A beloved mentor of mine once asked me, "Franc, is all feedback relevant?" My initial answer was, "I think some is and some isn't." He challenged me immediately: "Why is some feedback not relevant?" I told him that feedback isn't always given with full context, or that it might simply be wrong. He paused, then clarified one of the most misunderstood elements of the feedback process. "Franc," he said, "I did not ask you if all feedback is true. I asked if all feedback is relevant."
That distinction changed the way I think about feedback entirely. And if you work with teams, it should change the way you think about it too.
The Distinction That Changes Everything
The goal of feedback is not to deliver verdicts. It's to receive data and observations from someone other than ourselves. Seen that way, all feedback is relevant, including feedback that turns out to be inaccurate. Here's why: if someone gives you feedback that doesn't match reality, that gap itself is the data. It tells you something about their perception, their experience of you, or a blind spot in how you're communicating. Dismissing feedback because it "isn't true" means missing that signal entirely.
This matters enormously for leaders. When someone on your team receives feedback, their first instinct is often to evaluate it for accuracy. Was it fair? Does it reflect what actually happened? If not, they discount it. But that instinctive filter shuts down the very learning the feedback was meant to create.
How the Brain Filters Feedback
To understand why feedback lands the way it does, you need to understand something about how the brain assigns meaning. Our brains don't experience events neutrally. Every interaction, every piece of information, every piece of feedback passes through a filter built from our memories. Those memories carry emotions, and those emotions generate meaning, and that meaning drives the behavior that follows.
The chain looks like this:
- Good memory leads to a positive emotion, which generates positive meaning, which produces constructive behavior
- A difficult memory leads to a negative emotion, which generates negative meaning, which produces defensive behavior
When two people think of Mother Teresa, nearly everyone draws on positive memories and associations. When two people think of Charles Manson, the opposite is true. That same principle applies every time you sit down to give feedback to someone on your team. The words you choose will land inside a brain already primed by that person's history, relationships, past experiences with performance conversations, and their own deepest fears about belonging and being enough.
The Limbic System in Action
The part of the brain responsible for processing all of that is the limbic system, your brain's emotional center. Research has shown it can complete the full sequence of memory, emotion, and meaning-making in as little as 0.085 seconds. That's faster than conscious thought. By the time a person forms a rational response to feedback, their limbic system has already decided how they feel about it.
I'll be honest about my own relationship with feedback: it could generously be called "strained." Negative feedback hits my limbic system hard, because somewhere in my history, my brain learned that being criticized means I'm not good enough, and if I'm not good enough, I won't belong. That's a deep trigger, rooted in years of changing schools every year between grades two and seven, shifting languages of instruction three times over. Those experiences built extraordinary adaptability in me, but they also left some tender spots.
I share this not for sympathy but because the leaders I work with need to understand that the people on their teams carry similar histories. Every single one of them. The rep who gets defensive after a performance conversation. The manager who shuts down when their coaching approach is questioned. The high performer who goes quiet after a critical observation in a group setting. They aren't being difficult. Their limbic systems are doing exactly what those systems were built to do.
The Four Categories of Feedback
Understanding how the brain receives feedback is the foundation. The next layer is understanding that feedback itself isn't monolithic. University of Akron researchers Medvedeff, Gregory, and Levy identified four distinct categories of feedback in their 2008 study, and each one lands differently:
- Positive Outcome Feedback: "Good work." Simple affirmation of a result.
- Negative Outcome Feedback: "This work is unacceptable." A judgment on a result with no further context.
- Positive Process Feedback: "Great work, and the way you built the team to deliver it was excellent." Affirmation tied to how the result was achieved.
- Negative Process Feedback: "This work missed the mark, and here's what I observed about how the team was structured." A critical observation connected to the specific behavior or process that produced the outcome.
Most leaders default to outcome feedback because it's faster and feels less confrontational. "Good work" takes two seconds. "The way you structured your approach led to X result" takes a conversation. But the shortcuts cost you more than you realize.
The Positive-to-Negative Ratio That Changes Everything
The Centre for Creative Leadership published a white paper in 2017 titled "Busting Myths about Feedback," and the findings are worth sitting with. They found that the proper ratio of positive to negative feedback should be at a minimum of 3:1 and ideally 5:1. Five pieces of positive feedback for every one piece of critical feedback.
Most leaders are nowhere close. Many operate at an inverted ratio, spending the majority of their feedback conversations on what needs to improve. The problem isn't intent. It's that the brain under-receives negative feedback and over-weights it emotionally. The limbic system treats critical feedback as a threat. And when the threat response fires, the cortex, the part of the brain responsible for learning and behavior change, goes offline.
You cannot coach someone into growth when their threat response is running. The ratio isn't a politeness convention. It's a neurological requirement for learning to occur.
Why Process Feedback Outperforms Outcome Feedback
The Centre for Creative Leadership also found something that surprised many readers: when the 3:1 or 5:1 ratio was maintained, employees actually wanted more negative process feedback over negative outcome feedback. When people felt seen and recognized consistently, they became hungry for specific, actionable critique.
The neuroscience behind this is straightforward. Negative outcome feedback, "this wasn't good enough," gives the brain nothing to work with. The threat fires, the meaning-making machine assigns a story ("I'm failing"), and the behavior that follows is usually avoidance or defensiveness. There's no actionable path forward embedded in the feedback.
Negative process feedback works differently. When you name the specific behavior or approach, the brain has something concrete to lock onto. The threat response is still present, but the prefrontal cortex can engage because there's a problem to solve rather than a verdict to survive. "Your team lacked coordination in the final stretch because the communication cadence broke down after the first milestone" gives a person's brain something to act on. "This project failed" does not.
The same pattern holds for positive feedback. Positive process feedback, "your approach of setting up a shared decision log kept the team aligned throughout," is far more valuable than "great job." It tells the brain which specific behaviors to repeat and reinforces the neural pathways connected to those behaviors.
Intentional Delivery: What Leaders Must Do
All of this builds toward a simple but demanding conclusion for leaders: feedback must be intentional. Not just in what you say, but in how often you say it, when you say it, and how you frame it.
Intentional feedback means maintaining the positive-to-negative ratio as a discipline, not as an afterthought. It means choosing process language over outcome language, especially when the stakes are high and the limbic system is primed to fire. It means understanding that your people are not blank slates. They bring their histories into every performance conversation, every one-on-one, every hallway exchange that touches on their work.
And it means staying open, as a leader, to the feedback flowing in your direction. When someone gives you feedback that doesn't feel true, pause before dismissing it. The gap between their perception and your intention is the data. That's exactly what your mentor was pointing at when he asked whether all feedback is relevant.
The answer is yes. Every piece of it. And the way you give it, and the way you receive it, determines whether your team grows or stays stuck.
If you're thinking about how to bring more structure and neuroscience to your feedback culture, reach out to the Braintrust team and let's start a conversation.
