There is a recognisable figure in executive culture: the leader who argues hardest for psychological safety and candid feedback, and who is visibly the worst in the building at receiving it. The usual reading of that is hypocrisy. A more interesting reading starts by noticing that the leader may be partly right.
Feedback Is Not a Reliable Instrument
Kluger and DeNisi reviewed the evidence on feedback interventions for Psychological Bulletin in 1996. Their conclusion is usually quoted in half. Feedback intervention improved performance on average, and “over one-third of the feedback interventions decreased performance”.
Sit with the second clause. In more than a third of cases, the act of giving someone feedback made their performance worse. The cause was the intervention itself, independent of how well it was delivered.
That changes what the executive in the opening paragraph is doing. Some of their resistance is not pathology. It is a rough appraisal of a tool with a genuinely mixed record, and treating all feedback as automatically improving is the less defensible position of the two.
Which relocates the whole problem. The task is not to receive feedback more gracefully. It is to judge which feedback is worth acting on, and judging anything is hard while you are busy managing how it feels.
Why It Lands Differently at the Top
What follows is a reading rather than a finding.
Feedback to a junior colleague has somewhere to land that is not the person: a deliverable, a decision, a habit. The further up a role sits, the more the work and the self have been allowed to merge, until a remark about a strategy document arrives as a remark about judgement, and judgement is the thing the job is understood to be.
At that point the information has to get past a question about adequacy before it can be assessed on its merits. Most of it does not make the trip.
Clance and Imes described a version of this in their clinical work in the nineteen seventies. Among the successful women they saw, achievements were explained away, while “if they received any negative feedback they belied it and tended to remember it as evidence of their deficits”. The intake was asymmetric in both directions: praise discounted, criticism filed. That was a described pattern in a selected group rather than a measurement of how common it is, and later work using structured questionnaires found men reporting the same experience with comparable frequency.
What It Looks Like From the Outside
Executive defensiveness is rarely the obvious kind, because people who reach senior roles are generally skilled at appearing open. These are observations, not research findings, and they are here because they are recognisable.
- Immediate translation. “What I think they are actually trying to say is”, which replaces the feedback with a version that is easier to hold.
- Context as dismissal. “That is fair, but the situation here was”, where everything after the comma cancels everything before it.
- The performed pause. A thoughtful silence followed by a rebuttal that was clearly assembled before the silence began.
- Acceptance at the summary level. Warm agreement with the general point, no change in any specific behaviour.
These are adaptations, not character defects. They were developed in settings where being seen to be wrong carried real costs, and they have outlived the settings.
Why Technique Only Goes So Far
Most work on this is technique: active listening, separating message from delivery, asking clarifying questions. The techniques are fine. The limit is that they operate after the difficult part has already happened.
There is a related finding worth bringing in. Edmondson’s 1999 study across 51 teams found that psychological safety, the belief that one can speak up without being punished, predicted whether teams engaged in learning behaviour, and that the learning behaviour carried the effect through to performance. Senior leaders spend a great deal of effort constructing that condition for the people who report to them. Whether they have it themselves, in the sense of being able to be wrong in front of someone without cost, is a question that rarely gets asked at their level.
The Shift, Stated Honestly
Here is the claim this article can actually support, and the one it cannot.
What is supported: feedback is an unreliable instrument, so the valuable capacity is appraisal, and appraisal degrades when the thing being appraised feels like a verdict on the person doing the appraising.
What is interpretation: that the way out runs through where a person’s sense of adequacy is funded rather than through better listening habits. That reading fits the pattern, and it has not been demonstrated in anything cited here.
What the reading predicts is testable in a small way. If criticism of your work reliably produces a reaction out of proportion to its content, the content is not what is being responded to, and no amount of improved listening technique will reach the part that is reacting.
And if the reaction to criticism has become something that affects how you function, that belongs with a licensed professional. Nothing here is a substitute for one.
Where the Entanglement Runs
If feedback consistently arrives as a verdict, it is worth knowing what it is being allowed to pass judgement on. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth currently rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying more than it should. It takes about ten minutes. Begin your profile here.
If this was worth your time, there is a letter. One short piece a week on identity, self-worth and the arithmetic of senior work. It costs nothing, and leaving takes one click. See what arrives.
References
- Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254
- Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006
- Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Further Reading
If this resonated, these go deeper. You can also browse the full Research Library for all recommendations.
- Radical Candor by Kim Scott. On giving feedback that is both honest and caring; directly relevant for leaders who avoid difficult conversations to preserve relationships.
- Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. On vulnerability and shame resilience; essential reading for leaders who want to lead with authentic strength rather than projected invulnerability.
- The Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson. A reframe of failure as a tool for learning, not a verdict on worth; essential for perfectionists who catastrophize mistakes.
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