Give and receive praise and feedback: one card for good news and bad

Most senior leaders I coach are good at one half of this and quietly poor at the other. Some are generous with praise and vague with correction. Others are forensic about misses and say great job on the way out of the room. A smaller group are precise in both directions, and then bristle the moment someone offers them a note.

That imbalance costs more than it looks. Praise that is vague teaches nothing. Correction that is sharp but never balanced by specific recognition sounds like a verdict. And a leader who cannot take feedback trains the whole top team to stop giving it.

My position: praise and correction are one skill, not two. Name the behaviour, the impact and the next stretch. Use the same card for good news and bad. And receive feedback with the same precision you expect to give, because that is what earns you the right to give it.

One card: behaviour, impact, next stretch

The focus area I work on here is direct about it: generic praise is noise. The skill is naming the behaviour, the impact and the next stretch, so that feedback, positive or corrective, actually changes performance.

Each field has a job.

Behaviour is what a camera would have recorded. Not a trait, not an intention. You opened the pricing review with the two customers we lost and why.

Impact is what that behaviour did to the work, the people or the result. It moved the conversation from defending the price list to fixing the offer, and we agreed the change in 20 minutes.

Next stretch is where the person could take it. Do the same in the board pre-read next month; lead with the losses, then the plan.

The same three fields carry correction. In the pricing review you went straight to the price list (behaviour). We spent 40 minutes defending numbers no customer had questioned (impact). Next time, open with the two lost deals and what they told us (next stretch).

Notice what is missing in both: any judgement of the person. Gallup’s guidance on meaningful feedback makes the same point, advising managers to focus on discernible behaviours rather than employees’ characteristics when they address shortcomings. That applies just as much to praise. You are a natural strategist is a characteristic. It feels kind and gives the person nothing to repeat.

Type	Generic (noise)	Specific (signal)
Praise	Great work on the deal	You called the procurement lead before the deadline and saved the renewal
Praise	You are a real leader	You named the trade-off first, so the team stopped arguing about the symptom
Correction	You need to be more strategic	The plan lists 14 priorities; cut it to three and show what we stop
Correction	Your tone was off	You interrupted the CFO twice; let her finish, then challenge the number
Next stretch	Keep it up	Try that opening in the investor update next month

Why the CEO’s praise travels further

A pattern I see often: CEOs underrate how much their own recognition is worth. They assume praise is the line manager’s job.

The data says otherwise. When Gallup asked employees who gave them their most meaningful and memorable recognition, 28% named their manager and 24% named a high-level leader or CEO. Nearly a quarter remembered the top of the house. The same Gallup piece found that only one in three US workers strongly agreed they had received recognition or praise for good work in the past seven days, and that people who do not feel adequately recognised are twice as likely to say they will quit in the next year.

So your praise is scarce and it carries weight. That cuts both ways. Spend it on labels and you have taught the organisation to perform for you. Spend it on behaviours and you have published the standard, for free, to everyone who hears about it. Specific recognition from the top is also one of the cheapest ways to create loyalty in your organisation, because people stay where their best work is seen.

Two practical rules follow. First, praise what you want copied, not what you happen to like. If you want earlier bad news, praise the person who brought the bad news early, by name and with the effect. Second, keep a short note of what you praised this month. If every line is about revenue and none is about how the revenue was earned, your praise is telling people that the method does not matter.

Sideways: feedback between peers at the top table

Down the line is the easy direction. The harder one is sideways, between members of the executive team, where nobody owns the other person’s review and everybody owns the result.

Imagine a chief operating officer who watches the chief commercial officer promise a customer a delivery date that operations cannot meet. The usual routes are silence, a complaint to the CEO, or a sharp comment in the next leadership meeting. All three damage the team. The fourth route is the card, said directly and privately within the day: In the call with the customer you committed to the 15th (behaviour). We cannot build to that without pulling two other orders (impact). Next time, can we agree the date between us before it goes to the customer? (next stretch).

Peer praise works the same way and is rarer still. When one executive names what another did well, specifically, in front of the team, it does more for cohesion than any offsite. It tells the room that people are watching each other’s work closely and generously.

As CEO, your job is to make sideways feedback normal. Do it yourself first with your peers on the board. Then ask, in your leadership meeting, who has a note for whom, and hold the line that every note uses the three fields. The first few rounds will be stiff. That is the price of a team that stops routing its truth through you.

Timing matters in every direction. A note given the same day is about the work. A note given a month later is about the relationship, because the other person will wonder why you held it.

Receiving: the half leaders skip

Here is the uncomfortable part. Most people want correction more than leaders think. In a sample of 899 people, Zenger and Folkman found that 57% preferred corrective feedback and 43% preferred praise, and 72% thought their performance would improve if their managers gave them corrective feedback. Ninety-two per cent agreed that negative, redirecting feedback improves performance if it is delivered appropriately.

They also found something that should worry every senior leader: the people who found giving negative feedback most difficult and stressful were significantly less willing to receive it themselves. Giving and receiving are linked. If you flinch when a note comes your way, you will probably soften the notes you send.

Receiving well is four short moves:

1. Write it down. It slows you and signals that you are taking it seriously.
2. Ask one question. Which moment, specifically? That converts a judgement into a behaviour you can work on.
3. Repeat the ask. Say back what they want you to do differently, so they know it landed.
4. Act within a week. Visibly. Nothing teaches people to keep bringing you truth like seeing it used, and few things do more for earning trust with a senior team.

Receiving praise is a skill too. Batting it away as modesty teaches people to stop being specific. Absorbing it as identity makes you hungry for the next hit. Thank them, ask which decision they mean if they named a trait, and file it.

What you do when you hear a note	What your team learns
Explain the context at length	Bring me less next time
Ask what they saw, and write it down	Specific notes are welcome
Agree, then change nothing	Feedback is a ritual here
Change one thing within a week	Notes move things

Arguments

The case for

Specific feedback gives people something they can repeat or change; generic feedback gives them a mood. Mueller and Dweck’s work points in the same direction from a different angle: praise for a fixed quality made people more cautious and more fragile after failure, while praise for effort and approach kept them learning. Gallup’s recognition data shows that praise is scarce and that its absence is linked to people planning to leave. Zenger and Folkman show that people want correction and believe it helps when it is delivered well. A single structure for both directions is easier to practise, easier to coach and easier to trust.

The case against

Several objections are fair. Specificity takes time, and a busy CEO cannot write a three-field note for every good meeting. Senior people may find formal praise patronising. Cultures differ: in some teams public praise embarrasses, and blunt correction is read as disrespect. And a structure can make feedback sound scripted, which costs the warmth that made it land in the first place.

Where I stand

I agree that a script read aloud is worse than an honest sentence. The three fields are a discipline for thinking, not a form to recite. Most of the time a single sentence covers all three. On time: one precise note a day beats ten vague ones, and it takes under a minute. On culture: ask people how they like to receive recognition, then honour it. In the 7-step process, this is the core of Influence (step 4, upgrading your feedback playbook so the standard cascades) and Improvement (step 5, live feedback on real meetings and decisions). The receiving half sits in Awareness (step 2), because a leader who cannot hear feedback cannot see their own blind spots.

Try this

For the next ten working days:

1. Each day, give one piece of praise using all three fields. Write it in your notebook first, then say it.
2. Each week, give one piece of correction on the same card. Same day as the event if you can.
3. Ask two people one question each: What is one thing I did this week that slowed the team down? Write the answer, ask one clarifying question, thank them.
4. Change one thing you heard, visibly, before the ten days are up.
5. At the end, read your notebook. Count how many notes named a behaviour and how many named a trait.

Then reflect:

• Whose good work have I noticed and not named this month?
• When did I last change something because a direct report told me to?
• Is my praise teaching the method, or only the result?
• What do I do in the first 30 seconds after someone corrects me?

Where to go next

This part belongs to the chapter on feedback and difficult personalities. If a particular person’s behaviour is the issue, start with lead difficult personalities. If you are already giving precise feedback and nothing changes, read why feedback may fail. To build the same habits into a whole team, see build high-performance teams, and for the awareness work underneath receiving well, why self and team awareness pays board-level dividends.

In elite cycling, the useful note from a coach is rarely well ridden. It is what the rider did on a particular climb and what to try on the next one. I write about that on from elite sport to the boardroom. If you want to build this into your top team, executive team coaching is where we practise it on live meetings, or you can book a confidential 30-minute conversation.