Excavating the unsaid: 10 tips for giving and getting great feedback

How to dig deeper and understand “what’s really going on” during work performance reviews

“Our job is to excavate the unsaid,” Brené Brown tells us in her Netflix special, The Call to Courage. It’s a critical but underemployed lesson in management.

People often share with me their frustrations about a lack of progress at work — not being appreciated, not being promoted, not being given opportunities to realise the potential they know they have. So I wonder: “What’s actually going on here? What’s NOT being said?”

It isn’t that they are hiding something, just that they may not know the answer (on a conscious level, at least). They haven’t engaged deeply with this question before and, importantly, they haven’t brought it to their managers. Or not in the right way.

To my mind, this is a missing link in many workplace interactions, especially performance review processes: a deeper curiosity about the truths and half-truths that underlie feedback; a willingness to explore these in an open, empathetic way; and a commitment to clear, radically honest discussion of “what’s really going on.”

Focusing on these areas would help to close the gap between people’s expectations and the reality they experience. It could vastly improve the sense…