Coaching practices for Marshall Goldsmith Feedback

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Marshall Goldsmith Feedback, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I tend to bite my tongue in the moment and save things up for the formal review, and then I dump weeks of accumulated issues on someone all at once
• I’m hitting every productivity target and somehow feeling emptier by the week
• My feedback conversations end with the person nodding and saying "yeah, makes sense, got it"
• I deliver my feedback as a finished verdict and then the other person just sits there closed off
• When someone does something genuinely great I just toss off a "nice work" and move on, and it barely registers

Practices that may help

1. The Morning Questions
   Marshall Goldsmith’s morning questions are a daily active question routine in which you score yourself each morning on whether you "did your best" to pursue specific values-based commitments the previous day. The practice reframes self-monitoring from passive measurement ("how did X go?") to active responsibility ("did I try?"), which research on active questions suggests produces greater engagement and honest self-assessment. The evidence base is practitioner-clinical; large-scale trials are limited.
2. Feedforward: Future-Focused Feedback That Actually Changes Behavior
   Feedforward, developed by executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, replaces backward-looking critique with forward-looking suggestions — asking "what ideas do you have for the future?" rather than "what did I do wrong?" The core claim is that people are more receptive to ideas about what they could do than to judgments about what they did. Evidence is primarily clinical and practitioner-based rather than from controlled trials.
3. Give feedback in the moment, not stockpiled for reviews
   Feedback accumulated for a periodic review arrives late and in bulk — neither helps.
   The Feedback Sandwich: Why It Doesn’t Work and What to Do Instead
4. Include a happiness question — not as an outcome goal but as a signal
   Add "Did I do my best to be happy today?" to the list — not as a target, but as a daily quality-of-life sensor.
   The Morning Questions
5. Close feedback by checking understanding, not agreement
   Ask "What did you take from that?" rather than "Do you agree?"
   The Feedback Sandwich: Why It Doesn’t Work and What to Do Instead
6. Invite a response after delivering SBI
   Close SBI by asking what the other person makes of it — not with a verdict.
   The SBI Feedback Model, Made Practical
7. Use SBI for positive feedback, not just correction
   Name the situation, behavior, and impact when someone does something right.
   The SBI Feedback Model, Made Practical
8. Make feedback specific and behavioral, not evaluative
   Describe what you observed, not what it says about the person.
   The Feedback Sandwich: Why It Doesn’t Work and What to Do Instead
9. The Feedback Sandwich: Why It Doesn’t Work and What to Do Instead
   The feedback sandwich (positive–negative–positive) is the dominant model for giving feedback in workplaces, but research and practitioner experience suggest it routinely fails: recipients either remember only the positive parts or dismiss the negative as softened insincerity. The practices below cover why it fails mechanistically and what specific alternatives are better supported.
10. Establish shared purpose before delivering critique
    Frame critique as help toward a shared goal, not an evaluation from above.
    The Feedback Sandwich: Why It Doesn’t Work and What to Do Instead

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.