On Good and Bad Feedback

A supervisor once told me:

“You’re not leaderly.”

That was it. No example, no behavior to change, no coaching on what “leaderly” would even look like coming from me. Another time, a different supervisor told me:

“I don’t want you to do this because I tell you to, I want you to want to.”

Again: no room to bring my own experience, logic, or opinion into it. Just a demand that I arrive at her conclusion and feel good about it.

Both of those knocked me sideways at the time. It took years, and an awesome therapist (seriously, do not underestimate what a good one can do for you), before I understood what had actually happened in each of those rooms. The first supervisor had a narrow, specific picture of what a leader looks like, and I didn’t match it, so the problem became my personality rather than anything I’d actually done. The second wanted compliance dressed up as buy-in: not “here’s why I think this is the right call,” but “agree with me, and mean it.” Neither one was giving me feedback. They were giving me a mandate for who I should be, and calling it coaching.

Why This Is Harder If You’re Neurodivergent

If you’re neurodivergent, there’s a good chance some of this lands differently for you too, and it’s worth knowing the name for it: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, or RSD. Psychiatrist Dr. William Dodson, who popularized the term, describes it as close to the only emotional pattern found specifically in ADHD: extreme emotional pain triggered by perceived rejection, criticism, or disappointing someone, real or imagined. In his words:

“The pain is so primitive and overwhelming that people struggle to find any words to describe it.”

Cleveland Clinic puts it more clinically: the ADHD brain may not regulate pain-like activity the way other brains do, which is part of why rejection can hit disproportionately hard, and adults living with it are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and loneliness on top of it.

Worth saying plainly: RSD isn’t an officially recognized diagnosis, and the research base is still thin (see this Psychology Today piece on what the actual evidence does and doesn’t support). I’m also not going to pretend it’s a full explanation for everything on this topic. I think it’s a mistake to reach for a diagnosis every time something is simply hard. But whatever you call it, the pattern is real for a lot of ADHD brains: perceived criticism, even mild, even well-intentioned, can register less like “here’s some input” and more like a five-alarm fire. Your body reacts before your brain has a chance to sort the signal from the noise. If you want more on this, ADDitude and CHADD both have solid, plain-language explainers, and CHADD in particular is a longstanding nonprofit clearinghouse for ADHD research and resources.

But it is a real factor in why this specific skill, telling apart meaningful feedback from toxic or unvaluable commentary, is genuinely harder for a lot of us. When everything arrives feeling like an emergency, “is this true and useful” and “is this just going to hurt” get tangled together fast.

Turns Out, It’s Not Just Me

It may (or may not) surprise you to learn that women get a much heavier dose of personality-based and manner-based feedback than men do, and there’s real data behind that, not just my own two data points.

Linguist Kieran Snyder analyzed 248 tech performance reviews and found that critical feedback showed up in 87.9% of women’s reviews, compared to 58.9% of men’s. The bigger gap was in what kind of criticism showed up: personality-based critique appeared in 71 of the 94 critical reviews women received, and in just 2 of the 83 critical reviews men received. The word “abrasive” alone was used seventeen times to describe thirteen different women. It never appeared once in a man’s review.

That was 2014. It hasn’t gotten better. A 2024 Textio study, also led by Snyder, found that 88% of high-performing women received personality-based feedback in their reviews, compared to 12% of high-performing men. High-performing women were also 76% more likely to receive negative feedback overall than high-achieving men, who received it only 2% of the time. Ten years and a different data set later, Snyder’s read on why hadn’t moved either:

“Men are mostly receiving feedback about their work… when you look at women, the positive observations are not generally about the work. They’re about the woman’s demeanor, personality, or disposition.”

Harvard Business Review found something similar looking specifically at developmental feedback: women were 1.4 times more likely than men to get critical feedback that was subjective rather than tied to a concrete outcome, the kind of thing that reads less like “here’s what happened” and more like “here’s how I feel about you” (Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, HBR). Separately, researchers Elena Doldor, Madeleine Wyatt, and Jo Silvester ran a computerized analysis of over a thousand pieces of workplace feedback and found feedback to women skewed toward how she communicates rather than what she’s building, treated her confidence (or lack of it) as a fixed trait rather than something coachable, and was, in the researchers’ own words, “less actionable and less effective” than what men in comparable roles received.

I don’t share this to excuse every time I’ve bristled at a critique. Plenty of the feedback I’ve gotten over the years was fair and I needed to hear it, personality-shaped or not. But it does mean I no longer treat “this stings and I can’t point to what I’d do differently” as proof that I did something wrong. Sometimes it’s proof that someone ran out of an actual thing to say and reached for a version of me instead. “Not leaderly” wasn’t a fluke. It was a pattern with a name and a body of research behind it, and I was just one more data point in it.

The Problem With Just Filtering It All Out

Here’s the trick, though: the answer can’t be to stop listening. If we want to be learning humans, we have to ingest feedback in order to improve. Some of it is going to be uncomfortable and still be correct. Some of it is going to point at a real gap, a real blind spot, a real thing we could do better, and our job is to hear that even when it stings. Shutting the whole channel down because some of what comes through it is garbage means shutting out the parts that would actually help you grow.

So the actual skill isn’t “let feedback in” or “keep feedback out.” It’s sorting.

What Good Feedback Actually Looks Like

Looking back at both of those supervisors, I can now name what was missing, because I’ve since had feedback that did have it:

  • It’s about a behavior or a decision, not a personality.
  • It’s specific enough that I could picture doing something differently.
  • It leaves room for my own experience, logic, and judgment to be part of the conversation, not obstacles to overcome.
  • It would still make sense to me even after the sting wore off.

What Bad Feedback Actually Looks Like

And the version that isn’t feedback at all, no matter how it’s dressed up:

  • It targets who you are rather than what you did.
  • It can’t be turned into an action, because there isn’t one. “Not leaderly” isn’t a to-do list.
  • It asks you to override your own reasoning and just fall in line.
  • It’s really about the other person’s comfort, preference, or narrow definition of “right,” not about your growth.

Who It Has to Come From

Content isn’t the only filter, though. Source matters just as much, maybe more. So before I even get to whether a piece of feedback is specific or actionable, I check it against four things:

  1. It comes from someone I respect. Not someone I’m supposed to respect because of a title, tenure, or position. I’ve written before about the difference between the respect society tells you to hand out by default and the respect people actually earn through integrity, authenticity, and skill or knowledge applied and shared. Feedback inherits whatever kind of respect its source has. A title doesn’t buy credibility with me. Character does.
  2. It comes from someone with a valid point of reference or experience. That doesn’t mean they have to agree with me, or have lived my exact experience. It means they have real standing to speak on the topic, even when what they say is hard to hear. Someone reasoning from inside relevant experience is worth listening to even when I don’t like the conclusion. Someone with no real basis for the opinion isn’t.
  3. It comes from someone who supports me, or is at least neutral. I strictly limit how much weight I give feedback from people who have shown, over time, that they’re trying to damage me personally or professionally. Those people exist. It’s fine to see them clearly for what they are. Sometimes you can’t remove them from your environment, but you’re not obligated to treat what they say as truth once experience has already taught you otherwise.
  4. It comes from someone who demonstrates wisdom, insight, or qualities I actually want to develop. If I wouldn’t want to become more like this person in some specific, nameable way, their opinion of who I should be carries a lot less weight.

Run a piece of feedback through those four before you even ask whether it’s specific or actionable, and most of it sorts itself fast.

And once something sorts into bad, disingenuous, or damaging and unconstructive: reject it. Don’t keep turning it over hoping to find value that isn’t there. Give it one brief, honest scan for a glaring truth buried inside. If you find one, keep it. If you don’t, jettison the rest. No lingering debate required.

Good Feedback Still Isn’t a Command

Here’s the flip side, though: passing the filter above doesn’t mean you owe someone the exact behavior they were picturing when they gave you the feedback. Good feedback has to be examined and considered. That part isn’t optional. But worthy of consideration and worthy of producing the specific result or behavior the other person wants, or demonstrated themselves, are two different things. You still have to do the work of figuring out where it fits for you: in your own style, at your own scale, in your own words. Taking feedback seriously means engaging honestly with what’s true in it. It doesn’t mean becoming a copy of whoever gave it to you. That’s the same trap as “not leaderly,” just wearing a nicer outfit.

This stuff is hard. It isn’t easy. Sorting through what to keep, what to reject, and what to keep but reshape into your own version, all at once, while your own brain may be actively lying to you about how much danger you’re in, is real work. It doesn’t get easier because you’ve named the categories. It just gets slightly more possible.

What Sorting Actually Looks Like

Here’s the most recent test of all this. In my last role, I got feedback that I had interacted in a way that “may not have been appropriate.” That was close to the whole sentence. I had to press, more than once, to get an actual example, a specific situation, and something resembling coaching.

Once I had it, I did the actual work: I grounded myself in my own values and reviewed my own behavior as honestly as I could. I came out the other side with three separate conclusions, and they weren’t all the same kind of conclusion.

  1. There was one instance where I genuinely could have communicated better. I was running on brain chemical depletion (ADHD, overwork, and working while sick will do that to you), and something that should have gotten a beat of pause and an explanation came out sounding flip instead. That one was fair. That one was mine to own.
  2. Some people don’t like direct communication. I can be aware of that and adjust my language depending on who I’m talking to. But I’m not going to stop communicating directly, and I don’t really want to. It’s one of the things that makes me effective.
  3. Some people don’t like being held accountable, or being told plainly that something they did wasn’t correct. I can temper how I deliver that. I’m not going to stop saying it clearly, because if I do, I can’t fulfill my role.

Only the first one was actually feedback. The other two were preference, dressed up as feedback.

Praised for It, Then Punished for It

I’ve hit a version of this at several points in my career: I get praised for accomplishing things other people can’t, and then criticized for the exact qualities that made it possible. This isn’t just an Amy thing. It’s well documented, especially for high-performing women, and especially for those of us who are also neurodivergent.

Researchers Frank Flynn and Cameron Anderson ran a study, later popularized as the “Heidi and Howard” case, in which they gave people an identical account of a successful entrepreneur and changed only the name. Howard was rated likeable, someone people wanted to work for. Heidi, same résumé, same accomplishments, was rated selfish and someone people were less interested in hiring or working with. The competence didn’t move. The likeability did, purely on gender.

Leadership consultant Jennifer McCollum tells a version of this from her own career: after she won major results for a client through assertive, competitive tactics, a colleague described her as:

“A cupcake with a razor blade inside.”

Effective and unsettling, in the same breath, for the same behavior a man would likely have just been called effective for.

And for those of us who are also neurodivergent, there’s an additional layer. Researcher Dr. Damian Milton named this the double empathy problem: when autistic or otherwise neurodivergent people communicate directly and literally, the friction isn’t a deficit on our end, it’s a mismatch of styles that neurotypical listeners often read as rude or inappropriate simply because it’s unfamiliar to them. Direct isn’t the same as wrong. It just isn’t always what the room expects.

Put together: the qualities that get you praised for being effective are frequently the same ones that get you quietly punished for being difficult. That’s not a contradiction you’re supposed to resolve by shrinking. Eventually I concluded that my personal style and that particular environment weren’t well aligned, and I chose to go find a role where they were.

I’ve Gotten This Wrong Too, in Both Directions

In fairness, I haven’t always sorted this correctly, and I’ve failed in both directions, not just one.

There have been plenty of times I worked hard to extract value from feedback I should have just thrown away: sat with it, tried to find the fair kernel in it, gave it more of my energy and self-doubt than it had earned. And especially earlier in my career, there were times that went the other way: I was too attached to my own ego, or my own way of doing something, to actually let good feedback in and change based on it. Neither failure mode is the “safe” one. Over-ingesting bad feedback and refusing to ingest good feedback both cost me, just differently.

If You Can’t See the Difference Yet

Everything above assumes you can tell good from bad once you actually look for it. Some days, especially early on, you won’t be able to. If that’s you: talk to a coach, a therapist, or a mentor who can help you see what good feedback actually looks like, from the outside, when you can’t quite trust your own read on it yet. I mentioned it earlier and I meant it: an awesome therapist changed how I do this. There’s no shame in needing a second set of eyes for something this hard to sort out alone.

Crux

Not everything that hurts is wrong, and not everything that hurts is true. The work is telling those apart, and the test isn’t how much it stung going down. It’s whether, once the sting fades, there’s something specific and actionable left standing, something you could actually do something with. If there isn’t, that’s not feedback you failed to accept. That’s someone else’s discomfort, handed to you and mislabeled. And sometimes, once you’ve actually sorted it, the honest conclusion isn’t a personal action item at all. It’s that you and the room you’re in don’t fit, and it’s time to go find one that does.