What this post covers
Why giving negative feedback is the most valuable habit a founder-CEO can build, how to do it without destroying trust, and the no-triangulation rule that transformed two companies I ran.
The short answer
Negative feedback is a gift because it is the only type of feedback that changes behaviour. Gallup found that 80% of employees who receive meaningful feedback weekly are fully engaged. The problem is not that people reject criticism. It is that 81% have only ever received the destructive kind. Give it directly, privately, and with a specific behaviour to fix. Ask permission first. Then shut up and listen.
Negative feedback is information given to someone about a gap between their current performance and the expected standard. Unlike positive feedback, which reinforces existing behaviour, negative feedback identifies what needs to change. When delivered well, it accelerates growth. When delivered badly, it destroys trust and relationships.
Why do so many leaders avoid giving negative feedback?
Only 23% of employees worldwide received meaningful feedback in the past week (Gallup, 2025). That number should alarm you. It means three-quarters of your team are operating without a signal telling them whether they are on track or drifting.
The reason is not laziness. It’s fear. We imagine the conversation will end in a meltdown. We picture aggression, tears, a slammed door. So we say nothing, tell ourselves the problem will sort itself out, and watch performance quietly rot.
The habit starts early. We are taught from childhood: if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing. That lesson served us well in the playground. In a scale-up trying to hit a £30m run rate, it is organisational poison.
Here is the paradox nobody talks about. A Harvard Business Review study in March 2026 found that 81% of employees have experienced destructive feedback, and 78% recalled it vividly years later. More than a third said the relationship with the person who gave it never fully recovered. So the fear is not irrational. Most people have been burned by feedback done badly. The solution is not less feedback. It is better feedback.
What makes negative feedback a gift rather than a weapon?
The difference sits in one word: intent.
Kim Scott nailed this in Radical Candor, the book I recommend to every founder I coach. I’ve had Kim on my podcast twice, and the message is always the same. She draws a simple grid: care personally on one axis, challenge directly on the other. When you care about someone and challenge them directly, that is radical candour. When you care but stay silent, that is ruinous empathy. It feels kind. It is not. It robs the other person of the chance to improve.
Think about it from the other side. If someone on your team is underperforming and nobody tells them, how do they know? They may not be incompetent. They may just need someone to tell them what good looks like. Without that signal, they keep doing the wrong thing, their colleagues resent them for it, and you eventually fire them for something they could have fixed in a week.
Gallup’s data backs this up. Employees who receive meaningful feedback weekly are 3.6 times more likely to be motivated to do outstanding work than those who get feedback once a year. The feedback itself is the gift. Withholding it is the cruelty.
Dominic Monkhouse, founder of Monkhouse & Company, scaled Peer 1 Hosting from 0 to 120 people and Rackspace UK from 4 to 150, taking both businesses to a £30m annual run rate. He has since coached more than 200 founder-CEOs through the growing pains of scaling.
“At Peer 1, the executive team introduced a no-triangulation rule. If you had a problem with someone, you talked to them directly. No gossip, no third-party conversations, no politics. If someone came to a colleague to vent, that colleague had 72 hours to make sure the direct conversation happened, or they would raise it themselves. It was uncomfortable at first. Within six months it changed the culture completely. I have shared that rule at speaking events and had founders come back two years later to tell me it transformed their company.”
How do you give negative feedback without being destructive?
The HBR research identified exactly what makes feedback destructive. The top culprits: it lacks corrective guidance (78%), it feels false or unfair (67%), it is dismissive or contemptuous (44%), it attacks character rather than behaviour (24%), and it happens in public (23%).
Flip every one of those and you have a blueprint for feedback that works.
1. Ask permission first
One sentence changes everything: “Can I give you some feedback?” In my experience, they always say yes. But the act of asking lowers their defences. They have opted in. They are listening rather than bracing.
Then try this: “This is really difficult for me to say.” It sounds counterintuitive, but showing that the conversation is hard for you triggers empathy. They stop bracing and start listening, because they can see you are not enjoying this either.
2. Name the specific behaviour, not the person
“You missed the client deadline by three days” is useful. “You are unreliable” is character assassination. One gives them something to fix. The other gives them a reason to update their CV.
3. Explain the impact
People change when they understand what their behaviour costs. “When the deadline slipped, the client lost confidence and called me directly. That put the renewal at risk.” Now the stakes are real and the motivation to change is internal, not imposed.
4. Do it quickly. But private or public depends on the context.
The longer you wait, the less relevant the feedback becomes. The best feedback happens within 24 hours of the behaviour.
For general performance issues, do it privately. A quiet room, door closed, one issue at a time.
But here is what I tell the CEOs I coach: if the feedback is about behavioural standards the team has already agreed on, values they have committed to, a team charter they signed up to, do it in the room. In front of the exec team. Not behind closed doors.
Why? Because if only the CEO calls out behavioural breaches in private, the CEO becomes the sole enforcer. That is lonely, exhausting, and unsustainable. What you actually want is for the team to hold each other accountable. The fastest way to make that happen is for the CEO to model it publicly. Challenge the behaviour in the meeting. Show the team it is safe to do. Then they start doing it themselves, and you are no longer the only one carrying that weight.
5. Ditch the shit sandwich
You know the one. Good news, bad news, good news. A piece of shit in the middle of two compliments. It is amateur hour. It is for children. Your team sees straight through it and the only person it makes feel better is you. Say what you need to say. Be direct. Be kind. Do not wrap it in anything.
What does a strong feedback culture actually look like?
High-performing sports teams are the clearest example. The New Zealand All Blacks, the most successful team in the history of sport, have a value: “stab me in the belly, not the back.” Direct feedback, face to face, because the team’s standard matters more than anyone’s comfort. James Kerr wrote about this in Legacy, and I have had him on my podcast. The principle is simple: if you want to be a high-performing team, not a beer-league team, you take direct feedback because you want to be as good as you can be. You want your teammates to be as good as they can be. And if someone cannot take that, they cannot be on the team.
In business, we rarely build that kind of discipline. We hire people, throw them at the work, and sometimes never tell them how they are doing. I’ve seen founders lose good people because staff did not feel they were progressing. They did not know if they were doing a good job or not. No signal. No growth. No loyalty.
At Rackspace, when we were still at about 15 people in the UK, we built a peer feedback system from scratch. Every quarter, all staff rated everyone else on a scale of 1 to 5 against a set of behaviours we had defined as a team. The person with the highest score was named employee of the quarter and won a weekend away with their partner. I would then have a private word with the two people at the bottom.
One quarter, a guy called David came bottom. The feedback was simple: he never answered the phones on the IT support desk. Everyone moaned about it behind his back, but nobody had actually told him. I sat him down and gave him the direct feedback. He had no idea. He just did not know what he did not know. The moment he knew it, he was motivated enough to fix it. Next quarter, David was Employee of the Quarter. The rest of the team were complaining because they never got to pick up a call.
That is the power of honest feedback. Not punishment. Not humiliation. Just a clear signal that says: here is the gap, and I trust you to close it.
How do you build a no-triangulation rule in your team?
Triangulation is the silent killer of psychological safety. You and I should be having a difficult conversation, but instead we are each talking to a third person about it. Nothing gets resolved. Resentment builds. Trust erodes.
At Peer 1, the executive team made an explicit agreement: no third-party conversations about interpersonal issues. If someone came to a colleague to vent, that colleague had 72 hours to ensure the direct conversation happened, or they would raise it themselves. The rule cascaded from the exec team to the directors and then to the wider business.
It was uncomfortable. People resisted it. But it cut through the gossip and politics faster than any team-building exercise I have ever seen. The result was a leadership team built on peer-to-peer accountability that could have hard conversations without flinching, because the expectation was explicit and triangulation was no longer tolerated.
If you want to try it, start with your leadership team. Make the agreement public. Write it down. Refer to it the first time someone breaks it. Within three months you will see the difference.
What should you do when someone reacts badly to negative feedback?
They will sometimes. Defensiveness, anger, blame-shifting, silence. All normal. All manageable. But if someone consistently cannot take feedback, that tells you something important about whether they have the curiosity and coachability you need on your team. This is why I tell founders to hire for those traits in the first place. You want people who are ridiculously curious, who actively want to get better. Find that out in the interview, not six months later when you give them their first piece of honest feedback and they fall apart.
The key is to stay anchored in the behaviour, not the emotion. If they get defensive, acknowledge the feeling (“I can see this is hard to hear”) and redirect to the specific behaviour. Don’t argue about whether the feedback is fair. Ask them what they think happened. Listen. People are far more willing to change when they feel heard than when they feel judged.
And remember: you may not agree with feedback you receive. Sometimes people completely disagree with what they are told. But if someone has taken the time to say it, something you did or said made them feel that way. That is data. You do not have to accept the conclusion. You do have to accept that the feeling is real.
Say thank you. Mean it. The feedback is a gift.
| Destructive feedback | Constructive feedback |
|---|---|
| “You are unreliable” | “The deadline slipped by three days. What happened?” |
| Given in a team meeting | Given privately within 24 hours |
| No guidance on what to change | Specific behaviour + expected standard |
| Wrapped in a shit sandwich | Direct, kind, and focused on one issue |
| Waits for the annual review | Happens within 24 hours of the behaviour |
| Attacks character | Describes the impact on the team or business |
How often should you give feedback as a CEO?
More than you think. Gallup’s research across 13,490 employees found that those who received meaningful feedback in the past week were 80% fully engaged, compared to the global baseline of just 21% (Gallup, 2025).
Ed Batista put it well: “Make feedback normal. Not a performance review.”
The companies I coach that get this right treat feedback like breathing. It happens in the daily huddle, in one-to-ones, in hallway conversations. It is not an event. It is a habit. And the habit starts with you. If you, as CEO, are not modelling radical honesty, nobody else will either.
Only 44% of managers worldwide have received any formal management training (Gallup, 2025). That means more than half of the people delivering feedback in your organisation were never taught how. If you invest in one leadership capability this quarter, make it feedback. The return is immediate and visible.
I scaled two companies to £30m. Every week, I'll show you how.
Frequently asked questions
How do you give negative feedback in a positive way?
Ask permission first, then name the specific behaviour and its impact on the team or business. Focus on one issue at a time. Keep the tone direct and respectful. Avoid the feedback sandwich. End by asking how they see the situation and agreeing a next step together.
What is the difference between constructive criticism and destructive criticism?
Constructive criticism names a specific behaviour, explains its impact, and offers a path to improvement. Destructive criticism attacks the person rather than the behaviour, lacks corrective guidance, and often happens publicly. HBR research found that 78% of destructive feedback lacked any guidance on what to change.
How do you handle an employee who reacts badly to feedback?
Stay anchored in the behaviour, not the emotion. Acknowledge the feeling, then redirect to the specific issue. Ask them what they think happened and listen before responding. People are more willing to change when they feel heard than when they feel judged.
Why do employees prefer negative feedback to positive feedback?
Because negative feedback is the only type that changes behaviour. Zenger and Folkman found that 57% of employees prefer corrective feedback over praise, and 72% said their performance would improve if their manager gave more of it. Positive feedback confirms what is working. Negative feedback shows what to fix.
What is the no-triangulation rule?
A team agreement that bans third-party conversations about interpersonal issues. If you have a problem with someone, you talk to them directly. If you vent to a colleague instead, that colleague has 72 hours to make sure the direct conversation happens, or they raise it themselves. It eliminates gossip and forces honest dialogue.
How do you create a feedback culture in a scaling business?
Start with the leadership team. Model giving and receiving feedback openly. Introduce a no-triangulation rule. Use a simple framework like stop, start, continue to give people a structure. Build feedback into weekly one-to-ones and daily huddles. Train managers in how to deliver feedback constructively. Celebrate people who give honest, direct feedback rather than those who avoid conflict.
Should you give negative feedback in writing or in person?
In person, always. Tone, context, and empathy are lost in writing. Written feedback feels like a formal warning even when it is not intended as one. Have the conversation face to face or on a video call. Follow up with a brief written summary only if you need to document an agreed action.
Three ways I can help (ranked by impact, and by how much effort it requires from you)
- Book a call. Thirty minutes, no charge. I will tell you exactly where your feedback culture is costing you people and performance, and what to fix first.
- Grab the book. Mind Your F**king Business covers feedback, candour, and the leadership habits that make scaling less painful. Written for founder-CEOs, not HR departments.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. One email a week on scaling, leadership, and culture. No fluff. Unsubscribe whenever you like.
Your move. Pick the person you have been avoiding giving feedback to. Have the conversation this week. Ask permission, name the behaviour, explain the impact, and listen. That is all it takes to start.
About the author: Dominic Monkhouse is a business coach and founder of Monkhouse & Company. He has coached more than 200 founder-CEOs of scale-ups through the leadership challenges that come with growth.
What should you do next?
If this post has annoyed you slightly, good. The issue is probably not effort. It is design. The business is asking you to carry decisions, standards and exceptions that should now belong inside the team.
The goal is not to disappear. The goal is to build a company where your best work is not dragged back into every operational tangle.
That is the point. Scaling is not adding more people around the same bottleneck. It is rebuilding the business so the bottleneck is removed.
Four ways to take this further
- Book a call. If growth is now making the company slower, heavier or more dependent on you, I can help you decide whether the constraint is people, strategy, execution, cash or your role as founder. No obligation, no pitch. You will know quickly whether this is the right kind of help.
- Grab the book. F**k Plan B covers these principles in more depth, with the practical founder lessons behind customer obsession, honest communication, hiring, small teams and managers who coach.
- Watch the £30m scaling video. Start there if you want the founder-level version of these principles, using Rackspace and Peer 1 as the proof base.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. Get direct, practical thinking on scaling, founder bottlenecks, leadership rhythm and building a company that can run without you in every room.
Your move. Open Slack, Teams or your inbox. Find the decision that should not have come to you this week. That is where the scaling work starts.