Why the Feedback Sandwich Needs to Come Off the Menu |
Studies show that a third of feedback interventions actually decreased performance.
The feedback sandwich is primarily designed to manage the giver's discomfort, not the receiver's growth.
Repeated use of the sandwich trains people to hear every compliment as a warning sign.
Praise and criticism do their best work as separate acts, each given its own moment and its own purpose.
Every semester, somewhere in the middle of a conversation about giving feedback, one of my business students will look up with the confidence of someone who has cracked a code and say it: “Oh yeah, just do the sandwich thing.” They always say it the same way: confidently declarative as if it were a piece of common knowledge they were graciously passing along to their classmates.
The “feedback sandwich”, for anyone who somehow escaped a management training in the last thirty years, goes like this: open with something positive, deliver the criticism (aka your "real" feedback) in the middle, then close with something positive again. The idea is that the praise cushions the blow. The person hears the hard thing without shutting down, and everyone walks away with their dignity intact.
The formula is tidy and largely unquestioned, which is part of the problem.
Who the Sandwich Is Actually For
Here is the part the management handbooks tend to skip: What the sandwich primarily manages is the giver's discomfort, treating the receiver's growth is a secondary concern at best.
Delivering critical feedback is uncomfortable, and most people will do a surprising amount of work to avoid the moment when someone’s face falls or the room gets quiet. The sandwich gives the giver a script that feels kind, creates the sensation of balance, and lets the person walking into a hard conversation believe they have handled it gently, when what they have actually done is package their own anxiety in a layer of praise that the receiver will see through before the sentence is finished.
Baumeister and colleagues (2001) demonstrated that negative information consistently carries more psychological weight than positive information of equal intensity. We are wired, evolutionarily, to attend to what might........