they conclude they’re being managed out but no one will say so. Either way, the relationship is operating on incomplete information, and incomplete information erodes trust.

There is also a second-order effect that gets overlooked. When leaders consistently avoid direct feedback, their teams learn what’s actually rewarded: not honest performance, but the appearance of harmony. People stop raising concerns. They stop identifying problems. They start optimizing for whatever seems to make the leader comfortable rather than what would move the work forward.

Over time, you don’t just have a feedback problem. You have a culture problem.

What It Takes to Close the Gap

Giving better feedback isn’t about learning a new script. It’s about developing the self-awareness to know when you’re pulling a punch and the courage to stop doing it.

The Radical Candor model, developed by Kim Scott, names this tension well. Effective feedback lives at the intersection of two things: caring personally about the people you lead, and challenging them directly. Most leaders who struggle with feedback aren’t failing on the caring side. They’re pulling back on the challenge. They soften the message so much in the name of kindness that the message disappears. Radical Candor asks leaders to hold both at once.

Specificity is kindness. Vague feedback feels safer to deliver but it’s genuinely unkind. People cannot change what they don’t understand. If someone isn’t communicating effectively, tell them what that looks like and what you need to see differently. Spare them the experience of learning it the hard way.

Timeliness matters more than comfort. Feedback delayed is feedback diluted. The longer a leader waits, the more the behavior becomes normalized, the more awkward the correction feels, and the less connected the feedback is to anything the person can readily recall and act on.

Checking for landing is not optional. After a feedback conversation, it’s worth asking: what is your understanding of what I’ve asked you to do differently? Not to be adversarial, but because the goal of the conversation is clarity, not just delivery. Many feedback conversations “happen” in a leader’s mind while failing to register at all on the other end.

The Relationship Between Feedback and Trust

There is a common assumption that withholding difficult feedback preserves relationships. The opposite is usually true.

People generally know when something is wrong, even if no one has said so. They can feel the shift in tone, the slight withdrawal, the way a leader stops including them in certain conversations. What they’re left with in the absence of honest feedback isn’t comfort. It’s uncertainty, which is its own source of chronic stress.

Direct, honest feedback, delivered with genuine care for the other person’s growth, is one of the highest expressions of professional respect. It says: I believe you can handle this. I believe this relationship is worth the discomfort of this conversation. I’m not protecting you from reality. I’m inviting you into it.

That is what the best leaders do. And it is a skill that can be built.