When the word “feedback” is uttered, as in, “Can we meet? I have feedback to give you,” do your hands sweat and your brain run amok? Aren’t you already ready for it to be over with a capital “O?”

Why do we have such a negative reaction to the concept of feedback? If you ask people how much value they put on the perspectives of others, they will say that they care very much about how they are perceived and want to know how they can improve. The actual feedback exchange is often the first and most troubling aspect of the process.

So, what’s going on, and how we can “fix” feedback?

Change the conversation.

The Center for Creative Leadership is well known for its straightforward, behavior-based model of Situation Behavior Impact (SBI). Sloan Weitzel’s classic construct is described in Feedback That Works: How to Build and Deliver Your Message. This method shifts the focus of the feedback conversation away from what the feedback provider subjectively may not like about the person to focus squarely on the person’s impact — positive or negative — and the behaviors that are leading to those results. Set the context for where and when the behavior occurred (situation), describe the observable actions (behavior), and explain the results of those behaviors (impact).

Though quite compelling most of the time, this method falls short in one highly common situation. If the feedback receiver didn’t know or understand what they were “supposed” to be doing — either in terms of the goals/results they were expected to achieve or the behaviors they were “supposed” to exhibit — how is an SBI conversation feedback?

It is feedback in the sense that the person now knows whether the feedback provider is pleased or dissatisfied. But to what standard are we holding them? If we haven’t set expectations, we are holding them to a standard that they do not understand. We aren’t expressing feedback, we are revealing some level of resentment. It’s like expecting your children to empty the dishwasher without ever being asked. Of course we wish they would do it, but we can’t blame them for leaving it full when we never asked them to empty it. That’s not on them — it’s on us.