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    How-to-give-feedback_2

    Leadership

    How to give feedback: be empathic, specific, and watch your body language 

    by Winter Nie Published December 2, 2025 in Leadership • 10 min read

    Feedback is essential to growth, but it’s not always easy to give. This second of a three-part series explores why tone and gestures matter just as much as words.

    Giving feedback is a core responsibility of leadership. Without clear and structured input on their performance, team members may struggle to grow professionally and personally to stay meaningfully engaged with their work and purpose, and to address the issues that can hinder their effectiveness, contribution, and progress.

    Even so, giving feedback can feel like a minefield. All too often, leaders are stalled in their efforts by certain anxieties. Conflict avoidance or a fear of negative response can make feedback-giving feel awkward.

    In my work with organizations, I’ve pinpointed approaches that can help leaders and managers overcome these difficulties. Over time, I’ve compiled these into a six-part checklist that ensures that when you give feedback, it will always be timely, purposeful, balanced, empathic, specific, and ultimately effective.

    Giving effective feedback hinges on six prerequisites:

    • The right timing and setting
    • Clear intent
    • A positive/negative ratio
    • Empathy
    • Effective communication skills
    • Specificity – with room for exploration

    In the first feature of this three-part series, I walked you through the importance of the first three requisites: timing, intent, and the positive/negative ratio.

    Here, I’d like to work through the next three: empathy, communication skills, and specificity.

    Let’s get into it.

    Multi-ethnic group of young men and women studying indoors
    When people feel safe and respected, they are more willing to engage in learning behaviors, including acting on feedback

    Empathy

    Empathy is the capacity to somehow put yourself into someone else’s shoes and appreciate how things might look and feel from their point of view. It’s a core skill of effective leadership because it helps build multi-directional trust, collaboration, engagement, support, and resilience within your team. Empathy is also a fundamental part of giving constructive feedback. Why? Some social-neuroscience studies suggest that empathic or trusting interactions are associated with higher oxytocin levels – the so-called ‘bonding hormone’ – which may reduce stress responses and foster social connection.

    This sense of connection can, in turn, enhance psychological safety – the shared belief that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks such as admitting mistakes or receiving critiques. When people feel safe and respected, they are more willing to engage in learning behaviors, including acting on feedback. Finally, feedback that feels supportive rather than threatening aligns more closely with intrinsic motivation. Research grounded in self-determination theory shows that informational (constructive, autonomy-supportive) feedback sustains motivation and performance, while controlling or critical feedback undermines it.

    Taken together, these findings suggest that empathy does not just make feedback feel palatable – it helps create the psychological and biological conditions under which feedback can truly lead to growth and performance. But how do you go about integrating empathy into the way you give feedback? Here are a few suggestions:

    • Put yourself in their shoes. Pinpoint and maybe reference a situation or personal experience where you faced a similar challenge in your own life, while remembering that their circumstances and reactions may differ from yours – the goal is to convey understanding, not equivalence.
    • What do you know about your team member’s personality, background, or preferences? Factor all of this into the approach you adopt.
    • Listen. And avoid the temptation to interrupt or second-guess what your team member says in response to the feedback.
    • Recognize and respect their reactions. Use language that conveys genuine empathy and care – for example, “I can imagine this might feel difficult to take in, and I really appreciate your openness in sharing how you feel.”
    • Ask questions that elicit a better understanding of their feelings and thought processes. Try asking something like: “How did it feel to hear this? Or, “What were your thought processes here?” And avoid judging their responses.

    Remember, being empathic does not mean avoiding hard truths. And be careful to avoid false empathy. You are not a superhero, dashing in to solve someone else’s problems, nor do you know more about their problem or the source of any distress than they do. A good rule of thumb is to be aware of your own ego and remember that giving feedback is way less about you than it is about the person on the receiving end. Empathic feedback is all about delivering observations or messages with care, understanding, and a genuine desire to help the recipient grow and thrive.

    Hand holding glowing stars on blue background with mockup place for your advertisement Customer feedback and ranking concept
    “Giving feedback is about conveying a really important message – one that is designed to help another person learn, overcome, and grow. So be careful with language.”

    Effective communication skills

    As a leader, you might be confident in your communication skills. But remember that when you’re giving feedback, it’s not just about what you say – it’s about how you say it and the non-verbal cues that you give off while you’re communicating.

    Research in organizational and communication studies shows that a leader’s nonverbal immediacy behaviors – such as open posture, steady eye contact, nodding, and expressive facial engagement – significantly influence how feedback is perceived. For example, nonverbal immediacy has been linked with increased perceptions of warmth, trust, and relational closeness. In workplace settings, literature reviews suggest that consistent, positive body language can strengthen leader credibility and receptivity, which likely increases employees’ openness to feedback. If your facial expressions, posture and gestures, and tone of voice are friendly or relaxed, they will trigger a response in the recipient’s mirror neurons – the cognitive systems that make us mirror (understand and even imitate) the behaviors, attitudes, and approaches that we see. In other words, positive cues engender greater positivity in others – and greater receptivity to the messages being shared. Be aware of your body language and notice how it impacts your team member’s emotional status – and your own.

    Be sensitive too to the impact of the things you say. Giving feedback is about conveying a really important message – one that is designed to help another person learn, overcome, and grow. So be careful with language. Again, as a rule of thumb, avoid sentences that include the word “should,” which can come across as hectoring or demeaning. Similarly, be careful with words like “always” and “never,” which can sound like you’re generalizing. Be sure to focus your language on behaviors and not personality. Instead of something like “you are too sensitive,” how about “your reactions can appear sensitive.” Finally, try to lead with “I” statements. What do I mean by that?

    Using your own personal pronoun comes over as more personal opinion and less accusatory. When you say things like “I feel” or “I noticed,” the dynamic shifts to your personal perspective as a manager, and away from anything that might feel like an attack. Compare these phrases.

    “Your work is rushed and incomplete.”

    “I have noticed that some elements are missing in the work you’re submitting.”

    How about these?

    “Your work is not up to scratch.”

    “There are some areas for improvement that I can see in your work, and I’d like to go through them with you.”

    Can you appreciate how the “I” statements in these examples might have the effect of lowering defenses and opening up dialogue (albeit around difficult truths) in a way that makes the recipient feel more respected?

    When feedback is vague or overly general, you leave room for uncertainty – the recipient may be left guessing what went wrong or how to fix it

    Specificity – with room for exploration

    The last point in your six-part feedback framework is specificity. Be clear, be concrete, and as much as possible, be granular in what you observe and describe. Research consistently shows that specific, behavior-based feedback improves clarity, motivation, and short-term performance because it helps people understand exactly what behaviors to continue or adjust.

    When feedback is vague or overly general, you leave room for uncertainty – the recipient may be left guessing what went wrong or how to fix it. Worse, it can come across as unfair, unfounded, or even biased, as vague feedback has been shown to undermine credibility and contribute to inequitable career outcomes.

    Yet there is a balance to strike. Studies also caution that feedback that is too prescriptive can inadvertently limit curiosity and exploration – the very behaviors that fuel innovation and deeper learning. In other words, feedback should provide enough specificity to orient someone – what happened, when, and why it matters – while leaving space for reflection, dialogue, and self-correction.

    Compare these two phrases:

    • “You need to be better at communicating.”
    • “I noticed that you didn’t share a full project update in the last couple of team meetings, and this could cause alignment problems as we move forward. What about preparing a short update or slide from now on, so we stay aligned as a team?”

    The second version grounds the feedback in specific behavior and impact and then opens up a question – an invitation for the recipient to think, respond, and co-create a solution. That balance – specific direction plus space for exploration – is what makes feedback both actionable and developmental.

    Think of it like this: vagueness breeds confusion; rigidity stifles growth. The best feedback points clearly to “north, south, east, or west,” but still leaves room for the recipient to chart their own course toward improvement.

    Giving feedback can feel like an emotional or psychological minefield. But it doesn’t have to. When your feedback is delivered at the right time, with the right intent, when it’s balanced in positivity, expressed with genuine empathy, when your body and verbal communication are language are aligned and you are specific about areas to work on and improve while still leaving room for exploration, you will end up sharing valuable and important input that will help people grow and progress, professionally and personally. This is what your employees crave.

    Of course, feedback can and should be a two-way street. As a leader, it’s important that you also glean insights into the impact of your practices and approaches. These will be critical for your own leadership growth. In the next article in this series, we will look at how to receive feedback as a manager, be it from bosses, peers, or reports – how to avoid certain pitfalls in your thinking, how to frame feedback positively, and how to channel it into continuous progression, learning, and growth.

    Authors

    Winter Nie

    IMD Professor of Leadership and Change Management

    Winter Nie’s expertise lies at the intersection of leadership and change management. Her work shows that the role of leadership is not to eliminate but skillfully navigate through these tensions into the future. She works with organizations on change at the individual, team, and organizational levels, looking beyond surface rationality into the unconscious forces below that shape the direction and speed of change.

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