The moment your feedback makes someone feel small, you’ve lost them.

Feedbacks are given with a purpose. The purpose is to help the other person improve their mistakes and shortcomings. If someone walks away questioning their value instead of their approach, the feedback failed. They will not be able to focus on improvement, and even if they improve, they will never forget how that feedback made them feel, even though you had no bad intentions. 

That’s the power our words hold. And that’s exactly why the art of communication is crucial for managers and leads to learn. In this article, I will cover one aspect of communication: feedback. We will go over two questions: how to give positive feedback at work and how to provide constructive feedback. 

3 Steps To Give Positive and Constructive Feedback 

Step 1: Give positive feedback 

Positive feedback means appreciating someone’s work and efforts. For the record, never begin with a placeholder sentence.

“We appreciate your hard work and efforts” 

“You’re a valuable asset to our organisation”

These generic sentences are vague and don’t hold much meaning. Most people mentally discard them before you finish the sentence.

If you want to provide feedback that sticks with the employee and genuinely makes them feel appreciated, you need to be specific and realistic. In tech and data teams, effort is invisible unless you name it. Bring up the points they are personally interested in. Mention the bug, the critical bug they gave their days to fix it or their efforts in contributing to the meetings and improving their communication. 

What effective positive feedback includes?

There are three parts to effective positive feedback. The first one is necessary, and at least have one of the remaining two to make your feedback more motivating and driven. 

• The behaviour: what they actually did
• The result: what changed because of it
• The impact: why it mattered to the team, product, or business

Examples

Generic: “Great job on the dashboard.”

Precise: 

“The way you simplified the dashboard metrics helped the product team spot the churn issue two weeks earlier. That directly influenced the retention experiment we’re running now.”

And that’s how you give positive feedback. 

Step 2: Give constructive feedback 

If you want to give constructive feedback, you still need to start with positive feedback. The appreciation creates a safe space and trust that allows you to move into constructive feedback without triggering defensiveness. And this is where most managers and leads slip. 

They suddenly switch to a critique style, mentioning the negatives, which again dilutes all the positivity you just spilled. The problem usually lies in how the sentences are framed. 

“Your presentations lack clarity…”

“The analysis wasn’t detailed enough…”

“You didn’t communicate the risks clearly…”

Instead of pointing at a gap, point toward improvement, be their well-wisher who wants to see them win. A simple rule is to describe what stronger looks like. You still address the issue, just without anchoring it in deficiency.

Instead of saying, “Your presentations lack a clear narrative”. Say, “If you anchor the presentation around one core message and build the data around it, your insights will resonate more clearly with non-technical stakeholders.”

Same message. Very different emotional response. Foundations of Leadership for Nerds gives you a cheat sheet that makes the process of finding the impact, result and all the related parameters to help you frame your feedback within minutes. 

Step 3: End positively 

People remember the last signal more than the first. So the final step is to reinforce trust and make it clear that the feedback was given to help them win. End with encouragement so they are motivated to improve. 

“You’ll do better next time”

“Don’t worry about it”

“I know you tried”

Again, we need to avoid using formal, generic sentences. Here’s the end of the presentation example. 

“You clearly understand the problem space, and that showed in how you handled the questions. If you structure the story more tightly next time, your insights will be clearer. I’d be happy to review an outline with you before the next presentation.”

This is a strong encouragement. It does three things: 

• Reinforces strengths you already acknowledged
• Connects improvement to those strengths
• Offers practical support

3 tips to give constructive feedback

1. Your delivery matters

Besides your words, your tone, expressions, and body language all contribute to how your message is perceived. If appreciation is delivered flatly, it feels performative. If feedback sounds tense, it feels personal. 

Be intentional and show that you mean what you say. Authentic delivery is what makes feedback believable.

2. Follow up and acknowledge improvement early

A good leadership practice is to pay attention to progress and acknowledge improvements as soon as you see them. Timely recognition reinforces effort, and when people know their improvement is noticed, they’re far more likely to sustain it.

3. Keep constructive feedback private

Constructive conversations always belong in private, where honesty feels safe. Praise can be public. Correction should not be. 

Final thoughts

Feedback is one of those things that looks simple on the surface but quietly shapes how safe, confident, and motivated your team feels. Say it the wrong way, and people shut down. Say it well, and growth happens naturally.

And if you’re navigating leadership for the first time, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Foundations of Leadership for Nerds brings together the mindset shifts and practical frameworks to help you lead with confidence. 

The e-book is targeted to the data and tech geeks who are new to the realm of leadership and management. So if you fall into that category, it’s your cheat sheet to turn your first leadership experience from terrible and complex to simple and manageable.