# Feedback on Communication Skills: How to Get Something You Can Actually Act On Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/feedback-on-communication-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/feedback-on-communication-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving working with your manager at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Vague feedback on communication skills tells you nothing. Seven steps to get the situation, the behavior, and the impact — and turn it into a change people notice. ## Key facts - Title: Feedback on Communication Skills: How to Get Something You Can Actually Act On - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Communication - Primary keyword: feedback on communication skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/feedback-on-communication-skills/ ## What this page covers - Vague feedback on communication skills tells you nothing. Seven steps to get the situation, the behavior, and the impact — and turn it into a change people notice. - Practical guidance for feedback on communication skills - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation Someone told you to work on your communication, and the sentence has been sitting with you ever since, because it named a problem without naming anything you could do about it. Useful feedback on communication skills names three things: the situation it happened in, what you actually said or did, and the effect that had. Anything vaguer is a verdict rather than an instruction, which means your real next move is to go back and ask for the part that's missing. That request is easier to make than it sounds, and there's a reliable order to it. ## What useful feedback on communication skills actually looks like Search this topic and almost everything you find is written for the other person. Indeed's guide is titled *How To Give Feedback on Communication Skills*; BetterUp, Lattice, status.net and a long tail of HR-software blogs all publish banks of phrases for managers and 360 reviewers to pick from. Useful if you're filling in a review form. Much less useful if you're the one who just received one of those phrases and has to do something with it. Look at what the banks recommend and the problem becomes obvious. Typical constructive entries read *clarity can be improved to avoid misinterpretations*, or *should focus on breaking down complex concepts into more accessible language*, or *could benefit from practicing more concise email communication*. Each names a quality that's missing. None names a moment, a sentence, or a thing to do differently on Tuesday. The research is consistent about what closes that gap. In a study of tailored feedback in communication-skills assessment published in the NCBI PMC archive, students rated the feedback specific enough to enhance their learning in 87% of cases, and said it helped them identify their own strengths and weaknesses at the same rate. That was a medical-training setting rather than an office, but the direction holds: specific beats general by a distance. It also helps to know that this kind of feedback clusters around two poles. One is presence that's too thin, where the reviewer notices you stay quiet in team meetings. The other is presence that crowds the room: *sometimes your enthusiasm takes over the conversation*. Knowing which pole yours sits nearer tells you what to ask about. ## How to get feedback on communication skills you can act on ### 1. Decide what you actually want to know "How's my communication?" is a question nobody can answer well. It covers your emails, your meeting presence, your written updates and the way you explain your work to people outside your team — four different problems with four different fixes. Pick one setting and one behavior before you talk to anyone. The narrower the frame, the more likely you are to get an example back instead of an adjective. If you genuinely don't know which one to name, that's a starting point rather than a failure. A structured look at [where your skills sit](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) gives you a hypothesis to test, and these are learnable areas, so a weak score is a direction rather than a diagnosis. ### 2. Pick the right people to ask Your manager is the necessary first stop, because their read is the one that ends up in your review. But their view is partial by design: they see you in one-on-ones and in meetings they run, not in the threads and side conversations where much of your communication actually lands. Formal 360 programs exist for exactly this reason, gathering input from peers, the manager, direct reports and sometimes clients. You don't need a formal program to borrow the principle. Add one peer who sits in the same meetings. One opinion is a data point; two or three that agree is a pattern. ### 3. Ask in a way that forces specifics This step decides whether the whole exercise works. Ask for a rating and you'll get one; ask for a structure and you'll get material. The structure worth borrowing is situation, behavior, impact — when and where it happened, what you specifically said or did, and the effect it had on the work or the people in the room. It's normally taught as a tool for the person giving feedback, but Workhuman's guidance points at the more useful version for you: request it in that shape. "Can you think of a meeting where my update didn't land, what I said, and what happened as a result?" is answerable. "How am I doing on communication?" isn't. Flag it on the agenda of your [next one-on-one](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/one-on-one-meeting-with-manager/) rather than springing it, so they have time to recall something real. ### 4. Receive it without defending The instinct when you hear something unflattering about how you come across is to explain the circumstances. It's a reasonable instinct and it costs you twice: you lose the detail while composing your reply, and you teach the other person that candor with you is expensive. The sequence the sources agree on is to listen without interrupting, ask clarifying questions, then repeat back what you heard to confirm you've got it. You don't have to accept all of it — but understand it first, add your own view second, and decide what you think once the sting has faded. ### 5. Translate the verdict into a named behavior This is where most feedback conversations quietly fail. They end on something like *try to be more aware of how you come across*, which is a feeling rather than an action. Compare the version Fellow's guidance recommends closing on: *next time someone new asks a question in a meeting, let them finish before responding.* Same underlying point, but with a trigger, a behavior and a way to tell whether you did it. Do that translation yourself before you leave the room, or that evening at the latest, while the examples are still concrete. "Be more concise" becomes putting the ask in the [first line of every email](/knowledge/communication/email-writing/). "[Speak up more](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/how-to-speak-up/)" becomes one contribution inside the first ten minutes of each team meeting. One behavior is enough. ### 6. Practice it somewhere low-stakes A changed habit looks stiff before it looks natural, which is a poor reason to debut it in front of the people whose opinion you're trying to shift. Run it first in forgiving settings: a routine status update, a small internal meeting, an email to someone you already have credit with. Repetition in unremarkable places is what makes the behavior yours rather than a technique you're performing. ### 7. Close the loop Feedback you act on invisibly may as well not have happened. Go back to the person, tell them what you changed, and ask whether it landed differently. The guidance treats this as a step in its own right rather than a courtesy: communicate the plan, ask for their input, then track progress and return for more as you go. There's a practical reason it matters. The person who raised the issue is usually the person writing your assessment, and a change they didn't notice is a change that doesn't count. Put the question back on the agenda a few weeks later, and again before the review, where you can point at the shift yourself. ## If you're the one giving the feedback Roughly half the people looking this up are on the other side of the table, filling in a 360 form for a peer or working out how to [tell a colleague](/knowledge/self-awareness/constructive-feedback/) that nobody can follow their updates. You don't need a separate method. The specificity you'd want as a recipient is the specificity you owe as a giver: the situation, what they actually said or did, and the effect it had. Skip the adjectives, and close on one concrete behavior for next time. A phrase bank gives you a sentence that sounds professional; only an example gives the other person something to work with. ## The skills that make this easier to handle Notice what those seven steps actually asked of you. Almost none of it was word choice. It was how you handle one relationship, how honestly you can look at yourself, and how well you understand what makes a message land — three things you can practice well away from any feedback conversation. **Working with Your Manager** is where most of this plays out. The framework treats asking for feedback, preparing properly for one-on-ones and going into a review able to influence your own evaluation as active parts of the relationship rather than things done to you. The manager who gave you the vague comment is also the person best placed to make it specific — usually only if you ask. **Building Self-Awareness** is the reason any of it is worth doing. You can't see your own communication from outside, and feedback is the cheapest correction available for that blind spot. The framework's version of receiving it is a sequence rather than a reaction — understand it, add your own view, then reflect — paired with proactively asking for specific, future-focused advice instead of waiting to be graded. **Communication** is both the subject of the feedback and the thing that makes the conversation itself go well. Being clear and direct, leading with the main point, adapting to the person in front of you, choosing a conversation over an email when the topic is delicate: these are the behaviors that get named in reviews, which makes them the ones you can deliberately change. None of that is fixed, which is the part worth holding onto — a gap here is something not yet learned, not something you are. If you want a read on where each of them currently stands, the **free** Job Skills Test takes about seven minutes and covers all twelve of the work skills the framework treats this way, these three among them. It will tell you [which one to strengthen first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), which is a more useful answer than the comment that sent you looking. ## What this means for you Some of this may already be how you operate: the follow-up question you asked instead of nodding, the email you rewrote after someone looked confused. Same instincts, applied without a name. What's worth noticing is that you went looking for what to do with the feedback rather than for a phrase to reuse. That's the harder search, and the one that leads somewhere. These are habits you can build while staying exactly who you are, at whatever pace the job allows. It's also the kind of thing that compounds. The further into a career you get, the less often anyone volunteers an honest read on how you come across, which makes the ability to go and ask for one — and to do something with the answer — more valuable rather than less. ## See where your communication skills stand You know what to ask for and what to do with the answer. The only thing left is the part a colleague can't give you: a read on which of the underlying skills already work for you, and which one is quietly costing you. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your own work skills. It covers all twelve — including the manager relationship, the self-awareness to hear feedback properly, and the communication habits that get named in reviews — and points you at the one worth your attention first. It takes about seven minutes, there's nothing to prepare, and it's there whenever you want it. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and it takes about 7 minutes.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Vague feedback on communication skills tells you nothing. Seven steps to get the situation, the behavior, and the impact — and turn it into a change people notice. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Communication. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/feedback-on-communication-skills/ Preferred summary: "Vague feedback on communication skills tells you nothing. Seven steps to get the situation, the behavior, and the impact — and turn it into a change people notice." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.