Most companies do formal feedback sessions 1-4 times a year often called Performance Reviews or Growth Check-Ins. And every single time, there's this nervous energy that fills the organization. Leaders scramble to prepare. Employees brace for impact. Everyone treats it like some unavoidable corporate ritual that just has to be endured.

But here's what I've been reflecting on: we've put all the responsibility on the wrong people.

Think about it. When feedback season rolls around, what do you see? A million articles about "how to receive feedback gracefully" and "preparing yourself for your performance review" and "staying calm when getting critical feedback." It's all centered on the employee - on how they need to show up, how they need to process, how they need to handle whatever gets thrown at them.

Meanwhile, managers are just... winging it? Pulling together a list of grievances they've been storing in a mental folder all year? Hoping something lands?

That's backwards.

I recently read this quote in Brené Brown's Dare to Lead: "Those who enjoy breaking should not be in charge of the breaking."

And it hit me how perfectly this applies to feedback.

If you enjoy giving "tough feedback" - if there's a part of you that gets satisfaction from finally telling someone all the things they've been doing wrong - you should not be delivering feedback.

Feedback isn't about catharsis for the manager. It's not your moment to unload. It's not a gotcha session where you get to prove you've been paying attention to all their mistakes.

Feedback should help someone grow. Full stop.

Here's something else that drives me crazy: we call it "negative feedback."

When you label feedback as negative, you reinforce that the person did something wrong. You center the conversation around failure instead of growth.

What if we called it realignment feedback instead? Or calibration feedback? Or just growth feedback?

Because here's the thing - in most work contexts (and I'm taking truly harmful behavior off the table here), feedback isn't about someone being bad. It's about helping them understand where they're off track and how to get back on course.

All feedback should be constructive. So why are we framing half of it as negative?

Frances Frei talks about the 5:1 ratio - you should give 5 pieces of positive feedback for every 1 piece of corrective feedback.

The spirit is right. But in practice? It becomes performative.

Managers count: "Okay, I said 5 nice things, now I can dump the hard stuff."

Or worse - half of a performance review becomes: "Here's all the shit you got wrong that I've been storing up for six months. And oh, by the way, if you get upset about this feedback or ask questions, that's more feedback for you because you need to learn how to receive feedback better."

Hello. Yes. Hi.

This structure is fundamentally broken.

If you're giving so little feedback throughout the year that the formal review is full of surprises, you've already failed as a manager.

Here's what I want to see instead: feedback as a collaborative conversation, not a top-down judgment.

What if we stopped treating feedback like something that happens to someone and started treating it like something we do together?

That means:

Because let's be honest: in very, very few instances is one person 100% right and the other 100% wrong.

So why do we structure feedback conversations that way?

Let me show you what I mean with a real example.

The Scenario: Sarah is a Customer Success Manager. Her manager Alex is preparing for their 6-month review. Alex has been frustrated because Sarah's renewal rate is lower than the team average (78% vs 85%), and she's been slow to respond to escalations. But Sarah has also been crushing it at building relationships with key accounts.

Alex prepares by:

Sarah prepares by:

Together:

Alex opens with collaboration: "Sarah, this conversation is about us figuring out together how to set you up for success. I'm going to share what I'm seeing, but I want to understand your perspective too."

Positive feedback (specific and meaningful): "The TechCorp save was incredible. The customer said you were the only reason they renewed. That trust-building is exactly what we need."

Growth feedback (collaborative, context-aware): "I want to talk about response times on escalations. I've noticed it's taking longer than the team average. Can you help me understand what's happening there?"

Sarah responds: "Escalations stress me out. I feel like I need to have the perfect answer before I respond. I didn't realize there was a 6-hour expectation."

Alex takes responsibility: "That's on me - I should have been clearer. The 6-hour target isn't about having the perfect answer, it's about acknowledging we're on it. Even 'I see this, I'm investigating' buys trust. Would that work for you?"

They problem-solve together: On the renewal rate gap, Sarah shares: "I inherited a lot of at-risk accounts. But I also wonder if I'm spending too much time on relationships and not enough on proactive check-ins."

Alex responds: "Good insight. What if we review your accounts together and identify which need more proactive outreach? And let's get you trained on the usage dashboard."

"Here's what I'm hearing as our plan:

Does that feel clear and doable?"

Sarah adds: "Yes. And I want to make sure deep relationship building is still valued as I work on the metrics."

Alex: "Absolutely. That's your superpower. We're not changing that - we're adding the proactive piece."

This worked because:

The conversation created clarity, not confusion.

Here's what I'm building toward - a feedback framework that puts the onus where it belongs:

Before feedback conversations, managers should ask themselves:

During feedback conversations:

After feedback conversations:

At the end of the day, the reason formal feedback feels like a death march is because we don't get enough feedback in our day-to-day.

We don't get enough positive feedback. We don't get enough growth feedback. We don't practice it. We don't normalize it.

So these formal sessions become this high-stakes moment where everything gets dumped at once, and we expect employees to just... take it gracefully?

That's not feedback. That's a failure of management.

Feedback should be so continuous and normalized that formal reviews are actually kind of boring because there are no surprises.

And when we do have those conversations, they should be prepared together, delivered collaboratively, and focused on growth - not judgment.

Because feedback isn't about agreeing or disagreeing. It's not about one person being right and the other being wrong.

It's about creating clarity so someone can improve. Together.

Learning by Design is written by Courtney Sembler. Courtney currently helps companies build scalable customer education programs. After spending over a decade scaling HubSpot Academy globally, she now explores the systems, strategies, and realities of workplace learning, leadership, and customer experience—the kind that drives retention, adoption, and revenue by design, not by accident. Published twice weekly with monthly deep dives. Connect with her on LinkedIn and subscribe to Learning by Design.