How to Give Feedback When Balls Get Dropped

It happened again. A deliverable didn't land. A deadline came and went. Someone on your leadership team said they'd do something, and they didn't.

Now you're stuck in the worst part of being a leader: figuring out what to say about it.

Most leaders handle this badly. Not because they're bad leaders, but because nobody taught them how to have this conversation well. So they default to one of two modes: they either let it slide and quietly resent it, or they come in hot and torch the relationship.

Neither works.

Here's how to handle it so the ball stops getting dropped, and your team actually gets stronger in the process.

Your team wants this conversation more than you do

This might surprise you: in a study of over 2,500 employees across industries, Zenger and Folkman found that 57% of people actually *prefer* corrective feedback over praise. And 72% said their performance would improve if their manager gave them more of it.

The uncomfortable truth? Your team isn't dreading the feedback conversation nearly as much as you are. Most leaders avoid giving corrective feedback, not because it's unwelcome, but because it feels awkward to deliver. Meanwhile, your people are sitting there wondering if anyone noticed.

When you say nothing about a missed commitment, you're not being kind. You're communicating that the commitment didn't matter. And once that message lands, expect more missed commitments.

The real reason silence is deadly

Amy Edmondson at Harvard has spent decades studying teams that fail, and teams that don't. Her research uncovered a counterintuitive finding: the best hospital teams *reported more errors*, not fewer. They didn't make more mistakes. They were just willing to talk about them.

Teams with high psychological safety surface problems early. Teams without it bury them until it's too late.

When you skip the feedback conversation after a dropped ball, you're not preserving psychological safety. You're destroying it. Because what you're actually signaling is: *we don't talk about what went wrong here.* And that silence compounds. People stop flagging risks. They stop raising their hand when they're falling behind. They stop telling you the truth.

The ball doesn't just get dropped once. It gets dropped repeatedly, in the dark, where nobody can see it coming.

Name the behavior, not the person

Here's where most leaders blow it. They make the feedback about character instead of conduct.

"You're not reliable" is character. It triggers defensiveness and goes nowhere.

"The board deck was due Thursday and it didn't arrive until Monday, which meant I had to brief the investors without the latest numbers" is conduct. It's specific. It's factual. And it gives the other person something they can actually change.

The Center for Creative Leadership developed a simple framework for this called SBI: Situation, Behavior, Impact.

Situation: When and where did it happen? ("In last week's leadership sync...")

Behavior: What specifically did the person do or not do? ("...you committed to having the pricing analysis done by Friday, and it wasn't delivered.")

Impact: What was the downstream effect? ("That meant the sales team went into their Monday calls without updated numbers, and we lost momentum on two deals.")

That's it. No editorializing. No psychoanalysis. No "I feel like you don't take this seriously." Just what happened and why it mattered.

Have it fast

Feedback has a half-life. The longer you wait, the less useful it becomes.

If someone drops the ball on Tuesday and you bring it up the following Thursday, you've already lost. The context is stale. The other person has moved on. And now it feels like you've been stewing about it for nine days, which, to be fair, you probably have been.

The best feedback happens within 24 hours. Not because you need to pounce, but because the situation is still fresh for both of you. Details are clear. Emotions haven't had time to calcify into resentment.

Kim Scott, who led teams at Google and Apple before writing *Radical Candor*, puts it simply: care personally, challenge directly. You can be kind *and* clear at the same time. In fact, being unclear is actually unkind, because you're letting someone keep making a mistake they don't know they're making.

Ask before you assume

Here's the move that separates good leaders from great ones: after you name the behavior and impact, *shut up and ask what happened.*

"The analysis was due Friday and didn't arrive. That pushed back the whole sales kickoff prep. Can you walk me through what happened?"

Then listen. Actually listen.

Maybe they were drowning in three other commitments you didn't know about. Maybe they misunderstood the deadline. Maybe they hit a wall and were too embarrassed to say so.

Each of those root causes demands a completely different response. If you lead with assumptions, you'll solve the wrong problem every time.

Edmondson's research shows that in psychologically safe teams, people admit mistakes and surface obstacles *before* they become crises. But that only happens if you've demonstrated, through repeated behavior, that raising a flag early won't get them punished. Asking "what happened?" with genuine curiosity is how you build that muscle.

Fix the system, not just the person

If the same ball keeps getting dropped, the problem isn't the person. It's the process.

Ask yourself:

Was the commitment clear? Not "it would be great to get this done by Friday" clear. Actually clear, with a specific owner, a specific deliverable, and a specific deadline that both parties agreed to. The planning fallacy, first identified by Kahneman and Tversky, shows that people consistently underestimate how long things take. Vague commitments make this worse.

Was it visible? If the only record of a commitment is in someone's head or buried in meeting notes nobody reads, it's going to get lost. The Project Management Institute found that only 52% of projects finish on time. Visibility alone doesn't solve that, but invisibility guarantees failure.

Was there a check-in before the deadline? A quick "how's the pricing analysis coming?" three days before it's due gives someone a chance to course-correct, or to tell you they need help. Waiting until after the deadline to discover the problem is too late.

Did they have the capacity? Smart people will say yes to things they can't actually do, especially if they want to be seen as reliable. That's not a character flaw. It's human nature. Your job is to make it safe to say "I can't take that on right now."

The five-minute conversation

Here's what the actual conversation looks like, start to finish. It takes about five minutes.

Open with facts, not feelings. "Hey, I want to talk about the competitive analysis that was due Monday."

Name the impact. "We had a strategy session Tuesday and had to work off old data. That means we may need to revisit some of the decisions we made."

Ask what happened. "Can you walk me through what got in the way?"

Listen. (This is the hard part. Actually do it.)

Agree on what's next. "Going forward, if you're going to miss a deadline, I need you to flag it at least 48 hours early so we can adjust. Can we agree on that?"

Close clean. "I know you've got a lot on your plate. I'm not questioning your effort. I need to be able to count on commitments landing when they're supposed to."

That's it. No sandwich method. No awkward compliment before the criticism. No 45-minute conversation that leaves both people exhausted. Just clarity, curiosity, and a clear path forward.

Make it normal

The teams that execute best aren't the ones that never drop balls. They're the ones that catch them fastest.

That only happens when talking about missed commitments is a normal part of how you operate, not a special event that feels like being called to the principal's office.

Build it into your weekly rhythm. Review commitments. Mark what's done, what's at risk, and what slipped. Talk about it like adults. Make the conversation boring. Because when accountability is boring, it means it's working.

The goal isn't to create a culture of blame. It's to create a culture where commitments mean something, where saying "I'll have it done by Friday" carries weight, and where saying "I'm behind and need help" is just as normal.

That's how high-performing teams actually work. Not through fear. Through follow-through.