The hidden costs of withholding feedback

A manager routes work around a consistently underperforming direct report, delays honest feedback, and never follows through. The manager aims to be seen as a good boss, absorbs friction, and provides vague encouragement while taking on extra tasks to correct errors. Real assessment is postponed until later, but later never arrives, and by year’s end the manager performs both roles. Feedback avoidance is driven by conflicting human needs: learning and growth versus acceptance and respect as one is. Leaders who care may choose silence to protect relationships, but silence prevents improvement and allows problems to compound. Withholding feedback is framed as prioritizing the manager’s comfort over the employee’s development.

"Lois knew by March. Her direct report, Derek, was missing deadlines consistently enough that she was quietly routing work around him. She told herself she was being patient, that he was still getting up to speed, and that she'd bring it up after the next project wrapped. That never happened. Lois has been a manager for five years, and nobody ever warned her about how hard it can be to tell her people the truth."

"She wants to be the good boss - the one people say good things about. Which means she absorbs the friction and adjusts around him. She gives vague encouragement in their one-on-ones, but ultimately she takes on more work to fix his errors, saving the real assessment for conversations with her own manager. Silence becomes the default, and by December, she's doing his job and hers. Derek has no idea."

""Human beings are wired to learn and grow," and feedback helps us do that, she said, adding that research consistently shows we tend to be happier and more satisfied when we can see ourselves getting better at something. "But alongside that lies this second core human need, which is the need to be accepted and respected and loved just the way we are now. And the very fact of the feedback suggests that how we are now is not quite a-okay.""

"That explains why smart, caring leaders choose silence. I recognize this in leaders I work with who genuinely love their people. That's what makes it hard. But to organizational psychologist Adam Grant, withholding feedback amounts to choosing your own"

Read at Big Think