Coach Jack Cohen has spent 11 years working with founders, executives, and managers — and the single most universal challenge across all of them is giving feedback. Most people self-describe as 'conflict-averse' and dread direct conversations. The rest are fed up with failed attempts to get people to change their behavior, often complaining: 'I keep giving them the same feedback, and they never change. Maybe they just don't want to.' Cohen's response: those givers are missing their own power to catalyze change by shifting how they frame the feedback.
His evidence-based framework, GAIN, names the four elements that effective feedback must include:
- G — Goal: what both parties ultimately care about
- A — Actions: what needs to change to get there
- I — Impacts: why it matters
- N — Next actions: who will do what by when
The central philosophical move embedded in the acronym: tell the recipient what they stand to gain from the feedback. When that's clear, feedback stops feeling like a confrontation and starts feeling like a gift. Conversely, when the giver leads with their own frustration or skips to actions without anchoring on a shared goal, they unintentionally elicit defensiveness — and then mistake that defensiveness for the recipient's stubbornness.
Cohen's case study with 'Laura,' a VP-BD reporting to a micromanaging founder, illustrates the framing flexibility: Laura led with the founder's actions and impacts (because that's what the founder cared about most in the moment), then bridged to a goal both shared, then closed on concrete next actions. The order of GAIN elements isn't fixed; the requirement is that all four show up. Skipping any of them is what most failed feedback attempts share in common.