# Reviewing Your Manager: How to Give Honest Feedback Upward Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/reviewing-your-manager/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/reviewing-your-manager.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 Asked to review your manager? A step-by-step guide to gathering examples, framing feedback by impact, and saying what you mean without damaging relationships. ## Key facts - Title: Reviewing Your Manager: How to Give Honest Feedback Upward - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Communication, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: reviewing your manager - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/reviewing-your-manager/ ## What this page covers - Asked to review your manager? A step-by-step guide to gathering examples, framing feedback by impact, and saying what you mean without damaging relationships. - Practical guidance for reviewing your manager - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation The form is open, the box is blank, and the person you are being asked to assess is the person who decides what you work on next quarter. Reviewing your manager works best when you treat it as a report on effects rather than a verdict on a person. Gather two or three specific, recent situations, describe what happened and how it affected your work, say what you would have preferred instead, and include what you want them to keep doing. Deciding how much to say is the harder part, and there is a sensible way to work that out too. An upward review — an employee assessing their own manager — is a normal part of most performance cycles, and almost nobody is told how to do one. The steps below run in order, because each depends on the last: you cannot frame a point well before collecting the raw material, and you cannot judge how blunt to be before you know who will read it. ## Reviewing your manager, step by step ### 1. Find out what kind of review this is Before writing anything, establish what you are writing into. Upward reviews are not one format. According to Lattice, they range from informal feedback a manager asks for face-to-face, through a platform-based review cycle, up to a formal 360 conducted by an outside consultant. Those are very different exposures, and the question that matters is whether your text arrives with your name on it or aggregated with the team's. This is not a technicality. BetterUp notes that anonymous upward feedback tends to produce more honest responses, particularly the critical kind, because employees are unlikely to critique a manager's communication habits or leadership style with their name attached. That is a risk calculation rather than a character flaw: the same person genuinely writes a different review depending on the answer. If the tool does not say, ask whoever runs the cycle. Guides on the topic describe psychological safety — being able to speak up without punishment or humiliation — as the foundation the exercise sits on, and where you do not have much of it, the anonymous channel is the honest one. ### 2. Collect specific, recent examples Now gather raw material, before forming any opinion about how to phrase it. Open a note and list situations from the past few weeks or months where a decision, a message, or a meeting changed how your work went — the ones that helped as well as the ones that did not. CultureMonkey advises staying inside that recency window rather than reaching back six months. The reason is practical: old incidents are contestable on the facts, so raising one turns the review into a disagreement about what happened instead of a discussion about its effect. Recent ones are still fresh for both of you. Collect more than you will use. Writing from memory of the last fortnight produces a review of your current mood; a list shows which things actually recur, which is the only way to tell a bad week from a pattern. ### 3. Decide what should stay and what should change With the list in front of you, pick two or three points. A review is not an audit; a manager who receives eleven items will act on none. Sort your candidates into three buckets rather than two. There is the thing that should change, which is what everyone assumes an upward review is for. There is the thing they should keep doing, which Lattice argues is not optional if you want the review to produce change — a leader who only hears complaints has no idea what to protect. And there is a third, underused and often the safest genuinely useful thing you can contribute: something your manager believes is helpful but is quietly costing them time and energy. The status report nobody opens, the standing meeting that could be a message. Almost nobody tells them. If you are unsure whether a concern is yours to raise, the standard rubric behind most upward appraisal questions works as a scope test: communication, decision-making, leadership, support for people's development, and whether a manager gives usable feedback, avoids micromanaging, and keeps the team pointed at the right priorities. If your point lands inside those, it is fair to raise. ### 4. Write each point as behavior and impact This is where most reviews go wrong, and the fix is a single reframe: describe impact rather than intent. CultureMonkey's version is to say what happened and how it affected your work instead of assuming your manager meant to create a problem, and to ground the point in observable patterns rather than character judgments. The mechanism is arguability. "You never plan meetings properly" invites a counterexample and a defense, and the conversation becomes about whether "never" is fair. CultureMonkey's rewrite — that when meeting agendas change at the last minute, preparing effectively becomes difficult — cannot be argued with, because you are the only authority on your own work. Workhuman makes the same move on a harder one: instead of "you never listen to our ideas," an observation that team suggestions sometimes get little attention in meetings, plus the view that considering them more would improve how projects turn out. Both halves are doing work: the observed pattern without the stated benefit is still just a complaint with better manners. That reframe is a habit rather than a wording trick, which is why phrase banks help less than they promise — a borrowed sentence only lands if you observed something first. If you are not sure how naturally the habit comes to you, it takes a few minutes to get [a baseline on these habits](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), and knowing beforehand is a good deal easier than discovering it mid-review. ### 5. Say what you would have preferred instead Then, for each point, add the thing you wanted. Lattice's instruction is to be clear about what you would have liked to have had happen rather than what did happen, and CultureMonkey makes the same case from the other direction: feedback becomes actionable when it comes with a possible solution. This converts a complaint into a request. A described problem leaves your manager guessing at the remedy, and the guess is usually "this person is unhappy with me" — the least useful conclusion available. A stated preference gives them something to act on, and it is the least threatening form the same point can take. "More notice when the agenda changes" is a request. "Better planning" is a verdict. ### 6. Choose where the message actually lands Decide which points belong in the form and which belong in a conversation, because those channels do different jobs. Writing documents the pattern and, in an anonymous cycle, protects you. Talking handles anything sensitive, complex, or easy to misread — the sharper a point is, the more it benefits from a tone of voice attached to it. For most people the split lands the same way: pattern-level observations go in the form, and the one thing that genuinely matters gets said out loud in a one-on-one. When you raise it in person, ask first whether they are open to some feedback, and lead with the point from the keep-doing bucket. Neither is a manipulation; they give your manager a moment to switch from talking mode to listening mode, which is most of the reason feedback gets heard. ### 7. Close the loop in your next one-on-one Submitting is not the end, and this is the stage almost nothing covers. A review that is filed and never mentioned again reads, from the other side, as a one-off grievance. Referring to one point lightly in your next regular meeting signals it was meant constructively — and tells you whether anything is moving. The guidance is to keep this small: pick one practice, apply it in the next one-on-one, and let the honest exchanges accumulate rather than staging another big conversation. Some organizations formalize it with a short retrospective after each cycle. If two cycles pass and nothing shifts, that is worth knowing too. It is information about your manager rather than about your delivery, and the kind of thing you plan around rather than keep re-litigating. ## What makes reviewing your manager easier the second time Read back over those seven steps and little of the difficulty is in the writing. It sits in judging what belongs to your manager's job, choosing words that describe rather than accuse, and submitting the honest version instead of the comfortable one — three separate abilities, each of which gets easier with use. **Working with Your Manager** supplies the frame that makes the form answerable at all. Once you see the relationship as a partnership with a shared purpose — one where disagreeing is legitimate and your manager works under constraints you cannot see — the question stops being "am I allowed to say this?" and becomes the smaller "did this affect our work?" It also carries the guardrail the templates leave out: being honest upward is an investment in the relationship, while the version that travels sideways to colleagues instead is what damages it. **Communication** decides whether any of it lands. Lead with the main point, be clear and direct, keep it brief, and stay constructive wherever you can honestly be. It also governs the choice you made in step six: writing is for the record, while conversation is for anything sensitive, complex, or likely to be misread. Most of what looks like a wording problem in an upward review is really a medium problem. **Building Confidence** is what gets the honest version submitted rather than the softened one. It works by acting before the discomfort clears, not after: decide in advance exactly what you will write and when, and start with a single honest point rather than a full accounting. The anxiety does not have to go first. One review that included the thing that mattered becomes the evidence that the next one is survivable, which is how this particular fear actually shrinks. Since the working life ahead of you contains more than one manager, it is worth knowing [which ones to build next](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than guessing. The free Job Skills Test reads all three, along with **the nine others in the same set** — ordinary, learnable abilities that stay easy to underrate until a situation like this one puts one on show. ## Where this leaves you Some of this may already match how you work — the instinct to check the format before writing, or to note the thing your manager does well alongside the thing that does not. Those instincts are the useful part; the rest is practice you have not had yet rather than a different personality you would have to acquire, and the pieces worth working on will be yours to choose. It also compounds. The more your work depends on other people, the more of it runs through moments where someone has to say an uncomfortable thing accurately — a reason to start early rather than to worry, since this improves reliably with use. Looking up how to write this before writing it is already the part most people skip. So the only open question is which of these you already have. ## See where you stand Nothing here depends on doing anything today. But if you would like a clearer picture than your own estimate, the **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of the twelve work skills that shape situations like this one, the three above among them. It asks how you actually work, then gives you a plain read on where each of the twelve sits and which few would make the biggest difference to build next. It is ground most people cover eventually; this just skips the trial and error. **[Take the test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** Free, seven minutes, and your results appear as soon as you finish. ## 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? Asked to review your manager? A step-by-step guide to gathering examples, framing feedback by impact, and saying what you mean without damaging relationships. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Communication, Building Confidence. ### 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/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.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/reviewing-your-manager/ Preferred summary: "Asked to review your manager? A step-by-step guide to gathering examples, framing feedback by impact, and saying what you mean without damaging relationships." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.