Most feedback conversations go sideways in the three seconds after the feedback lands, well before anyone has had a chance to think about whether the content itself was even right. You may have felt this yourself: someone tells you something about your work that you didn’t ask to hear, and before you’ve even processed the content, your body has already decided how to react– maybe defensively, perhaps launching into an explanation, or maybe just shutting down entirely. That reaction is very common. Once you and your teammates are able to recognize how feedback is received in the moment, you can adjust to respond to the various ways people react, as opposed to getting derailed by it every time.
That pattern has a name: the feedback staircase.
The Five Steps
Consider an actual staircase, as illustrated above, with five steps from bottom to top.
- Reject. The feedback doesn’t match how you see yourself or your work, so your first instinct is to deny it outright, saying something like “that’s not what happened” or “I don’t think that’s true.”
- Defend. You’re still resisting the feedback, but now you’re building a case, justifying your actions, arguing your side, or pointing to reasons why the criticism doesn’t hold up.
- Explain. You start giving context, hoping that if the other person understands your reasoning, they’ll change their perspective. This step can look like progress simply because you’re engaging, even though you might still be trying to make the feedback disappear rather than actually taking it in.
- Understand. You start hearing what’s being said, even when it’s uncomfortable to hear.
- Change. You act on the feedback in a productive way, integrating the learning into your existing skillset.
It’s important to remember that you can’t skip the bottom steps by being more mature or more professional. Most everyone tends to start off lower on the staircase when the feedback stings, which means the climb takes a minute for even the most self-aware among us.
Why receiving feedback well is just as important as giving it
Most feedback education focuses on the person giving feedback, teaching you to use “I” statements and be specific. While this is useful, there isn’t usually as much focus on what to do if you are the one receiving the feedback, especially when that feedback is critical. Common feedback education fails to address the moment when the receiver is standing on step one or two of the staircase, while the giver keeps talking as though they’ve already reached step five. That mismatch, rather than any bad intent on either side, is usually where the drama comes from.
This is the piece we come back to in our work with teams: building a supportive culture has less to do with avoiding hard conversations and everything to do with giving people a shared way to move through them together. When you can understand and even empathize with the step someone’s on, you can adjust so that the whole conversation can change shape, no matter what your role is. You stop taking the reaction personally or pushing harder when someone’s defending (which almost always backfires), and you start giving people room to move up the staircase at their own pace rather than expecting them to arrive at the moment of understanding you want or expect them to.
How to use this as the person giving feedback
The most useful thing you can do as the giver is to pay attention and watch for the reaction. If someone’s defending or explaining, treat that as your cue to slow down, acknowledge what they’re feeling, and let the moment breathe, rather than repeating your point more forcefully.
A useful move here is simply naming what you’re noticing without judgment, something like “I can see this is landing hard, take your time,” a single sentence that often does more to help someone climb the staircase than any amount of additional evidence would.
How to use this as the person receiving feedback
The most useful skill here is something we like to refer to as “notice and name.” You want to tap in to your own emotions and reactions, noticing when you’re rejecting or defending what you’re hearing. Next, name that reaction internally. This can be as simple as thinking to yourself, “I’m on step two right now.” That small act of checking in with yourself can create just enough distance to keep you climbing rather than settling in on step two for the rest of the conversation. If the feedback provider is also familiar with the feedback staircase model, it may also be helpful to name what’s going on externally, so that the other person is aware of what you’re thinking or feeling.
It also helps to remember that feedback is information you get to weigh and decide what to do with once you actually understand it. This decision is a great deal easier to make from step four than it ever is from step one.
Why this belongs in your change readiness work
A team’s ability to hear and process hard feedback well turns out to be one of the clearest predictors of how it will handle change more broadly: if people get stuck at Defend when a manager flags a performance gap, they’ll likely get stuck at Defend again when the organization announces a restructure, rolls out a new tool, or shifts strategy. This makes the staircase far more than a mere feedback model, since it also works as a diagnostic for how much resistance you should expect the next time you ask people to do something differently.
This is exactly why we treat feedback fluency as foundational to change readiness in our own work. Teams that learn to name their own reactions and keep climbing the staircase tend to build change fluency right alongside it, since both skills come down to the same underlying move, staying in the conversation long enough to get past the instinct to self-protect.
Practical ways to introduce this to your team
Here are a few low-lift ways to bring in the feedback staircase:
- Review it in a team meeting before you use it in the moment. Spend ten minutes talking through the five steps together so everyone has the same shared language before it gets used in a real feedback conversation.
- Draw it, literally, sketching the staircase on a whiteboard or slide during a workshop (visuals tend to stick better than lists).
- Model naming your own step out loud before you ask anyone else to do it, since a manager saying “I think I just landed on Defend, give me a second” can help support the conditions for a safe and brave team environment.
- Build it into 1:1 templates, adding a simple prompt like “where did you land on the staircase during any feedback” to recurring check-ins so it becomes a shared reference point.
- Use it after the fact too, debriefing a tense conversation later by asking “where do you think we each were on the staircase during that exchange?” This takes the heat out of the conversation and turns it into a genuine learning moment for both people.
- Frame it as a no-fault model from the start, making it clear that landing on Reject or Defend is simply the starting point everyone begins from, which on its own reduces the shame that often keeps people stuck lower on the staircase longer than they need to be.
Feedback fluency works like a muscle that gets built through repetition, and the feedback staircase gives your team a shared, low-drama way to keep building it, one conversation at a time.