Start, stop, continue feedback: how to run it properly

If your leadership team avoids hard feedback, you do not have a feedback problem. You have a trust problem.

People can usually name the behaviour that is frustrating them. They can tell you who dominates meetings, who misses deadlines, who avoids conflict, who nods in the room and then does something different afterwards. The problem is that nobody says it out loud.

That silence is expensive. It creates fake harmony, weak accountability and a leadership team that looks aligned on paper but behaves like a group of functional heads defending their own corners.

This is why I use start, stop, continue feedback with leadership teams. It is simple enough to run in a room with paper and pens. It is structured enough to stop the conversation turning into vague praise or personal attack. And when it is done properly, it gives every leader a practical personal development plan written by the people who work with them every week.

What is start, stop, continue feedback?

Start, stop, continue feedback is a structured exercise for giving practical behavioural feedback. Each person receives three kinds of input:

• Start: what they should begin doing because it would help the team.
• Stop: what they should stop doing because it is getting in the way.
• Continue: what they already do well and should keep doing.

You may know it as an agile retrospective tool. That version is useful for reviewing projects, sprints or ways of working. I use it differently. I use it with leadership teams to improve trust, candour and performance.

That distinction matters. A project retrospective asks, “What should we change about the work?” A leadership-team feedback session asks, “What behaviour do I need to change if this team is going to perform better?”

That second question is harder. It is also where the value is.

Generic start, stop, continue	Monkhouse & Company leadership-team version
Anonymous ideas on sticky notes	Named peer feedback with initials attached
Looks mainly at the work or the project	Looks at the behaviours that make the team stronger or weaker
Produces a list of team actions	Produces a personal development plan for each leader
Useful for retrospectives	Useful when the leadership team needs more trust, candour and accountability

That is the information most templates miss. The tool is easy. The real question is whether your team has enough trust to attach a name to the feedback and act on it afterwards.

When should you use start, stop, continue?

Use start, stop, continue when your leadership team needs more honest feedback but does not yet have a clean way to give it.

It is particularly useful when:

• people are polite in meetings but frustrated outside the room
• the team is avoiding conflict in the name of harmony
• accountability conversations are too vague
• the CEO gets filtered feedback and misses what people really think
• annual appraisals have become a compliance exercise
• the team says it wants high performance but has not agreed what high-performance behaviour looks like

This is not a soft issue. Gallup’s 2025 employee engagement research found that 14% of employees cite a lack of feedback, recognition or development opportunities as a missing part of their work experience. The same analysis argues that once- or twice-a-year reviews cannot replace regular feedback on performance, collaboration and customer value.

I often use it alongside Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team. If absence of trust leads to fear of conflict, lack of commitment and weak accountability, then you need exercises that make trust and conflict practical. Start, stop, continue does that.

It is also a better alternative to many anonymous 360 reviews. Anonymous feedback often turns into quantified gossip. Start, stop, continue is direct. If someone writes the feedback, they own it. If the team has enough trust, they say it out loud.

How do you run a start, stop, continue feedback session?

For a leadership team of six to eight people, allow around two hours. Do not squeeze it into the last 20 minutes of an off-site. You are asking people to give each other useful truth. That deserves proper space.

1. Start with the context

Before anyone writes feedback, remind the team what they are trying to achieve together. This could be your purpose, BHAG, One-Page Strategic Plan, quarterly priorities or the behaviours in your team charter.

The feedback is not, “What do I personally find annoying about you?” It is, “With this team and this goal in mind, what do you need to start, stop or continue so we can perform better?”

2. Give every person one sheet of paper

Each person writes their name at the top of a blank sheet of paper. Then they divide the page into three sections: start, stop and continue.

Pass the papers to the left. The next person writes feedback in one, two or all three sections. Then the paper moves on again. Keep going until every sheet has gone around the room and returned to its owner.

I prefer people to add their initials to the feedback they write. It keeps the exercise adult. It also means the person receiving the feedback can go back afterwards and ask, “Can you tell me more about this?”

3. Make the feedback behavioural

Good feedback describes behaviour. Weak feedback describes personality.

“Be more strategic” is not useful. “Start bringing the commercial risk into the first ten minutes of the meeting, not the last five” is useful.

“Stop being negative” is lazy. “Stop opening every new idea with the operational reason it will fail” gives the person something they can recognise and change.

“Continue helping the team see the customer impact before we make internal decisions” is better than “Continue being helpful”.

4. Let people read their feedback privately first

If this is the first time the team has done the exercise, especially if trust is low, let people take the sheet away and read it privately.

That may sound soft. It is not. The first goal is to make truth safer to handle. I have had clients pin the sheet above their monitor because it was the clearest personal development plan they had ever received.

What are good start, stop, continue feedback examples for leaders?

The best examples are specific enough that the person can picture the behaviour. Use these as prompts, not scripts.

Category	Weak feedback	Better feedback
Start	Be clearer	Start ending each meeting with the owner, deadline and expected outcome for every decision.
Start	Be more strategic	Start showing the team the trade-off you are making, not just the decision you want.
Stop	Stop being negative	Stop opening new ideas with why they will not work before the person has finished explaining them.
Stop	Stop micromanaging	Stop asking for status updates twice a day after you have delegated the outcome.
Continue	Keep helping	Continue translating customer problems into plain English so the whole team understands the commercial impact.
Continue	Keep supporting people	Continue giving calm, direct feedback in the moment instead of saving it for formal reviews.

Notice the pattern. The useful version names the moment. It gives the person a behaviour they can see, hear and practise.

How do you go deeper when there is enough trust?

Once the team has enough psychological safety, take the exercise further. The CEO or team leader should go first.

Ask the team to give the CEO one piece of positive feedback first. What should they continue? Then ask for one piece of constructive feedback. What should they start or stop?

This matters because the leader sets the tolerance level for truth. If the CEO receives feedback defensively, the room learns that honesty is not safe. If the CEO thanks people, asks clarifying questions and resists the urge to explain everything away, the team learns something different.

I have had to learn this myself. At Peer 1, I used to travel from the UK to the west coast of America for quarterly off-sites. By about 4pm, jet lag had usually done its work and I would start picking a fight with the CEO. Eventually it became a standing joke. As the clock ticked towards 4pm, people would watch me and call the behaviour out.

That is what useful feedback does. It gives people language for the pattern while it is happening, not six months later in a formal review when nobody can remember the details.

What should you do after the exercise?

The exercise is not finished when the paper comes back. That is where most teams waste it.

• Choose one or two changes. Do not try to act on every comment at once.
• Ask for examples. If a note is unclear, go back to the person who wrote it and ask what they saw.
• Turn it into a 90-day commitment. Pick a behaviour, define what better looks like and review it next quarter.
• Share the learning with your functional team. Nothing demonstrates vulnerability like taking your feedback back to the people you lead.

One of my first coaching clients had broken relationships with a lot of people in his organisation. I asked him to take start, stop, continue back to 20 of them and work through it directly. The response was overwhelmingly positive. People were surprised he had come to them for input, but they were happy to help him change. He was still there three years later and had been promoted twice.

That is the bit leaders often miss. People do not expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to show that you are listening.

How often should you run start, stop, continue?

Run it at least every six months. Quarterly is better if the team is going through change, scaling quickly or working on a new behavioural charter.

A useful rhythm is:

• run the full exercise at a quarterly or six-monthly off-site
• choose one behaviour to change in the next 90 days
• check progress at the next quarterly session
• ask, “Do you believe I acted on the feedback you gave me?”

That final question is powerful. It turns feedback from a one-off emotional event into an accountability loop.

Why does start, stop, continue work?

It makes feedback balanced

People are more willing to hear difficult feedback when it sits alongside what they should continue. This is not about wrapping criticism in praise. It is about giving a fuller picture.

Workhuman and Gallup’s 2024 research, tracking more than 3,400 employees, found that only one in four employees strongly agree they receive valuable feedback from the people they work with. Those who do are five times as likely to be engaged. That is why the continue column matters. It turns feedback from a list of flaws into a fuller view of what is working and what needs to change.

It builds psychological safety

I interviewed Amy Edmondson on Scale to Win about this exact issue. Her useful shorthand is that psychological safety gives people “permission for candour”. In her HBS research, she defines it as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk. Start, stop, continue gives the team a small, repeatable way to take that risk.

You do not build psychological safety by putting it on a slide. You build it by creating moments where people can tell the truth and survive the experience.

A 2025 CEPR discussion paper using data from more than 500 teams and 4,300 employees found that cultures where people feel safe voicing ideas are associated with innovation, team performance and team stability. The paper also found that interventions focused on employees’ psychological needs increased psychological safety. That is the point of this exercise. It creates a controlled moment for voice, not a slogan about openness.

It creates a practical development plan

Most development plans are too abstract. This one is written by colleagues who see the person under pressure, in meetings, making decisions and dealing with conflict. That makes it harder to ignore.

It replaces annual appraisal theatre

Annual appraisals are usually too slow and too sanitised. By the time the conversation happens, the useful examples are gone. Start, stop, continue works because the feedback is closer to the behaviour.

It also fits with Kim Scott’s Radical Candor: care personally and challenge directly. When I interviewed Kim Scott about radical candour, the point was not to make feedback brutal. It was to make it useful. Kim later came back on the podcast with Trier Bryant to talk about being an upstander rather than a bystander. That is the same muscle this exercise builds. If either half is missing, the feedback fails. Challenge without care becomes aggression. Care without challenge becomes avoidance.

What mistakes should you avoid?

Mistake 1: starting with brutal honesty before there is trust

If trust is low, begin with continue. Ask people to write what they value in each other before moving into start and stop. You are warming up the feedback muscle, not trying to tear it.

Mistake 2: allowing vague feedback

Ban comments that cannot be acted on. “Be better at communication” is not feedback. “Start sending the decision note within 24 hours of the meeting” is feedback.

Mistake 3: treating the paper as the outcome

The sheet is not the outcome. Behaviour change is the outcome. If nobody chooses a commitment and nobody follows up, you have created a cathartic workshop, not a better team.

Mistake 4: keeping it inside the leadership team

The best leaders take the feedback back to their own teams. They say, “Here is what my peers told me. Here is what I am working on. I need you to help me spot it.” That is how the exercise starts to shape culture rather than staying as an off-site activity.

What is the real test?

Start, stop, continue is not complicated. That is the point.

The hard part is not drawing three boxes on a page. The hard part is building a team where people are willing to write the truth in those boxes, sign their initials next to it and then help each other change.

If your leadership team cannot do that, the exercise has already shown you the real work.

Questions CEOs ask about start, stop, continue feedback

What is the start, stop, continue feedback method?

The start, stop, continue feedback method is a simple structure for giving balanced behavioural feedback. Start means the behaviour someone should begin because it would help the team. Stop means the behaviour that is getting in the way. Continue means the behaviour already working and worth protecting. The method is useful because it turns feedback into observable actions rather than personality labels. In a leadership team, the question is not, “Do I like working with this person?” It is, “What behaviour would make this person more effective for the team and the company we are trying to build?” That keeps the exercise tied to performance, not preference.

Should start, stop, continue feedback be anonymous?

Start, stop, continue feedback should not be anonymous once the team has enough trust to handle direct feedback. Anonymous feedback can be useful when psychological safety is low, but it often becomes gossip with a spreadsheet. The stronger version is adult-to-adult feedback where people put their initials beside what they write. That creates a clean follow-up path. If someone writes, “Stop closing discussion before the quiet people have spoken”, the person receiving it can ask, “What did you see, and what would better look like?” That is where the learning happens. If your team cannot attach a name to useful feedback, that is a trust signal worth paying attention to.

How long does a start, stop, continue session take?

A proper start, stop, continue session with a six-to-eight-person leadership team takes around two hours. You can run a quick version in less time, but do not pretend it is the same exercise. The value is not in filling three boxes. The value is in writing useful feedback, reading it properly, asking clarifying questions and choosing one or two behaviours to change. If you rush it into the last 20 minutes of an off-site, people will write safe comments because there is no time for anything better. The clock tells the room how seriously you are taking the conversation.

What should happen after a start, stop, continue session?

After a start, stop, continue session, each leader should choose one or two behaviours to work on and turn them into a 90-day commitment. The paper is not the outcome. Behaviour change is the outcome. Ask for examples where the feedback is unclear, decide what better would look like, and tell the team what you are working on. Then come back next quarter and ask, “Have you seen me act on this?” That closes the loop. Without that follow-up, the exercise becomes an interesting afternoon and nothing more. The team will remember whether you acted far longer than they remember what was written.

When should a CEO go first?

The CEO should go first when the team has enough trust to give direct feedback without turning the session into theatre. Going first is powerful because the leader sets the tolerance level for truth. If the CEO listens, asks questions and resists the urge to defend every point, the team learns that honest feedback is safe. If the CEO gets defensive, the team learns the opposite. When trust is low, start smaller. Let people read their feedback privately first, then build towards reading it aloud as the team matures. The aim is not bravery for its own sake. The aim is useful truth the team can act on.

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Four ways to take this further

1. Book a call. If your leadership team is avoiding honest feedback, Dominic can help you work out whether this is a trust issue, a structure issue or a CEO bottleneck. No obligation, no pitch. We will establish quickly whether what he does is right for where you are.
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Your move. Do not start by asking whether your team likes the template. Ask whether they trust each other enough to use it properly. The CEOs I have seen make the biggest shifts created one honest conversation, acted on it, then came back 90 days later and asked whether the team had seen the difference.