If You Can't Give Feedback That Makes People Uncomfortable, You Can't Lead
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If You Can't Give Feedback That Makes People Uncomfortable, You Can't Lead
Your best employee just delivered another mediocre presentation.
You know she's capable of brilliance—you've seen flashes of it. But she's been coasting for months, delivering work that's technically fine but strategically shallow. The kind of work that keeps the lights on but never moves the needle.
You sit there, watching her click through slides that could have been generated by ChatGPT, and you have a choice.
You can smile, nod, and say "great job" like you always do. You can preserve the harmony, maintain the relationship, keep everyone comfortable.
Or you can tell her the truth: that her work is forgettable, that she's operating below her potential, and that if she doesn't step up, someone else will.
Most leaders choose comfort. They choose the polite lie over the uncomfortable truth.
And that's exactly why their teams stay mediocre.
Your kindness is their ceiling.
The Great Leadership Lie
We've been sold a lie about leadership.
The lie is that great leaders are beloved by everyone, that they create harmony and consensus, that they make people feel good about themselves.
The truth is more brutal: Great leaders make people uncomfortable in service of making them better.
Reed Hastings didn't build Netflix by making everyone feel warm and fuzzy. He created a culture where honest feedback flows freely, even when it stings. Especially when it stings.
"We're a team, not a family," Hastings famously said. "We're like a professional sports team where everyone fights for a starting position."
This isn't cruelty. It's clarity.
When you refuse to give uncomfortable feedback, you're not being kind—you're being selfish. You're protecting yourself from an awkward conversation while denying someone the information they need to grow.
The feedback you don't give becomes the ceiling they can't break.
Why Your Feedback Isn't Working
Most feedback is garbage because it's designed to make the giver feel better, not the receiver.
You've probably given feedback that sounds like this:
"Maybe consider exploring different approaches..." "I'm wondering if there's room for improvement..." "Have you thought about potentially strengthening this area..."
This isn't feedback. It's verbal bubble wrap—layers of cushioning that protect everyone from impact.
Real feedback lands with weight. It's specific, it's consequential, and it forces someone to confront a reality they've been avoiding.
Here's what most leaders miss: The discomfort isn't a bug in the feedback process—it's the feature. Discomfort signals that you've reached something real, something that matters enough to defend or change.
When someone gets defensive about your feedback, you've found the lever. When they argue back, you've touched the thing that needs to shift. When they get quiet and thoughtful, you've given them a gift.
Defensiveness is just truth knocking on the door of change.
The Jeff Bezos Standard
Jeff Bezos had a principle at Amazon that explains why the company dominated while others flattered themselves into mediocrity.
He called it "disagree and commit."
If you disagreed with a decision—any decision, even one from Bezos himself—you had an obligation to speak up. Not diplomatically. Not carefully. Directly.
But once the discussion was over and a path was chosen, everyone committed fully, regardless of their original position.
This created a culture where hard truths could be spoken without destroying working relationships. Where someone could tell their boss they were wrong without ending their career.
The result? Amazon made faster, better decisions because they had access to uncomfortable truths that other companies buried under politeness.
Bezos understood something most leaders don't: High standards are worthless if you're not willing to enforce them. And enforcement always feels uncomfortable to someone.
Standards without enforcement are just suggestions in disguise.
The Anatomy of Growth-Producing Feedback
Feedback that changes behavior has three characteristics:
It's immediate. You don't wait for the quarterly review or the annual performance discussion. You address it in the moment when the context is fresh and the impact is clear.
It's specific. You don't talk about "communication style" or "leadership presence." You talk about the exact words they said in Tuesday's meeting that shut down collaboration.
It's consequential. You connect their behavior to real outcomes—lost deals, frustrated teammates, missed opportunities. You make the cost of staying the same higher than the discomfort of changing.
When I started giving feedback this way, something interesting happened. The people who could handle it got dramatically better, fast. The people who couldn't handle it revealed themselves as wrong fits for the team.
Both outcomes were valuable.
Your feedback is a filter—it attracts the right people and repels the wrong ones.
The Comfort-Growth Paradox
Here's what every leader needs to understand: Comfort and growth are mutually exclusive.
If someone is comfortable with your feedback, they're probably not hearing anything they don't already know. If they're not defensive, you're probably not challenging anything that matters.
The feedback that changes people is the feedback that makes them squirm.
This doesn't mean being cruel or personal. It means being surgical about the gap between where someone is and where they need to be.
When Oprah Winfrey was starting out as a talk show host, her producer gave her feedback that stung: "You're trying to be Barbara Walters instead of being Oprah. Stop performing and start connecting."
That feedback was uncomfortable because it forced Oprah to abandon a strategy she thought was working. But it redirected her toward authenticity—the very quality that would make her legendary.
Building a Culture That Can Handle Truth
Individual feedback conversations are just the beginning. The real leverage comes from building a culture where uncomfortable truths can be spoken regularly without destroying relationships.
This requires three foundational shifts:
Separate intent from impact. Someone can have good intentions and still create negative outcomes. Teaching your team to focus on impact over intent makes feedback less personal and more actionable.
Normalize feedback as care. The people who care about your growth are the ones willing to risk your temporary discomfort for your long-term development. Frame difficult conversations as acts of investment, not criticism.
Create feedback rituals. Don't leave feedback to chance or mood. Build it into regular processes—project post-mortems, monthly one-on-ones, quarterly growth conversations. When feedback is expected, it's less threatening.
The teams that master this create something magical: an environment where people get better faster because they have access to information that other organizations keep hidden.
The Price of Avoidance
Every time you avoid giving uncomfortable feedback, you make a choice.
You choose short-term harmony over long-term growth. You choose your comfort over their development. You choose the mediocre present over the excellent future.
And here's the cruel irony: The feedback you avoid giving doesn't disappear. It just gets delivered by someone else—usually a competitor, a customer, or the market itself.
The difference is that when reality delivers the feedback, it's often too late to do anything about it.
Your Uncomfortable Truth
The most uncomfortable feedback might be the feedback you need to give yourself.
As a leader, you're probably avoiding difficult conversations right now. You're probably tolerating performance that doesn't meet your standards. You're probably choosing comfort over growth in your own leadership.
The question isn't whether you have the skills to give better feedback. You do.
The question is whether you have the courage to make people uncomfortable in service of making them better.
Because here's what I've learned: The leaders who change lives aren't the ones who make people feel good. They're the ones who make people grow.
And growth requires discomfort.
Your team is waiting for you to care enough to tell them the truth. Even when it stings. Especially when it stings.
The comfort you preserve today becomes the mediocrity you're stuck with tomorrow.
Thank you for reading.
– Scott