Case Insight #11: When Feedback Diagnoses the Wrong Problem

Performance feedback is an organizational intervention. Before deciding what needs to change in a person, leaders need to understand what produced the outcome.

A leader asks a manager to develop a set of performance indicators.

The assignment requires some investigation. The information exists, but it is distributed across several places and the expected format has not been prescribed.

Three people receive comparable assignments.

Two begin investigating independently. The third returns almost immediately with questions: Where do I find the information? How should I structure it? What exactly should this look like?

The feedback in this situation may be relatively straightforward.

At that level of responsibility, the expectation is not simply to complete an assigned task. It is to exercise some independent judgment before escalating uncertainty upward. The developmental conversation can therefore focus on a specific behaviour: investigate first, form an initial point of view, and then ask for help where uncertainty remains.

Sometimes the individual level really is the right level of intervention.

But not always.

From outcome to attribution

Consider a different situation.

A senior leader approves a piece of work containing terms that should have prompted further scrutiny. The issue is discovered later, and the immediate conclusion is that the leader should have exercised better judgment.

That conclusion may be correct.

But imagine that the leader approved the work believing those terms had already been agreed with the customer.

That additional information does not automatically make the original decision appropriate. Nor does it eliminate individual accountability.

It does, however, change the diagnostic question.

The question is no longer simply:

Why didn't this person catch the problem?

It becomes:

What did this person reasonably understand about the decision they were making, and what conditions shaped that understanding?

Those are not the same question.

And they may lead to very different interventions.

Feedback contains a diagnosis

Performance feedback often appears to concern an individual because an individual is where the outcome became visible.

A decision was made. A deadline was missed. A customer interaction went poorly. An escalation happened too late. Something important was overlooked.

The visible outcome gives the organization somewhere obvious to look.

But the location of the outcome does not necessarily identify the location of the constraint. An individual's action may reflect a capability gap. It may also reflect unclear decision rights, incomplete information, conflicting expectations, an operating practice, an incentive, a governance gap, or some combination of these conditions.

The Decision Altitude Model makes this distinction explicit. The same situation can be understood at several altitudes- from its immediate context through work and practice, the operating model, the organizational system, and the broader enterprise context. The objective is not to push every problem upward, but to find the narrowest frame that provides sufficient understanding for the decision being made.

Feedback requires the same discipline.

Before telling someone what needs to change, a leader is implicitly making a claim about what produced the outcome.

That claim deserves examination.

When an organizational problem becomes a personal one

The risk is not merely that poorly diagnosed feedback feels unfair.

The more consequential risk is that the organization intervenes in the wrong place.

Suppose an undesirable outcome is produced by several interacting conditions:

unclear decision rights + incomplete information + an unstated leadership expectation + individual judgment

If the organization reduces that outcome to:

poor judgment

the intervention becomes obvious.

Tell the individual to exercise better judgment next time.

But nothing else changes.

The decision rights remain unclear. Information continues to move imperfectly. The leadership expectation remains implicit. The operating environment continues producing the same ambiguity.

The organization may believe it has addressed the problem because feedback has been delivered.

It has actually addressed only the place where the problem became visible.

This is precisely the kind of fragmentation Integrative Leadership is intended to counter. Integrative leadership asks leaders to understand how decisions, priorities, systems and behaviours interact rather than optimizing or interpreting each independently.

Performance management is not exempt from that requirement.

The opposite error matters too

There is an equal danger in over-diagnosing.

Not every disappointing outcome reveals an operating-model flaw.

Sometimes expectations were clear. The necessary information was available. Authority was appropriate. Comparable people operating under comparable conditions behaved differently.

The relevant constraint may, in fact, sit with the individual.

Returning to the first example, a manager who repeatedly seeks instruction before attempting reasonable independent investigation may need developmental feedback about initiative, problem-solving, or judgment.

Turning that situation into a systemic inquiry would not necessarily produce greater insight. It might simply avoid a useful conversation.

Decision altitude matters in both directions.

Too narrow a frame can convert organizational conditions into individual deficiencies. Too broad a frame can turn ordinary performance management into unnecessary organizational analysis. The Decision Altitude Model describes precisely this tension: effective judgment requires enough breadth to understand what matters, but no broader than the decision requires.

The objective is not to explain away individual responsibility.

It is to locate it accurately.

Accountability and diagnosis belong together

Good performance management requires accountability.

People make decisions. Leaders carry responsibilities. Expectations matter. Sometimes someone simply needs to do something differently next time.

But accountability becomes more useful when it follows diagnosis rather than replacing it.

Before concluding that an outcome demonstrates poor judgment, weak communication, insufficient initiative, lack of executive presence, or some other individual deficiency, leaders can ask a more fundamental question:

What would have needed to be true for the expected behaviour to have been reasonable in that situation?

Was the expectation known?

Was the relevant information available?

Was authority clear?

Would someone operating under the same conditions reasonably have understood the situation differently?

Is this an isolated behaviour, or evidence of a recurring pattern?

And importantly: what evidence tells us that the constraint sits primarily with the individual rather than somewhere around them?

These questions do not weaken accountability.

They make accountability more precise.

Feedback as an organizational intervention

Organizations are continuously shaped through ordinary decisions and behaviours, not only through formal redesigns. Organizational Intentionality describes how accumulated choices gradually reinforce structures, practices and patterns that can eventually become part of the organization itself.

Feedback participates in that process.

What leaders repeatedly correct teaches people what matters.

What they attribute to individuals teaches people where responsibility resides.

What they investigate - and what they do not - shapes how the organization understands itself.

A culture in which every undesirable outcome becomes an individual performance issue may gradually teach people to protect themselves from blame.

A culture in which every individual failure is attributed to the system may erode meaningful accountability. Neither is particularly useful.

The more disciplined position sits between them:

Understand what produced the outcome, then intervene at the level where change is actually required.

Sometimes that means changing a process.

Sometimes it means clarifying a decision right.

Sometimes it means making an expectation explicit.

And sometimes it means looking someone in the eye and saying: you had enough information, authority and context to make this decision differently.

That conversation is not less developmental because it is direct.

It is more credible because the diagnosis underneath it has been earned.

Closing Reflection

The location of a performance outcome does not necessarily identify the location of the constraint.

Before deciding what someone needs to do differently, leaders should understand what produced the behaviour they are trying to change.

The purpose is not to remove accountability from the individual.

It is to make sure accountability - and the intervention that follows it - is placed where it belongs.

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Related Content

Decision Altitude Model A framework for determining the level at which an organizational situation should be understood and acted upon. Particularly relevant here because feedback itself requires a judgment about whether the observed outcome can be sufficiently explained at the individual level or whether the frame needs to broaden.

Integrative Leadership Explores how leaders strengthen decision-making by examining relationships among people, decisions, systems, priorities and constraints rather than interpreting organizational outcomes through a single lens.

Organizational Intentionality Examines how everyday decisions and behaviours accumulate into organizational patterns over time. Feedback belongs in that accumulation: repeated choices about what leaders attribute to individuals, what they investigate, and what they correct gradually shape how an organization understands responsibility and accountability.