Why Positive Feedback Comes First
The Trust Foundation for Every Feedback Conversation
Experience Level: Developing Leaders (1-2 years)
Article 2 of 8 in the Mastering Feedback Conversations Learning Path
Reading time: 10 minutes
Three weeks into her first supervisor role, Mariah was drowning.
Her team’s quality numbers were slipping, safety protocols were getting sloppy, and productivity was down 8% from the previous month. She knew she needed to address these issues—fast. So she did what felt natural: she started having tough conversations. She pulled people aside to discuss missed targets, called out safety violations in the moment, and sent detailed emails about performance expectations.
Within two weeks, something strange happened. People stopped making eye contact with her. Team members who used to ask questions just nodded and walked away. When she approached the pack stations, conversations stopped. Her best performer requested a transfer to another shift.
Mariah was technically right about every performance issue she’d identified. But she’d made a critical mistake—she’d tried to withdraw from a trust account she’d never made deposits into.
The Trust Account That Determines Everything
Every feedback relationship works like a bank account. Positive feedback represents deposits. Constructive feedback represents withdrawals. And here’s the rule that many new managers learn the hard way: you can’t withdraw what you haven’t deposited.
This isn’t some soft-skills metaphor. It’s the operational reality of how feedback works on the floor.
In manufacturing and warehouse environments, this dynamic becomes even more pronounced. The constant pressure of metrics, the visibility of performance data, and the urgency of production goals create an atmosphere where everything feels like criticism. When we’re tracking cycle times, error rates, and productivity metrics by the hour, team members become hyper-alert to negative feedback. They’re already aware that someone is always watching the numbers.
When you only show up to point out problems, you create a deficit trust account. Every interaction becomes transactional. Every conversation triggers defensiveness. And ironically, the feedback you give—even when it’s accurate and necessary—loses its power to drive improvement.
I learned this during my career at Amazon. Like Mariah, I started by focusing almost exclusively on corrective feedback. My logic was simple: if something’s working, people don’t need to hear about it. If something’s broken, that’s when I step in. Seemed efficient.
What actually happened was that people started hiding problems instead of solving them. They stopped taking initiative because initiative meant risk, and risk meant I might show up with feedback. My best problem-solvers became my most hesitant team members.
The shift came when a seasoned manager pulled me aside and said, in essence, “Your team thinks you only notice them when they screw up. You’re managing from a deficit. Start making deposits.”
That conversation changed my approach to feedback completely—and it’s exactly the kind of practical, operations-focused insight I share each week in Leadership Lessons. If you want frameworks like this delivered straight to your inbox. Every week, I’ll send one article with immediately actionable strategies for manufacturing and warehouse leaders.
The Three Psychological Reasons Positive Feedback Must Come First
Recognition Activates Receptivity
Brain research shows something fascinating: people are more receptive to growth feedback after recognition. When someone receives genuine acknowledgment, their threat response diminishes. They shift from defensive to open. From protecting to learning.
Think about the last time you received unexpected recognition. Your guard came down, didn’t it? You felt more generous, more willing to consider other perspectives, more open to suggestions. That’s not coincidence—that’s neurochemistry.
The opposite happens with criticism-first approaches. When your primary experience with your manager is corrective feedback, your brain learns to associate their presence with threat. The moment they approach, your defenses activate. You’re already formulating explanations before they’ve finished describing the problem.
During my time managing operations at Amazon, I noticed a clear pattern. Team members (at any level) who received regular positive feedback were much more likely to ask for coaching when they were struggling. They didn’t wait for me to notice problems—they brought them to me. Why? Because they’d learned that feedback conversations were about growth, not punishment—a shift directly connected to building the psychological safety I explored in Creating a Culture of Openness and Honesty.
The key pattern here is simple but powerful: when people know you see their strengths, they trust that you’re trying to help them improve rather than documenting their failures for some future disciplinary action.
Positive Feedback Establishes Credibility
Here’s what team members think about managers who only show up with criticism: “You don’t actually know what I do. You only appear when something’s wrong.”
And honestly? They’re often right.
It’s easy to spot problems from metrics dashboards and exception reports. It takes actual attention to notice what’s working. When you can reference specific moments of excellence—the way someone handled a difficult situation, the extra effort they put in during a critical period, the clever workaround they developed—you prove you’re paying attention to the work itself, not just the numbers.
This distinction matters more than most new managers realize. Team members can tell the difference between a manager who’s present and a manager who’s reviewing reports. Recognition of specific behaviors proves presence. Criticism of outcomes without context suggests absence.
When I made recognition a deliberate priority—catching three to four specific positive behaviors per shift—something shifted within about a month. When I did need to address performance issues, people actually listened. They didn’t immediately get defensive or shut down. Why? Because I’d already proven I understood their work and noticed their effort.
The recognition had given me credibility. The criticism that followed landed as coaching instead of judgment.
Positive Feedback Creates the Pattern for Effective Feedback
Here’s something else most managers miss: how you deliver positive feedback teaches your team what good feedback sounds like.
When you consistently deliver well-structured recognition—specific observations focused on behaviors with clear impact—you’re modeling the framework that all feedback should follow. You’re showing what “specific” actually means. You’re demonstrating the difference between personality-based comments and behavior-based observations. You’re teaching the rhythm and tone of developmental conversations.
This matters because by the time you need to deliver constructive feedback, the format is already familiar. Your team has experienced dozens of brief, specific, behavior-focused conversations. They understand the structure. They recognize the tone. They know this is about growth, not judgment.
The only thing that changes is the content.
I saw this play out clearly when I started training new managers across Amazon’s network. Managers who built strong positive feedback habits found that their constructive conversations went smoothly about 80% of the time. Managers who only gave feedback when problems arose struggled with defensiveness and pushback in nearly every critical conversation.
The difference wasn’t in how they delivered the criticism. It was in whether they’d laid the groundwork through consistent recognition.
The Sequence That Actually Works
The wrong approach: waiting until you “have to” give feedback, then leading with problems.
The right approach: building a consistent rhythm of recognition that makes constructive feedback feel like part of an ongoing development conversation.
Research on effective management—and my experience training managers across 83 Amazon facilities—suggests maintaining a ratio of roughly 3:1 or 4:1 positive to constructive feedback. That’s three to four specific recognitions for every corrective conversation. This ratio maintains trust while still driving improvement.
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
Weeks 1-2 as a new manager: Focus almost exclusively on positive feedback. Your goal is to establish yourself as someone who notices and values good work. You’re making deposits with everyone on your team.
Week 3 and beyond: Maintain your rhythm of regular positive feedback while beginning to introduce constructive conversations. The key word here is “maintain”—the positive feedback doesn’t stop when you start addressing problems.
The critical pattern: Never let more than two to three positive feedback instances pass before addressing a performance concern with any individual. If you’ve given someone three specific recognitions in the past week, you’ve built enough trust equity to have a constructive conversation that will land as coaching rather than criticism.
This isn’t about sandwiching criticism between compliments—that technique everyone sees through. This is about establishing a foundational relationship where feedback flows in both directions consistently, and the positive recognition outnumbers the corrective guidance by a clear margin.
You’re building a feedback culture where conversations about performance feel normal, expected, and growth-oriented rather than rare, surprising, and threatening.
As I explored in Positive Feedback: Recognize What’s Going Right, specific recognition isn’t just about making people feel good—it’s about clearly communicating what excellence looks like in your operation. And as you’ll see in the next article in this path, that foundation makes delivering constructive feedback dramatically more effective.
This feedback foundation is one of eight essential capabilities I cover in Leading From the Floor. The book walks through the complete system for building trust, delivering effective feedback, making operational decisions, and developing your team—all grounded in real experience. If you want the comprehensive playbook, you can find it here.
From Theory to Action
1. Start Immediately with Positive Focus
Identify three team members to give specific positive feedback to this week—before addressing any performance concerns with anyone. Your goal is to practice the recognition skill in isolation before combining it with constructive feedback. Choose team members across different performance levels. Even your struggling performers are doing something well that deserves recognition.
2. Track Your Feedback Ratio
For the next two weeks, keep a simple tally. Every time you give feedback—positive or constructive—make a mark in the appropriate column. At the end of each week, calculate your ratio. If you’re not at least 3:1 positive to constructive, you’re managing from a deficit. Adjust accordingly before the pattern becomes your reputation.
3. Build Recognition into Your Routine
Set three phone alarms during your shift—beginning, middle, and end. When the alarm goes off, deliberately pause and look for one specific positive behavior worth recognizing. This sounds mechanical, but it works. Within two weeks, you won’t need the reminders anymore. You’ll have trained your attention to notice excellence instead of just exceptions.
4. Practice Specificity with Positives
Use positive feedback as your training ground for the specific, behavioral approach you’ll need for constructive feedback. Each recognition should include three elements: the exact behavior you observed, the context where it happened, and the specific impact it created. This level of detail proves you’re paying attention and teaches you the skill you’ll need when addressing problems.
5. Review Before Criticizing
Before delivering any constructive feedback to a team member, pause and ask yourself: “When was the last time I specifically recognized something this person did well?” If you can’t remember a recent positive interaction, you need to wait. Find something worth recognizing first. This discipline prevents you from creating the deficit-account dynamic that undermines your effectiveness.
The Foundation That Changes Everything
Positive feedback isn’t the warm-up act before the “real” feedback. It’s not optional fluff that precedes correction. It’s the foundation that makes every other feedback conversation possible.
Without this foundation, even your best-intentioned constructive feedback lands as criticism rather than development. With it, tough conversations become coaching moments. Performance issues become problems you solve together rather than conflicts you manage.
The managers I’ve trained who master this sequence—consistent recognition first, constructive feedback second—report something interesting: they give more critical feedback than they used to, but they receive less defensiveness. Their teams are more willing to hear hard truths because those truths come from someone who’s proven they notice and value good work.
Start building those trust deposits today. Make recognition your default mode. Prove to your team that you see what’s working before you point out what isn’t.
Your future feedback conversations—and your team’s willingness to hear what we need to tell them—depend on the deposits you make right now.
This is article 2 of 8 in the Mastering Feedback Conversations Learning Path
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Now that you understand why positive feedback must come first, we’ll explore how to deliver constructive feedback effectively in Delivering Constructive Criticism. You’ll learn how to structure tough conversations that drive improvement while maintaining the trust foundation you’ve built through consistent recognition.