Why what you said isn't always what your employees hear

Plenty of managers who deliver bad news try to cushion it. They lead with what's working before they mention what isn't, or hint at a problem rather than naming it outright. The instinct comes from a good place, but according to Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., it often produces the opposite of what leaders intend.

"I think it's common for many people in many contexts to be indirect if you want to communicate something negative," Tannen said. She's spent decades studying conversational style, her term for the countless small choices that shape how people say what they mean, and it's given her plenty of insight into why hard conversations at work can go sideways.

Tessa West, associate professor of psychology at New York University and author of Job Therapy, sees a related problem from a different angle. In her view, it's not just how a message gets phrased. It's the culture that decides whether people phrase things clearly in the first place.

"Culturally, a lot of us are actually not trained on how to give feedback," West said. "By that I mean being really specific about what someone needs to hear behaviorally, about something they need to change."

Why managers avoid being direct

Tannen has heard the same worry from managers for years, one that comes down to not wanting to upset the person on the other end of the conversation. She recalled men in her research describing their fear of making a woman cry during a difficult conversation, though she noted men cry too when they're let go.

But softening a message only works if the other person actually understands what's being said, and Tannen argues that's the part managers tend to get wrong.

"The key thing is that they're assuming the message will be clear," Tannen said. "And often it's not. But that doesn't mean it's never clear. So the issue is the difference in conversational style more than the indirectness per se."

West sees something bigger than any one manager's discomfort: a culture of niceness, where positivity is the norm and specific criticism reads as a violation of it.

"There are such strong forces against it that when you do it, you're actually violating norms," West said. "People are very scared to do that. They're afraid of being called toxic. It's that we work in organizations where nobody else is doing it."

The cost of being vague

West said the disconnect between what a manager believes they've communicated and what an employee actually understands tends to stay hidden for a long time before it surfaces.

"There's a huge mismatch between what people think their bosses think of them and what those bosses actually think of them," West said. Research for her book found that managers overwhelmingly felt they'd been clear about why someone wasn't promoted, while the employees on the receiving end almost never felt they'd been told directly.

"You end up in a bad marriage, where you're growing apart, but one person doesn't know it and the other thinks things are great," West said. "And then one day they just come home and their partner's like, I would like a divorce, and it just kind of seems to come out of nowhere."

Tannen described a similar dynamic between a manager and an employee whose report needed real revisions. To soften it, the manager opened with everything that was working before she got to what needed fixing. When the employee returned his next draft, none of the requested changes were there.

"He said, 'You said it was okay the way it was,'" Tannen said. "The fact that she began with all these good things made him think that's the main point. And because the things she wanted changed came later, he thought they were more of an afterthought."

That kind of breakdown isn't unique to this one exchange. A study published in PLOS One surveyed 419 managers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia and found that when feedback was negative, recipients rated it as less accurate and rated the person delivering it as less qualified to give it, compared with recipients of positive feedback.

How to make feedback actually land

West's advice starts before the conversation even happens, and it has more to do with specificity than tone. She recommends sending the substance of the feedback in writing in advance, rather than springing it on someone in the room.

"I don't like surprises. I think most people don't like surprises," West said. "If you just say, let's meet Tuesday at 4, go over the following four things, they'll have time to digest it, and they'll be in a much better mood that you were transparent with them."

She also keeps each conversation narrow, one or two specific behaviors rather than a running list.

"Focus on one or two little things," West said. "That's true for people who are defensive and are going to get spicy with you, and also people who swallow feedback well."

Closing the loop matters too. Tannen suggested ending a difficult conversation by restating the agreed next step out loud, so both people leave with the same understanding of what happens next. West follows up in writing.

"Here's what we agreed to. You're good with this, right?" West said, describing the note she sends after a feedback conversation. "It's like a shared reality check."

Building the habit

West also pushes back on the idea that feedback belongs in a formal quarterly or annual review. She'd rather see it happen in short, frequent bursts.

"These should be small, bite sized, frequent conversations," West said. "The things you're having feedback about should also be small, and these conversations should take two to five minutes."

That frequency matters, she said, because small check ins catch small problems before they turn into a blindsided layoff or a denied promotion months later.

"There should be no surprises in performance reviews," West said. "You should not be dropping anything in a quarterly review that someone didn't already know."

There's no single style that works for everyone. A direct approach that lands well with one employee might come across as blunt with another, which is part of why managers play such an outsized role in retention and day to day satisfaction. Getting the style right is a skill, not a script, and it starts with a simple habit: say the specific thing, say it often, and check that it landed. That's also what Gallup has found employees want most, more than direction from leadership or additional training, and it's worth building into a broader culture of feedback.

"Talking about styles is very helpful," Tannen said. "That's especially relevant in a workplace situation where there's an ongoing relationship, so the people involved can come to an understanding between them of how they mean what they say."