Getting Honest Feedback as an Owner: Approaches That Work

Why do owners so rarely get honest feedback?

An owner asks in the team meeting whether anyone has suggestions for improvement. Silence, someone praises the last company outing, then the agenda moves on. Two weeks later an experienced employee resigns and, in her exit conversation, names reasons that must have been known for months. Just not to the owner.

The pattern has a simple cause. Employees depend on the owner for their income, their tasks, and their development. Criticizing the owner is a risk; staying silent is not. The more power someone has in a business, the more filtered the news that reaches them. This guide answers one question: How does an owner get honest feedback, and what must they do so that it makes a difference?

To answer it, we first clarify the terms and introduce the Johari Window as a thinking model. Then come the research findings on feedback to managers, two views on where good feedback comes from, and a method for everyday use.

Feedback, criticism, speaking up: what is meant?

Feedback here means any response about how your own behavior affects others. It differs from criticism because it describes rather than judges. And it differs from speaking up, through which employees point out a problem in the business. Research calls raising problems and suggestions with superiors employee voice. The two are connected: an employee who contradicts the owner is also giving them feedback.

For employees to dare this, a certain climate is needed. Edmondson (1999) describes psychological safety as a team's shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, such as admitting a mistake, asking a question, or disagreeing. The article Learning from Bad Decisions shows why this climate arises above all from what actually happens after a mistake.

The thinking model: the Johari Window

In 1955 the psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham presented a simple model of self-perception and perception by others, named the Johari Window after their first names. It divides everything that can be known about a person into four fields. Two questions decide: Do I know it myself? Do others know it?

For owners, the second field is the most expensive. The blind spot contains behavior the team experiences daily but nobody talks about. Feedback is the only means of shrinking it. The third field shows the opposite direction: an owner who discloses his own doubts and mistakes makes it easier for others to tell him something too.

An everyday analogy helps. A car has a blind spot that no mirror shows. No driver would claim there is nothing there just because they see nothing. They turn their head or rely on a passenger. An owner's blind spot works the same way. Hearing nothing does not mean there is nothing to hear.

Silence in the team is not agreement. It is the answer to a question nobody asked.

What research shows about feedback to managers

In a meta-analysis, Smither, London, and Reilly (2005) analyzed 24 longitudinal studies in which managers received feedback from several directions and were rated again later. The result is sobering. For ratings by their own employees, 19 of 21 effects were positive, but the mean effect corrected for measurement error was only d = 0.15. For peers it was 0.05, for supervisors also 0.15. Self-ratings hardly changed at all.

But the authors also show when feedback achieves more. Improvement is more likely when the feedback makes a need for change clear, when the recipient reacts positively, believes change is possible, and sets concrete goals. Effects were larger when feedback served development only and was not also used for appraisal or pay.

The most important finding for owners comes from a long-term study reported by Smither and colleagues. Walker and Smither (1999) followed 252 managers over five annual feedback rounds. Managers who then discussed their results with their employees improved more than the others. And they improved more in the years in which they discussed the results than in years when they did not.

Two more recent studies explain why employees stay silent. In several experiments and a field study, Jiang, Gong, Dong, and colleagues (2025) found that supervisors with strongly critical thinking foster the belief among their employees that one may only speak up with solid data or finished solutions. Those who feel confident bring better proposals. Those who feel unsure stay silent more often. Li, Johnson, Lee, and colleagues (2025) showed that suggestions for improvement inspire managers more than warnings about problems. Warnings had an effect only on managers who think more in terms of the bigger picture.

The limits: the studies come mainly from larger organizations with formal feedback programs. In small businesses, dependence on the owner is more direct, and anonymous feedback is harder because everyone recognizes everyone. The direction of the findings is still likely to carry over.

Two views: feedback from the team or from outside?

The first view sees the team as the most important source. Nobody experiences the owner as often and as closely as their employees. Their feedback concerns precisely the behavior that shapes everyday work. The findings of Walker and Smither support this view: the conversation with your own team has the strongest effect.

The second view is more skeptical. Because employees are dependent, their feedback is filtered, and the smaller the business, the more so. People who have nothing to fear from the owner judge more honestly: an advisory board, a mentor, other entrepreneurs, customers. How an advisory board should be composed so that it disagrees is described in the article Advisory Boards in the Mittelstand. What a mentor can do is shown in Mentoring for Entrepreneurs.

I consider both sources necessary, but for different questions. Outsiders see strategy, numbers, and big decisions more clearly. Only those who experience it every day know the blind spot in leadership behavior. If you only ask outside, you avoid the more uncomfortable conversation at home. If you only ask inside, you get the filtered version. The method in the next section follows from this.

The Three-Channel Method: team, customers, outsiders

The Three-Channel Method gathers feedback from three directions every six months and closes each round with a response to everyone who said something. The last step is the most important, because it decides whether there will be honest answers again in the next round.

1. Ask a concrete question

   Do not ask “What can I do better?” but, for example: “What should I do differently in meetings?” or “Which of my decisions made your work harder last quarter?” Concrete questions get concrete answers.

2. Make it easier

   Offer a written route alongside the conversation, and for teams of about eight or more, an anonymous one too. In conversation, a trusted person who collects feedback and passes it on in bundled form helps.

3. Include customers

   Ask two or three important customers what makes working with you personally easier or harder. What a structured customer round looks like is described in the article Setting Up a Customer Advisory Board.

4. Ask outsiders

   Present a major decision or your annual plan to an advisory board, mentor, or peer group and ask them to look for weaknesses.

5. Listen without defending

   Say thank you, ask for examples, do not explain yourself. If you immediately justify why something is the way it is, you signal that feedback is not welcome.

6. Respond and report back

   Within two weeks, share what you heard, what you will change and what not, with reasons. This is the form of follow-up conversation that made the difference in the study by Walker and Smither.

What makes feedback worthless

Three mistakes devalue any feedback round. The first is justifying yourself the moment you receive feedback. It forces the other person to defend themselves against the owner. The second is a question without consequences: if you gather feedback and report nothing back, you teach the team that honesty achieves nothing. The third is mixing it with appraisal. If an employee has to fear that their criticism will flow into the next pay round, they become cautious. The meta-analysis by Smither and colleagues found larger effects when feedback served development only.

Added to this is a thinking error described in the article Cognitive Biases of Business Owners: confirmation bias. People receiving feedback preferentially hear what they already believe. A simple countermeasure is to write down the three most uncomfortable pieces of feedback before you decide what to change. How to give feedback in your own team is described in Feedback in Sales Teams.

The next step

• Formulate a concrete question about your own behavior to ask in the next team meeting.
• Appoint a trusted person who also receives feedback in writing and passes it on in bundled form.
• Write to two customers and ask for a short conversation about working with you.
• Put a date in your calendar two weeks after the round on which you report to the team what you will change.
• Write down the three most uncomfortable pieces of feedback before you decide on consequences.

Conclusion: how does an owner get honest feedback?

The question was
an owner gets honest feedback and what they must do so that it makes a difference. The answer has two parts. They get honest feedback by asking concretely, making it easy, and using several channels, because each channel has its own distortion. It only becomes effective through what happens afterwards.

The research is clear here. Feedback alone achieves little. The conversation about the feedback achieves more. For owners this means: the blind spot does not shrink through questions, but through answers.