Leadership
How to Give Feedback to Your Manager
Give upward feedback that your manager can act on: pick the right moment, describe the behaviour and its impact, suggest a change and keep the working relationship intact.
Giving feedback to your manager works best when you describe a specific behaviour, explain its impact on your work and suggest a concrete change—at a moment when they can actually hear it. Upward feedback is not insubordination. Most managers receive far less honest input than they need, and many genuinely want it.
It is also legitimately risky in some workplaces, so this guide covers judgement as well as wording: when to raise something, how to frame it, and when to use a different route such as HR, a skip-level conversation or an anonymous survey. The examples are fictional wording to adapt to your situation.
Decide whether and when to raise it
Ask yourself three questions first. Is this a pattern or a one-off? Does it affect your work, the team's work or just your preference? And is your manager likely to be able to change it? Feedback about a recurring behaviour that blocks your work is worth raising; feedback about a personality trait you dislike rarely lands well.
Timing matters more than wording. Avoid raising feedback in the middle of a crisis, in front of others, or in the same meeting where your manager just received bad news. A one-to-one with some breathing room, or a dedicated conversation you have asked for, gives the feedback a fair chance.
If the issue involves harassment, discrimination or ethics, skip the informal route entirely and use your organisation's formal channels. This guide is about everyday working relationships, not misconduct.
Structure: behaviour, impact, request
The most reliable structure is: describe the observable behaviour, explain its impact on your work, and make a specific request. This keeps the conversation about something changeable rather than about who your manager is as a person.
Behaviour: ‘In the last three planning meetings, my updates were cut short before I could flag risks.' Impact: ‘Twice, a risk I had not mentioned became a problem the following week.' Request: ‘Could I have two minutes at the end of my update to flag risks, even when we are short on time?'
Avoid ‘always' and ‘never', avoid diagnosing motives (‘you don't trust me'), and avoid stacking several issues into one conversation. One behaviour, one impact, one request is enough for a first conversation.
Example phrases to adapt
About meeting behaviour: ‘I have noticed that in team meetings my points often get a quick response and we move on, while similar points from others get discussed. I may be misreading it, but I leave unsure whether my input is useful. Could we talk about how I can make my contributions more helpful?'
About unclear priorities: ‘This week I was asked to prioritise the report and the client prep, and both were described as urgent. I want to make the right call when that happens. Could we agree how I should check priorities when everything is urgent?'
About recognition: ‘When the launch went well, the credit in the all-hands went to the project generally. The team had put in significant extra hours, and a mention of their names would have meant a lot. Could the team be named when their work is presented?'
About workload: ‘I want to flag something early rather than late. With the two new requests this week, I cannot finish everything to the standard I would want. Can we look at the list together and decide what moves?'
Frame it so it can be heard
Lead with the shared goal, not the grievance. ‘I want our one-to-ones to help me prioritise better' is easier to engage with than ‘our one-to-ones are not useful.' You are proposing an improvement to how you work together, not delivering a verdict.
Ask permission when the feedback is personal: ‘Can I share an observation about how our meetings work?' This gives your manager a moment to prepare and makes them a participant rather than a target. If they say now is not a good time, take that seriously and ask when would be.
Stay curious about their side. Your manager may be under constraints you cannot see—a directive from above, a staffing gap, a deadline you do not know about. ‘Is there context I am missing?' is a genuinely useful question, not a retreat.
After the conversation
If your manager agrees to a change, let it actually happen. Give the new behaviour a few weeks, acknowledge it when you see it (‘the risk round in planning is really helping'), and do not keep score in the meantime.
If nothing changes after two or three honest attempts, decide what that tells you. Some issues you can work around; some need escalation to a skip-level manager or HR; some mean the role is not the right fit. Repeatedly delivering the same feedback with no response is information in itself.
Keep a brief private note of significant conversations—date, what you raised, what was agreed. This is not about building a case; it is about being able to describe a pattern accurately if you ever need to.
Invite feedback in return
The strongest position for giving upward feedback is being someone who visibly receives it well. If you regularly ask your manager ‘What could I do differently?' and act on the answer, your own observations carry more weight.
You can also widen the picture beyond your manager's view. ERA Skills lets you compare your self-assessment with pooled feedback from colleagues across five interpersonal skills—useful grounding before a difficult conversation, because it separates ‘my manager's opinion' from ‘how I come across generally.' Results need at least three completed raters, and no individual rater's answers are ever shown.