Who Gives Feedback to the People Who Spend Their Careers Giving It?
I spend a lot of time in two professional worlds: academia and business.
They are clearly different. The work is different, the language is different, and success is assessed in different ways.
But there is one similarity I keep noticing.
Managers and academics spend a remarkable amount of their professional lives evaluating, being evaluated, and helping other people improve. Managers review performance, discuss targets, give feedback and receive it. Academics assess student work, review papers, supervise researchers, respond to reviewers and work within promotion and performance systems.
In both environments, feedback is everywhere.
Yet there is an interesting question underneath all of this:
Where do the people doing all that evaluating go when they need a conversation in which they are not being evaluated?
Feedback is not the same as development
A recent California Management Review article from August 2026 highlights a familiar problem in leadership development. Feedback is often too general to produce useful behavioural change. Comments such as "be more strategic" or "develop greater executive presence" may signal a concern, but they do not necessarily tell someone what to do differently.
Academia has its own equivalents:
"Strengthen the contribution."
"Be more ambitious."
"Increase your research profile."
There may be useful information behind these comments. But receiving an assessment and developing from it are two different processes. Research supports that distinction. In two organisational studies, Anseel and colleagues found that feedback combined with structured reflection led to greater performance improvement than feedback alone. In other words, receiving feedback is only part of the process. We also need the opportunity to think about what it means, how we are responding to it, and what we want to do next.
Academics know this tension too
Research on peer review of teaching in higher education provides an interesting parallel.
A systematic review by Lily Min Zeng describes different purposes for peer review, including evaluation and professional development. Evaluation may inform quality assurance or personnel decisions. Developmental approaches have a different purpose. It is about helping academics examine and improve their practice.
Recognising that difference is important.
Professional evaluation is necessary in both management and academia. But when a conversation has hierarchy, assessment or possible consequences attached to it, complete openness can become more difficult.
Sometimes we explain.
Sometimes we defend.
Sometimes we filter what we really think before saying it.
A different kind of conversation
This is where I see a useful similarity between coaching managers and coaching academics.
A coach is not deciding whether the manager deserves a promotion.
A coach is not reviewing the academic's manuscript or deciding the outcome of a promotion application.
That allows for different questions:
What are you assuming here?
Why is this feedback difficult to hear?
What part of the situation can you influence?
Are you choosing your response, or simply reacting to the pressure around you?
What are you avoiding?
These questions are not designed to produce the "correct" answer. They help someone examine the thinking behind their response.
There is a growing evidence base for this kind of coaching. A 2023 meta-analysis by de Haan and Nilsson, based on 37 randomised controlled studies, found a positive overall effect of workplace and executive coaching across leadership and personal outcomes. The authors also noted some publication bias, so the results should not be overstated.
From being right to having choices
Experienced people can become very good at explaining why their judgement is sound.
Often, they are right.
A manager may have good reasons for not trusting someone with more responsibility.
An academic may have good reasons for believing a reviewer misunderstood a paper.
But even when the explanation is correct, another question remains useful:
What options do you have now?
That changes the conversation. It moves us away from proving who is right and towards examining choice.
Coaching does not replace good feedback, strong peer review, mentoring, supervision or honest conversations with colleagues.
Its purpose is different.
It gives us an opportunity to examine how we are responding to the judgements, expectations and pressures already around us.
The next time you receive feedback that produces a strong reaction, try asking:
What is this feedback causing me to think, feel and do?
Then ask:
Is that response helping me make a useful choice?
You may agree with the feedback. You may reject it. You may take only part of it.
But first, you have examined your own response.
For managers and academics alike, that can be a valuable form of professional development.
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