The Feedback Framework I Wish I’d Learned Sooner

Early in my career I walked into an annual performance review and saw that my manager had the largest, fakest grin on his face I’d ever seen.

I immediately knew I was screwed.

He proceeded to tell me I was going to love this meeting because he considered tough feedback “a gift”—and he had a lot of gifts to bestow that day.

I was young and inexperienced, so I’m sure the feedback was valid, but I didn’t hear a word of it. I just mirrored his ridiculous faux-positivity with a giant grin of my own. I nodded along and agreed with everything he said, but inside I was fuming.

Looking back, I should probably cut him some slack. The only thing harder than hearing difficult feedback is delivering it.

Not long after this fateful review, I became a manager myself. And while I never said anything as cringe as, “You’re going to love these feedback gifts I’m about to give you,” I was pretty terrible at delivering feedback.

For years, I mostly relied on the dreaded compliment sandwich:

Hey, love your energy. Just a small thing—your report was late again. But seriously, great job jumping into the project!

This is patronizing, everyone sees through it, and worst of all, it dilutes the message. Instead of clarity, you create confusion. Are they doing well? Are they in trouble? Should they change something, or not?

Eventually, a (much better) manager of mine gave me a real gift: a simple framework for clearer, more useful feedback called STAR/AR.

You may have seen the STAR format in interview prep. It stands for:

• Situation

• Task

• Action

• Result

It’s a way to structure what someone did and what happened because of it.

In the meeting yesterday (Situation), I asked you to present client success results (Task). You spoke off the cuff and didn’t show any metrics (Action), which made the results feel squishy and led to confusion from leadership (Result).

That kind of feedback is harder to misinterpret, easier to learn from, and stripped of emotional hedging.

What makes it even more valuable is the AR—an Alternative Action + Result.

Next time, prep a one-pager or slide with 2-3 hard metrics (Alternative Action). That gives leadership something to trust and positions you as more dialed-in (Alternative Result).

STAR/AR strips out the fluff. No padding, no vague praise, no guesswork. Just clarity.

Here’s what happened. Here’s the effect. Here’s what better could look like.

What I love most about this tool is how simple it is. You can use it on the fly in a hallway chat, a Slack message, or a quick 1:1. For higher stakes moments you can write it out if it helps, but most of the time, you won’t need to.

It works just as well on vague compliments too.

“You’ve really stepped up lately” doesn’t tell someone what they did or how to repeat it. But a quick STAR turns praise into a blueprint:

Last week when you handled the client escalation (Situation) and offered two clear paths forward (Action), it kept the deal on track (Result).

Most of us treat feedback like we’re tiptoeing through a minefield. We save it for performance reviews. Or we skip it altogether—not because we don’t care, but because we’re afraid it’ll come out wrong or cause friction we don’t want to manage.

But your team is starving for direction.

Give it to them with STAR/AR.