Welcome back to Edition 9 of The Moat where I share honest stories on building culture, leading teams, and figuring it out as you go. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here.
One question this edition will answer: what does it actually cost you when the feedback stops flowing, and how do you know it's happening before it's too late?
A founder I respect told me something recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
They'd just lost someone from their leadership team. Not a messy exit. A quiet one. And in the farewell conversation, the person said: "I did try to raise this. A few times. I just didn't feel like it was going anywhere."
The founder had no idea. They thought the communication was good. They had regular one-on-ones, an open-door policy, retrospectives every quarter. All the structures were there. But somewhere in how those conversations were actually running, there was no real place for the hard thing to land.
That's what a broken feedback loop costs. Not a process failure. Not a culture score. A person who stopped trying to be heard, and eventually stopped staying.
That conversation is what made me start looking more carefully at how feedback actually moves, or doesn't, in the teams I work with and on my own.
The reason I call it a hidden metric is that it behaves like one. It has a baseline. It degrades. It sends early warning signals long before the obvious problems arrive. But almost nobody is watching it that way.
Think about what a healthy feedback culture looks like as something you could observe. Concerns travel upward, not sideways. The conversation in the meeting is the same as the conversation after it. The most junior person in the room sometimes says the most important thing, because they've seen it received well before.
Now think about what degradation looks like before it's obvious. People get slightly more careful with their words. Retrospectives produce the same observations every time. You start hearing about problems later than you should. Someone leaves and the exit conversation contains things you wish you'd heard a year ago.
Those are signals. And they're worth watching deliberately. The simplest diagnostic question: when did you last hear something from your team that genuinely surprised you? Not something you'd already privately agreed with. Something that shifted how you saw a situation.
If you can't remember, that's a reading on the metric.
The most common reason feedback conversations produce nothing useful is the question itself.
"How are we doing?" gets you "Good, busy." "Any feedback for me?" gets you a polite pause and then something about a process that could be slightly smoother. "Was that useful?" gets you yes or no, and neither tells you anything.
These questions sound like invitations but they ask the person to surface a problem they haven't been invited to name yet. So they say everything is fine, and the conversation ends, and both people move on having technically had the exchange.
What works better is specificity with room to move. "In the last month, was there a moment where you weren't sure how to raise something with me?" That question names the mechanism. It acknowledges that the barrier might not be the topic but the moment. It gives the person permission to describe an experience rather than issue a judgment.
The question has to give the person enough structure to know what you're asking, and enough space to answer honestly. Most of us reach for the easy question because a vague answer to a vague question means nobody had to be uncomfortable. But nothing changed either.
This is the section I find hardest to write, which probably means it's the most important.
When someone gives me feedback I disagree with, my instinct is to explain. To give context. To help them understand what was actually happening from my side. Sometimes that context is useful. But I've started noticing something uncomfortable: most of the time, what I'm doing in those moments is not receiving the feedback. I'm managing it.
There was a conversation last year where a team member told me that a particular client call had left them feeling like their input wasn't valued. My immediate internal response, before I'd said a word, was to run through the call in my head and build a case for why their read was off. I could think of three reasons their interpretation didn't match mine.
I said something like: "I hear you, that wasn't my intention, here's what I was thinking."
They nodded. The conversation moved on.
What I had done, effectively, was tell them that their experience was less accurate than my account of my own intentions. The instinct to explain comes from genuinely believing your intentions matter. But intentions and impact are two separate data points, and when you rush to defend one, you close the door on the other.
What I'm working on now is creating a pause between receiving and responding. Before I say anything that could sound like a rebuttal, I ask one question. "Can you tell me more about what that felt like from your side?" Not to gather evidence. To understand what they experienced before I say anything about what I was doing.
I won't claim it's solved. But the conversations where I've managed to do this have ended differently. The person leaves knowing their experience was heard, not just processed. And that changes whether they bring something to you again.
After the receiving comes the responding. And this is where most feedback conversations quietly die.
Someone shares something. You thank them. You say you'll think about it. From their perspective, nothing happens. They don't know if you acted on it, filed it away, or forgot about it. The loop stays open on their end, and the practice slowly loses its point. That's what trains people to stop sharing.
The thing that has made the biggest practical difference for me is closing the loop explicitly, every time. When someone gives me feedback, I try to tell them one of three things:
"I'm going to act on this." Specific, with a rough sense of when.
"I'm taking this into consideration." This means: I've heard it, it's informing how I'm thinking, but I can't promise a direct change right now.
"I hear you, and I'm not going to be able to act on this, and here's why." This one is the hardest to say. But it's the most respectful. The alternative is nodding, thanking someone, and quietly doing nothing.
This is what keeping the feedback metric alive actually looks like in practice. Not a survey. Not a quarterly review. A consistent habit of telling people what happened to what they said.
In Edition 2, I wrote about Work Shouldn't Feel Like an Audition, the idea that people do their best work when they're not performing for an audience. Feedback is where that gets tested most directly.
The quality of your decisions is only as good as the quality of the information feeding them. Every broken feedback loop is a slow leak in your decision-making. And unlike most business problems, this one is nearly invisible until it's already expensive.
The person who leaves. The client relationship that frays. The strategic call that seemed obvious in hindsight but was never surfaced at the time because the team assumed you already knew, or decided it wasn't worth saying.
A team that can be honest with you consistently, not just when they're brave enough, builds something that compounds. Each honest conversation makes the next one slightly easier. Over time that becomes an organisational muscle your competitors would have to start from scratch to replicate.
When did someone last give you feedback that you genuinely didn't expect? And what did you do with it?
