Giving and Receiving Feedback in Performance Reviews
Watch as Glynne Steele and Kate Leto explore giving and receiving feedback for managers in performance reviews, and how to encourage honesty from their teams.
About this webinar
Performance review season is exactly when leaders most need honest feedback, and often when they're least likely to get it. Ask a leader if their reviews are honest conversations and most will say yes. Ask their team, and you'll often hear something different.
What makes people hold back or edit what they say in a performance review? Is it the rating sitting in the room, the pay decision riding on it, or something closer to home: the leader's own behaviour? And once you understand why people edit their feedback, what actually changes it? What does it take to make feedback useful rather than dreaded, and to structure a review conversation that builds trust instead of eroding it?
Watch our special guest, Kate Leto, Executive Coach for Technology Leaders, alongside our host Glynne Steele, Founder of DoThinkDo, as they explore why performance reviews so rarely deliver the honest conversation they're meant to be, what makes people filter or edit their feedback when the stakes are highest, and how leaders may be unknowingly contributing to the silence. They'll look at what's really happening in the room when a leader is also the person deciding someone's rating, pay or promotion, how to prepare for and structure that conversation so it builds trust rather than closing people down, and what changes when leaders learn to receive feedback as well as they give it.
Whether you're preparing for review season, trying to understand why your own reviews don't surface what you need to hear, or wanting to look honestly at your own part in the pattern, this session will provide practical, coachable techniques you can use in your very next review conversation.
We discuss:
- Why performance reviews so rarely deliver the honest conversation they're meant to be
- What makes people hold back or edit their feedback when their rating and pay are on the line
- The specific, often unconscious ways leaders shut down openness in review conversations
- Why the power imbalance built into a review makes trust harder to earn
- What it actually takes to make feedback useful rather than dreaded
- How to prepare for and structure a review conversation that builds trust instead of eroding it
- What changes when leaders learn to receive feedback as well as they give it
- Shifts leaders can make before, during and after the review to hear more of the truth
Kate Leto
Kate Leto is an executive coach and leadership team coach with over 25 years of experience spanning organisational design, digital transformation, and leadership development across startups, scaleups, and global enterprises.
She works with senior leaders and leadership teams — primarily in technology organisations — navigating growth, change, or transition, where old ways of leading no longer work. Her focus is on the challenges leaders are actually facing: complex decision-making, tension between stakeholders, shifting roles and authority. She pays particular attention to the unspoken dynamics that shape decisions and relationships at senior levels, and how these affect organisational performance over time.
Before coaching, Kate held senior leadership roles in high-growth technology companies. That practitioner experience continues to inform how she works with leaders under real pressure.
Kate is the author of Hiring Product Managers: Using Product EQ to Go Beyond Culture and Skills and is accredited through the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute and the International Coaching Federation (ICF).
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