Trust First, Feedback Second
On building the conditions that make feedback work.
The Four Pillars of Trust
I was recently at a team retreat where we spent some time with Charles Feltman’s book, The Thin Book of Trust. Admittedly, I had never read or heard of this book before, but I was familiar with Brené Brown’s reverence towards the author.
As someone who loves learning (and who leans with a heavy tilt towards input), I find the sheer volume of great books out there to be more and more overwhelming by the day. Perhaps this isn’t unique to me, but at any given time, I’m perusing my way through a few different books. But this one is quite nice in that, as the name suggests, it’s pretty short. You can honestly read it on a short flight. One might wonder how much impact such a short read can have on a person, but as most of us here know, quality often matters much more than quantity.
In any case, Feltman defines trust as choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions. In other words, it’s a deliberate decision to hand control of something that’s important to you over to someone else, knowing that they might cause harm or drop the ball, but still believing they won’t. Felt also says that trust is anchored around four pillars:
Pillar 1: Care — Believing the other person has your interests in mind.
Pillar 2: Sincerity — Believing the person is honest and acts with integrity.
Pillar 3: Reliability — Believing the person keeps commitments.
Pillar 4: Competence — Believing the person has the ability to deliver.
All four pillars are worth some sitting with, but the one that stood out to me most was competence, probably because so much of starting a new role (as many of you know I recently did) is about “proving your competence”—whatever that means. What’s interesting about competence is that we often equate it with perfection or at the very least, minimal faultiness. But being competent doesn’t mean being perfect. As Feltman articulates, part of competence is knowing what you don’t know, being willing to learn, and asking for help when we need it. As such, part of competence is recognizing where we’re incompetent and owning that fully.
Now bear with me, but as I was sitting with this idea, I started thinking about how our competency muscle is exercised in the context of feedback conversations—formal or otherwise. More specifically, I was reflecting on the fact that this is the place where the rubber meets the road in terms of whether we’ve actually built out the conditions for trust. Both giving and receiving feedback are risks. The person giving feedback is making their observations vulnerable, while the person receiving it is making different aspects of their being vulnerable. Thus, whether either of these risks feels safe to take depends almost entirely on the trust holding up the relationship underneath the conversation.
Trust isn’t always about a framework, nor is it always about timing. Rather, it’s about the relationship, and that’s what I’m here reflecting on this week.
Words Aren’t Everything
Most of us have been in situations where the feedback handed to us landed beautifully despite it being hard to swallow. It was specific, behavior-based, and framed in a spirit of generosity. We in turn heard something hard about ourselves and walked away with more clarity and more motivation, and very much ready to do something with it.
I’ve also been in situations where where the exact same type of feedback landed more like an accusation. This is the kind of interaction where things go quiet and body language closes off. There may have been developmental intention on the part of the feedback-giver, but that really meant nothing.
The difference here is often less about the words and more about the relationship. In the rooms where feedback lands well, there is often a powerful history with a real, accumulated sense that one person is seriously invested in the other’s growth and that they weren’t delivering observations from a place of judgment or self-interest, but from one of genuine care. Conversely, in rooms where feedback falls short, there’s an absence of history, and even careful, well-intentioned feedback can get distorted.
Of the four trust-building pillars, Feltman argues that care is the most important for lasting trust, mostly because there’s considerable power that comes when people believe you genuinely hold their interests alongside your own: they tend to extend trust more broadly and are more forgiving when things go off track. This is absolutely foundational in determining whether feedback is going to work. It has far less to do with the right framework than it does with what’s being built behind the scenes in everyday interactions.
Most feedback training focuses on the side of the feedback-giver. It encompasses different feedback models they can use, the kinds of language they should choose, and the broader sequence and flow of the conversation to adhere to. These elements are all significant, and we should all have feedback training, but I do think we’re missing some of the fundamentals, because ultimately, if the person receiving the feedback doesn’t trust the person delivering it, there’s not a whole lot we can expect.
Stanford researchers David Yeager and Geoffrey Cohen (along with others) conducted what they called “wise feedback” experiments. These were essentially studies through which they found that critical feedback (for students in particular, although the findings have professional application as well) paired with a simple relational signal such as “I’m giving you this because I believe in your ability to meet these standards” shifted how people engaged with and acted on the feedback. The content within the feedback wasn’t different, but the relational signals were, emphasizing the importance of the trust variable in determining both the reception and outcome of feedback.
I should also add that I firmly believe the setting matters more than we often realize. There’s something about always delivering feedback in a formal context, whether it be a pre-scheduled meeting, a closed door, a calendar invite that says “discussion.” This kind of thing prompts the person on the other side of the invite to walk in with a pre-set posture. But when we contrast this approach with feedback that happens over coffee, during lunch, or even on a walk, the same observations we name may be processed entirely differently. Many managers haven’t been trained to think about this, but trust is innately human, and an informal setting reflective of real human needs is a highly effective way of cultivating relational trust.
Easy, right?
Well, not necessarily.
I think this is tricky because it means that the work of building a rich and effective feedback culture starts earlier and goes deeper than many organizations realize. It starts in ordinary, less than glamorous moments, like in how managers show up on the day-to-day, whether they follow through on what they say they’ll do, whether they ask questions from a place of openness and curiosity, and whether people experience them over time as someone who is invested in their growth. This reflects an accumulation of what Feltman calls sincerity and reliability, showing up again and again in small yet consistent ways. And in the end, it’s what builds the trust necessary for feedback to yield opportunity and behavior change.
Receiving Feedback
Receiving feedback well is also imperative here. We spend a fair amount of organizational energy training managers to deliver feedback, but I think we do a lot less when it comes to sending folks into conversations with the actual preparation for how to hear difficult things without shutting down, deflecting, or responding defensively.
Defensiveness in response to feedback isn’t a character flaw. It’s a pretty predictable and human response to perceived threat. But again, trust is the anchor. When a relational context has low-trust, the brain is more or less justified in registering threat, because in low-trust relationships, critical feedback may indeed signal that something “bad” is coming. The problem is that defensiveness, whatever its origins, inhibits what feedback is supposed to do, because we cannot update our understanding of ourselves while simultaneously defending our current understanding of ourselves.
This is why trust has to come first. Without trust, our nervous system is working against the whole feedback endeavor, and no amount of skillful delivery can get around it. Real trust—built through Feltman’s four distinctions, thoughtfully and over time—is what creates the conditions for people to hear hard things and do something meaningful with them.
Upward Feedback
I also want to spend a minute on the topic of upward feedback. Many organizations have this mechanism (via forms, surveys, etc.) built into their infrastructure, but is it used?
Not always.
Upward feedback requires the individual with less power to make themselves vulnerable to the individual with more power, which isn’t a small task. Research monitoring employee experiences has found that feeling genuinely trusted by a manager is a primary predictor of whether employees voice concerns and share upward feedback. It’s not enough to simply tell people it’s safe to speak up. Instead, we need to show them, repeatedly and over time, through the kind of sincerity and reliability that Feltman describes. Without this, upward feedback forms and other well-intentioned mechanisms will fall short.
Building the Conditions for Organizational Success
If words are secondary to the relational context in which they land, then perhaps the most important questions we need to be asking ourselves are as follows:
“Have I built the kind of relationship where my feedback can be heard and acted upon?”
“Have we nurtured the trust and safety—on both sides of the exchange—that would make that process meaningful?”
In my newsletter I talk a lot about the fact that many managers were never really developed as people leaders. They were promoted because they were excellent individual contributors, and then handed a team and largely left to figure out the ins and outs of supporting and developing people on their own. I think it’s worth flagging this again here, because the skills that made someone great at their individual function are not the same skills required to build the kind of relationships that make feedback—dare I call it a requirement for a flourishing organization—work. When we skip this development, we’re not just setting the manager up to struggle, but their entire team, all because trust hasn’t been given enough attention.
Feltman’s framework isn’t really about trust as a standalone concept, and that’s precisely what I love about it. We need to think about trust as a cornerstone for everything else, rooted in daily, accumulated choices anchored around the principles of sincerity, reliability, competence, and care that, over time, build the conditions for positive interpersonal relationships and ultimately, organizational success.
Feedback goes on to live or die inside these conditions. When we build them first, feedback becomes possible. Trust first, feedback second. In that order, always.
Have you read The Thin Book of Trust? I highly recommend it! Either way, I’d love to hear about your experience with all things trust and feedback in the comments below.
Feedback works when the relationship already feels safe
Great article! It’s a good reminder that feedback isn’t just about what you say, it’s about the relationship you’ve built leading up to it.