What Is Feedback? The Types, and What to Do When You Get It

Feedback is information about what you did — your work, your behavior, your results — given back to you by someone who saw it, so that you can use it. That last part is the whole test. Information you can’t act on is a comment; information you can act on is feedback.

Ask what feedback is and most sources give you a definition like that one and stop. That’s fine right up until you’re across the desk from your manager and something they say lands badly, because knowing the word doesn’t tell you what to do with the thing. What follows is the fuller picture: the kinds of feedback you’ll meet at work, and what each is asking of you.

What is feedback, exactly?

The word carries two related meanings. The older, technical one — the one Merriam-Webster leads with — is the transmission of evaluative or corrective information about an action, event, or process back to its original source. In systems terms, an output gets routed back around as an input, closing a loop. The workplace meaning is that same loop with people in it: you do the work, someone sees the result, and what they saw travels back to you.

Keep that loop framing, because it explains why feedback exists at all. Without a return path, you have no way of knowing whether what you did worked; you’d just keep doing it.

The most useful definition of the workplace kind actually comes from education rather than HR. The teaching center at the National University of Singapore defines feedback as any information about the quality of what someone does, thinks, or accomplishes that can be used to improve their learning. The load-bearing words are “can be used.” Not accurate, not kind — usable. That gives you a practical test for anything you are handed.

The three kinds of feedback people mix up

Most confusion about feedback comes from one problem: three different things share the name. The framing that sorts them out best comes from Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen’s Thanks for the Feedback, and it turns up everywhere from Yale School of Medicine to specialist management writing. What makes it more useful than the usual positive-versus-negative split is that it sorts feedback by what the giver is trying to accomplish, not by how the feedback sounds.

Appreciation

Appreciation is recognition — someone telling you that your effort registered. It contains no instructions and isn’t meant to. Its job is to signal that the work was seen and that you are valued for having done it.

It’s easy to dismiss appreciation as the soft one, but its absence is what people actually notice: work nobody acknowledges starts to feel invisible, and invisibility is demoralizing in a way criticism isn’t. It speaks to the relationship and the effort, not to the standard.

Coaching

Coaching is advice aimed at helping you get better at something — expanding a skill, correcting a habit, handling a challenge you haven’t met before. “Next time, send the summary before the meeting rather than after.” It points at your next attempt rather than your last one.

This is the type that reliably contains something you can use, which makes it the one worth asking for by name. It’s also the type most often withheld, because giving it takes more effort and more nerve than saying “nice work.” If you want more of it, you usually have to ask — and ask specifically. “Any feedback for me?” invites a shrug. “What would you change about how I ran that meeting?” is much harder to dodge.

Evaluation

Evaluation tells you where you stand: a rating, a ranking, a judgment measured against expectations or against other people. Performance reviews are the standard vehicle, and this is the type with consequences attached — pay, promotion, a written record.

It also drowns out the other two. Keep the strands separate, because together the evaluation swamps everything else. That’s why the compliment-then-criticism sandwich fails so reliably. Once a verdict is in play, your attention goes to the verdict, and the coaching wrapped around it never gets heard. On the receiving end of a bundled conversation, do the separating yourself: what is this person telling me about where I stand, and what are they telling me to do differently?

Formal and informal feedback

Cutting across those three is a second distinction that most workplace sources organize around. Formal feedback runs through scheduled machinery — annual or quarterly reviews, structured evaluation cycles, documented performance improvement plans. It sits on a calendar, it’s usually written down, and it often follows a template.

Informal feedback is everything else: a remark after a client call, a comment in the margin of your draft, someone mentioning that your last email was clearer than the one before. According to AIHR’s guide to workplace feedback types, this is both the more frequent kind and the more useful one for day-to-day correction, precisely because it arrives close to the thing it’s about.

The trap for anyone new to work is that only the formal kind registers as feedback at all. You spend eleven months assuming nobody is telling you anything, then sit down in a review and find the assessment was assembled from a hundred small observations you never counted as data. You’re almost certainly receiving more than you think.

Where feedback comes from

Workplace sources sort feedback by source as well, and the source changes how you should read it:

• Your manager — carries formal weight and usually feeds the evaluation.
• Peers and teammates — see how you actually work day to day, which your manager mostly doesn’t.
• Upward feedback — what you give your manager about how they manage.
• Customers and clients — report from the receiving end of the work.
• 360-degree feedback — a format that gathers several of these at once.

The logic behind the 360-degree format is worth understanding: every source sees a partial view. Your manager sees your output; a teammate sees how you respond when a deadline slips. The places where they disagree are usually the interesting part.

What to do when you’re the one receiving it

Almost everything written about feedback is aimed at the person giving it — how managers should deliver it, how organizations should structure it. Early in a career you’re on the other side far more often, and the sequence that works there is short.

Start by understanding it before you respond. That means knowing what is actually being said — which type it is, and what prompted it — rather than reacting to how it landed. “Can you give me an example?” isn’t a defensive question; it’s the difference between something you can act on and something you’ll only brood about.

Then add your own view. Taking feedback well isn’t the same as absorbing it in silence. You hold information the other person doesn’t — what you were trying to do, what constraints you were under — and saying so is part of the conversation, not a challenge to it.

Then reflect on it later, on your own. Your first reaction to criticism is rarely your considered one, and a day’s distance usually changes what you make of it.

There’s a standard worth applying while you do all that. Across the HR sources that cover this, the quality bar for feedback is consistent: timely, specific, clear, actionable, and tied to what your role expects rather than to who you are. Feedback that misses that bar isn’t a verdict you have to swallow — it’s an unfinished sentence, and the repair is a question. What would that look like done well?

It also helps to know what you think before someone else tells you. Having your own read on where you’re strong and where you’re not turns outside feedback into a second data point rather than the only one, which makes it far easier to weigh — so it’s worth a few minutes to get your own read first.

The skills that turn feedback into something useful

Notice how little of the above was about feedback itself. Most of it was about what happens in the few seconds after it arrives, and what you do in the days that follow. Those are habits, and habits sit inside particular skills.

Building Self-Awareness is the one feedback runs on. There are things about your work that you cannot see from inside your own head, and other people’s observations are the only route to them. The practical version isn’t deep introspection — it’s the receiving sequence itself: take it in, add what you know, think about it again once the sting has worn off. It also includes the move most people skip, which is asking for specific, future-focused advice instead of waiting for the annual verdict to arrive.

Communication is what you need on the giving side, and you’ll be there sooner than you expect — a peer review, a comment on a teammate’s draft, a retro. Giving feedback belongs with the genuinely tricky conversations, and the same principles apply: lead with the main point, be clear and direct rather than gentle to the point of vagueness, keep it short, and choose a conversation over a written message when the subject is sensitive. Feedback nobody can decode isn’t kind — it’s just unusable.

Working with Your Manager decides how much feedback you get at all. Most of it comes through one channel, and you have more say over that channel than it feels like — raising the question in your regular one-on-ones rather than waiting for the review, preparing before you go in, keeping it pointed at what happens next rather than relitigating what already happened, and saying plainly what you want to get better at.

Which of the three would repay your attention first isn’t something reading can settle. That’s what the free Job Skills Test is for: it runs across twelve work skills, these three among them, and lets you see where each one stands right now. None of the twelve is a trait you either have or don’t — anywhere you come out low is simply something you haven’t learned yet.

You may already recognize parts of this. If you’ve ever gone back to a piece of criticism a day later and found it more useful than it felt at the time, you have done the reflection step without needing a name for it.

What changes with practice isn’t how much criticism stings. It’s how fast you can sort it — which type this is, what it’s asking of you, whether it clears the bar or needs a follow-up question. That’s a habit you build rather than a temperament you’re born with, and you can build it while staying exactly who you are. It also counts for more over time, not less: the further along you get, the more feedback arrives compressed, indirect, or simply assumed, with nobody left to unpack it.

Which makes it worth knowing now which parts of this you already handle well. You’ve started on that already, by looking it up before your next review rather than after it.

Find out where your own skills stand

The one thing an article can’t tell you is which of these you’re already good at. The free Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of the twelve work skills that shape how people get on at work — including how you take feedback in, how clearly you give it, and how you work with your manager. It shows where each of yours currently sits, so you can put your attention on the two or three that would change the most.

Take the skills test

Free, seven minutes, and it covers all twelve skills — not just the three above.