Giving feedback is a core leadership skill. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to develop, direct, and accelerate the growth and success of the people who report to you. Get it right, and they’re better equipped not only to hit their goals but to exceed them.
There is no shortage of tools and frameworks to build your feedback muscles – from the BOFF model (behavior, outcomes, feelings, and future suggestions) to my own six-part feedback framework outlined in previous articles. But here’s the thing: how do you know you’re using these ideas consistently and effectively?
This was the question posed by Fabienne Astier, Global Head of Talent at Ipsen. In response, she and her team have developed an innovative way to capture, monitor, and evaluate leaders’ feedback practices in her organization using AI to transform unstructured text feedback into hard data.
As an approach, it’s pretty novel – essentially a way to give feedback on giving feedback in real time. And it’s opening eyes and driving valuable conversations at the top of the organization. Let’s get into it.
While Ipsen has a robust and long-established culture of feedback-giving, like many other big organizations, it has faced its challenges, says Astier. Chief among these is a “skew towards positivity.”
Ipsen managers are required to formally document end-of-year feedback on direct reports – a practice designed to ensure leadership accountability, but one that has also shed valuable light on a gap between intentions and outcomes. Reviewing these documents, Astier and her team found a discrepancy between what was being written and what was being said.
“Our managers tended to be a little vague and overly positive. And this would come to a head when there was a real performance issue, and someone ended up leaving. In the worst cases, we’d hear things like ‘if only I’d known,’ or ‘if only someone had told me…’ Of course, at that point, it’s too late.”
People want honest conversations. They genuinely want to know what they need to improve. But managers are afraid of causing hurt or offence, so they are just not clear enough, and they end up sending the wrong messages. The result is that people don’t grow as much as they could because they aren’t being given the areas for improvement.- Fabienne Astier, Global Head of Talent, Ipsen.
Astier knew they had to do some quality control. With the backing of CEO David Loew, her team put together an ambitious action plan; one that would not only capture feedback given by Ipsen’s leaders, but also systematically assess the quality of that feedback – assigning it a quality “score” – and making recommendations for improvement.
“We wanted to be as systematic as possible, but whatever we did, we wanted to be able to scale. So we knew we’d have to pilot this right at the very top of the organization, with our executive committee, because that was where change would need to happen first before it could cascade down through the company,” says Astier. “That’s why it was so critical to have this championed by David. We needed our CEO to stand behind the initiative, to spell out the importance of high-quality feedback and to model best practice in action.”
They also needed the technical resources to make it work, and this is where the Ipsen approach became truly innovative. Here’s what they did.
Astier and her team started by gathering all the end-of-year reviews written by Ipsen’s executive committee and running the material through a 360-degree assessment using BOFF criteria already integrated into the company’s iPeople software. This established the members’ baseline feedback capabilities and potential weak spots. Then they got granular.
Astier’s team developed a sophisticated evaluation tool that assesses the quality of performance review feedback on a scale of 1–20. These scores were aggregated against six core criteria that were determined using and adapting my six-part feedback framework:
Scoring feedback this way creates a dashboard allowing Ipsen’s leadership to see the quality of their feedback at a glance (figure 1). Their score immediately reveals how well they’re faring against agreed criteria – whether their feedback hits the mark in terms of meaning, effectiveness, and actionability, or not. And that’s not all.
For continuous feedback, the performance management system also leverages AI to offer users suggestions on how to improve their feedback, again drawing on the BOFF model and Ipsen’s in-house leadership framework (figure 2). This refers to the continuous feedback functionality available to all employees in iPeople, which is separate from the end‑of‑year review process.
Systematizing this way should improve the quality of the feedback that managers give their reports and make it easier to create a habit of giving feedback routinely rather than at concrete annual touchpoints.
“Ideally, feedback should be a continuous process – not as a surprise at the end of the year,” says Astier. “This is why we aim to encourage our leaders and managers to give feedback and employees to ask for it all year long. The system we’ve created in iPeople facilitates this purpose.”
The true promise of AI is not in automation, but in elevation – elevating our insight, elevating the courage behind our decisions, and elevating the standards we hold ourselves to as leaders.- Fabienne Astier, Global Head of Talent, Ipsen.
In a world where science and technology are transforming at unprecedented speed, innovation becomes culture only when it strengthens our ability to learn and to engage in honest, future‑focused dialogue.
AI will never replace judgment or empathy at the heart of our work, but it will amplify our capacity to lead with clarity, courage, and consistency. This is how we shape the future of biopharma – and how we build a learning organization, one conversation at a time.
Ipsen’s pilot kicked off late 2025 and is being rolled out across the company’s ExCom with plans to expand going into 2026. To make it work, Astier is emphatic on two points.
First, it is critical to preserve privacy and protect the identity of both those giving and receiving feedback.
Then there’s how they’ve framed the new approach with Ipsen’s leaders. While they have the backing of CEO Loew, who has outlined the link between high-quality feedback and organizational capability building in a company town hall, Astier and her team have been careful to frame the new model as a “coaching tool” for Ipsen leaders and managers.
“This is not about being judgmental or punitive. Our goal is not to find fault with our managers or criticize their feedback,” she says. “This is about having a growth mindset and helping our leaders find ways to build their own feedback skills.”
Both tools are helpful in that they model best practices in action, she adds: “They have the ability to give you constructive feedback on your feedback. So, as you’re writing your year-end reviews, and once completed, you get feedback on your feedback style. You can then challenge yourself, correct, and improve. Or, throughout the year, when you give feedback on the spot, at any time, you get these prompts in real time. It will give you context and balance: ‘this is something you’re doing well and here’s something you could improve, ’or ‘here’s where you could improve with a concrete example or a recommendation’ for behaviors and future orientation.”
Many Ipsen leaders have been really intrigued by the year-end performance tool, particularly by the insight it provides into feedback balance and development opportunities, says Astier. Although many have been surprised by their scores.
Of the 97 performance reviews analyzed, more than half scored between 11 and 15 out of 20 – which suggests that most leaders are getting the basics right. Even so, the pilot has confirmed a positivity skew in leaders’ feedback and surfaced other areas for improvement.
“We found that 33% of the feedback was just completely positive without clear developmental guidance, so there’s a missed growth opportunity here. And this chimes with what we know about the challenges of giving feedback because balancing the negatives with the positives and focusing on future dimensions requires the most skill and confidence.”
As the pilot gathers momentum, however, there are promising indications of its impact. Many participants are already seeing significant improvement in their feedback scores – and this within the space of weeks, not months (figure 3).
“We’ve seen scores improving, especially on the balance criterion,” says Astier. “Since we communicated the first set of results, the percentage of feedback including both positive outcomes and improvement areas has increased to 73%.”
Ipsen’s AI-driven tool marks a step change in talent development. It finally moves feedback beyond anecdotes and into evidence. By analyzing the actual content of performance-review feedback, the HR team can give leaders a data-based view on how they effectively coach and develop others, replacing guesswork with measurable insight. The result is a systematic and scalable way to strengthen a critical leadership skill, one that has sparked interest across R&D and other functions.
Rather than relying only on engagement surveys and anecdotal impressions, Ipsen can now “hold up a mirror that reliably and consistently reveals the patterns and those areas that they can really improve to amplify their impact,” explains Astier.
And the best thing? They can do this in real time. Over time, Astier’s team plans to integrate their approach across all their HR review practices, creating a virtuous cycle in which managers give feedback, receive feedback on it, and improve – building their skills continuously and developing better habits by doing.
“Changing habits is hard; it requires repetition. So, we are contemplating scaling this approach and systemizing it across the organization because doing is where the learning happens,” says Astier.
Ipsen’s story takes the guesswork out of giving feedback. And it has the potential to transform feedback-giving from individual skill to organizational capability.
Fabienne Astier has lessons to share with other organizations that want to reframe feedback as a measurable driver of competitive advantage:
Looking ahead, the intention is to use these insights to collectively strengthen the quality of feedback across Ipsen, says Astier. The goal is not to rate or rank managers individually, but to develop shared coaching habits and elevate feedback standards across teams.
Feedback should be direct, respectful, and future-focused. Remember: a coaching conversation isn’t about judging someone – it’s about helping them unlock their potential. Situational leadership plays a role here. Sometimes you need to coach, sometimes you need to give straight feedback, and sometimes you just need to be present without being hands-on. In all cases, we are accountable for the quality and impact of our guidance.- Fabienne Astier, Global Head of Talent, Ipsen.
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