Leader, if you’re nesting negatives within positives, you’re doing it wrong

Feedback is something that reveals the heart of a leader.

When I was initially trained in giving feedback over 25 years ago now, and it was stressed on us that feedback must always be more positive than negative, to inspire and reward good performance and not punish what you don’t want, but what I find these days is plainly negative feedback is the norm.  Leaders seem to have lost the art of maintaining the trust and confidence of those they lead.  What I find is so common these days is the negatives are nested within the positives, which simply devalues the positives, because what is really being communicated is the negative.

An example of this is when someone writes you an email and they start out positively, but you can quickly sense that the real reason for the email is the negative.

So many managers and leaders these days don’t get it that an inspiring leader encourages.  And through that encouragement there is less need for negative feedback.  Because there is more of a willingness to task properly, by communicating properly, giving task clarity without micromanaging, an employee is set up for success and they’re left to do their job.

People hate being micromanaged.  It leads to anxiety and work stress and is a real psychosocial hazard.  It’s often leads to people feeling bullied.  Micromanagement is a form of workplace harassment.  The effect of this is workers taking their work home with them in their minds, where sleep patterns are interrupted, where they cannot escape the circular movement of what should only be a quarter of their life in their minds.  It breeds trauma.

A lot of the leadership malpractice and dysfunctional management stems from a critical heart behind the feedback given.  Managers like this are bent on control.

How many reading this will attest to the stress and anxiety that is suffered when a particular person’s name flashes up on their phone or email account?  That’s the evidence trauma, right there!  Right there is the fight, the fright, the flight, the freeze, and the fawn.  In an instant.

If a leader is giving negative feedback just about all the time, they’re doing it wrong.  Even if someone deserves negative feedback after negative feedback, surely the way to encourage different or better performance is through encouragement or better direction.  Instead what’s given is often a set of mixed messages, so the person being directed is constantly in a state of confusion about what’s required of them.

Without any doubt one of the tangible needs of a worker is the confidence and backing of the person they work for.  It is a need.  It is a human right.  If a worker does not have this, they are on the conveyor belt to trauma.

The leader who hides negative feedback within the positive is just trying to soften the blow and appear like a good leader.  Their heart is not in the positive, it’s in the negative.  Leaders must be honest, because workers can smell it a mile off when they aren’t.

NOTE: this is NOT a comment on ANY of my present leaders but emerges out of patterns I’ve seen in clients I’m helping!  Indeed, it’s because I’ve got sound leaders at present that I can say these things today.