Everyone has experienced a senior person whose behaviour is creating cost — to the team, to the work, to the pace of delivery. Most people do one of three things: say nothing, vent sideways to a peer, or raise it once in a way that lands badly and then never raise it again.
The conversation that would actually help — direct, specific, upward feedback — almost never happens. Not because people don’t see the problem. Because they don’t know how to raise it without it becoming their problem.
Context
Upward feedback is structurally harder than downward feedback. The power dynamic is real. The risk of being misread — as difficult, as not a team player, as someone who doesn’t understand how things work — is real. And most orgs have no practiced norm for it, which means every attempt feels like an improvisation with high stakes.
The result is a one-way feedback system. Leaders get data about what is happening below them. They rarely get clean data about the cost of their own decisions, behaviour, or communication patterns. The org loses signal precisely where it needs it most — at the level where the most consequential decisions are made.
Insight
The reason most upward feedback fails is not the content. It is the framing. Feedback aimed at a person — their style, their personality, their approach — is easy to dismiss and hard to receive. Feedback anchored to a specific situation, a specific impact, and a specific ask is much harder to dismiss, because it is not about them as a person. It is about a pattern that is creating a cost the org can see.
There is a second thing worth naming: the goal of upward feedback is not to change the person. It is to surface information they may not have, give them the option to act on it, and create a record that the issue was raised. What they do with it is theirs. Your job is to raise it cleanly, once, with precision.
Implication
If you never give upward feedback, you become complicit in the pattern. Not morally — operationally. You absorb the cost, work around the behaviour, and the system never learns that there is a problem. The senior person continues with incomplete information. The team continues to pay the price.
If you give it badly — emotionally, publicly, or without a specific anchor — you make yourself the story. The feedback gets lost and you absorb the consequence.
The narrow path is specific, private, impact-first, and delivered without an agenda beyond the information itself.
Action
Choose the right moment. Not in the heat of a specific incident, not in a group setting, not at the end of a long meeting. A separate, private conversation — ideally one you have asked for specifically. “I want to share something I’ve been observing — can we find 20 minutes?”
Lead with impact, not behaviour. Not “you do X” — “when X happens, the effect on the team is Y.” The behaviour is observable. The impact is the business case. Anchoring to impact makes the feedback about the work, not the person.
Be specific, not cumulative. One pattern, one example, one ask. Upward feedback that arrives as a list of grievances reads as an ambush. One clear, well-evidenced observation is more likely to land and harder to dismiss.
Name the ask explicitly. Feedback without a specific request is just a complaint. What would you like to be different? What would help? Make it concrete and make it forward-looking. “When this happens, it would help if…” gives the other person something to work with.
Do not expect immediate agreement. Senior people receiving feedback they did not ask for often respond with defence first. That is normal. Your job is not to win the conversation — it is to complete it. Say what needs to be said, hear the response, and close without needing resolution in the room.
Say it once. Mean it. If you have raised it clearly and nothing changes, you have done your part. Raise it a second time only if the impact has escalated and there is new information. Beyond that, you have the information you need about whether this environment responds to that kind of input.
The org’s role
This only works consistently if the org creates conditions where upward feedback is safe to give. That means leaders who explicitly invite it, who respond to it without retaliation, and who are seen to act on it sometimes. Without that, individual acts of upward feedback are acts of courage, not normal operating practice — and you cannot build a feedback culture on courage alone.
If you are in a leadership position, the most important thing you can do is make it visibly safe to tell you something you did not want to hear. Not by asking “does anyone have feedback for me” in a group setting — but by responding well, publicly, the first time someone actually gives it.
Upward feedback is not insubordination. It is the information your org needs most and is least likely to receive. Deliver it precisely, privately, and without needing it to change everything. That is your part. What happens next is theirs.