Feedback: Are You Protecting Feelings or Performance?

When I was racing, feedback was constant.

It might come from a coach calling something out from the bank in the middle of a session — a tiny adjustment to timing or technique that you could feel immediately. Or from reviewing race footage and noticing something I hadn’t felt in the moment. Or from a teammate who could sense that something wasn’t quite right in the boat, even if you couldn’t yet see it yourself.

It wasn’t always comfortable. But it wasn’t personal either, just part of the process of improving.

In fact, the most frustrating moments weren’t when feedback was direct; they were when it was missing. Because without it, you stand still and standing still isn’t how you win world titles!

A slight change in technique. A fraction of hesitation in timing. A standard that slips just enough to go unnoticed in training, but shows up when it matters. By the time it becomes obvious, the performance cost is already high.

I see a similar pattern now in the teams I work with.

Performance rarely breaks down because people don’t care enough, or aren’t capable enough. It breaks down when the space for honest feedback disappears.

Not deliberately or because anyone has decided it shouldn’t happen. But because, in the moment, it feels easier not to say anything.

There’s a reason for that.

Psychologists have a term for it — the “MUM effect” (Minimise Unpleasant Messages) — which describes our tendency to stay silent when we’re holding information that might make someone else uncomfortable.

Most of us recognise it.

We notice something that could help someone improve…and then we pause, weighing it up. We wonder how it will land, whether it’s our place to say it, and if it’s worth the potential awkwardness. Often, without really deciding to, we let it go.

Interestingly, that doesn’t mean the thought disappears.

It often just gets shared somewhere else — with a colleague after a meeting, or in a conversation that doesn’t quite reach the person who could actually use it.

So the feedback exists. It just doesn’t land where it matters, and whilst there’s something deeply human in that, it’s not great for performance or harmony.

For most of our history, belonging to a group was essential to survival. Upsetting the balance of that group carried real risk. Even now, we’re wired to avoid anything that might threaten our standing or create social discomfort.

So we stay quiet.

At the same time, many of us don’t actively ask for feedback either.

Sometimes that’s because we feel we should already know, sometimes because we don’t want to appear uncertain, and sometimes because we suspect it might be uncomfortable to hear.

So feedback sits in an awkward space.

Not quite absent, but not quite present either. And that’s where performance starts to suffer because high performance depends on small adjustments made early. Not big corrections made too late.

The difference in high-performing environments is not that feedback is delivered more perfectly. It’s that it’s more normal.

It happens regularly and is expected. Importantly, it’s focused on what’s happening in the work, not what it says about the person, which changes the feel of it completely.

It becomes part of the rhythm of how performance improves — less of an event and more of an ongoing adjustment.

When that structure is in place, feedback doesn’t need to carry so much weight. It becomes easier to give, easier to receive, and far more useful. If feedback feels uncomfortable, inconsistent or slightly avoided where you are, it’s worth pausing to look at the system around it, not just the people within it.

Because more often than not, it isn’t a personality issue. It’s a structural one. And when the structure shifts, the quality of performance tends to shift with it.

In the boat, we didn’t have time for the MUM effect. In your team, you don’t either. To help you close the feedback gap and make feedback more natural, more useful, and less loaded, I’ve put together a short guide that explores this in a practical way.

→ Download my Feedback Guide  here