The feedback you think you're giving isn't the feedback they're getting.
Every leader believes they give feedback. Ask their team what they've heard lately - specific, actionable, about behavior - and the answer is usually silence. The gap between what you think you're delivering and what's actually landing compounds quietly: growth that doesn't happen because the feedback wasn't specific enough to act on, and problems that drift because nobody named them while they were still small.
This is a field guide for feedback that lands. Five practices you can work through before the next conversation: the Two-Sentence Rule that forces specificity, the 48-Hour Window that keeps feedback close to the moment, the different mechanics of reinforcing and corrective, how to receive feedback so people keep giving it to you, and how to make feedback work across power dynamics - up, down, and sideways.
Start with the diagnostic to find where you break down, then go straight to the practice that fixes it. Every practice comes with coaching questions and a forty-eight-hour experiment - because the point was never to understand feedback. It's to give the piece someone on your team needed a month ago.
Don Eash is a Master Certified Coach (MCC, ACTC) who spent three decades leading teams at Disney, Universal, and Gateway Ticketing before coaching full time. Over 6,000 hours and more than 1,000 leaders - at Google, Meta, LinkedIn, AT&T, and dozens of other organizations - he has coached this exact conversation more times than he can count.
Part of The Right Altitude Field Guide series - a companion to The Right Altitude: What Nobody Tells You About Being a Leader.
