The Warmth of the Bribe

The leather of the office chair is cold through my trousers, and my manager, Sarah, is leaning forward with that specific, practiced look of empathy that usually precedes a disaster. I know this look. It is the look of a person who has spent 16 hours in a leadership seminar learning how to ‘soften the blow.’ She starts with the bread of the sandwich. ‘Jasper, you’ve been doing an incredible job with the digital citizenship curriculum; the parents are raving about your engagement levels.’ I feel a slight warmth, a momentary lapse in my cynicism, before the ‘but’ arrives like a cold front over a summer lake.

‘But,’ she continues, her eyes dropping to a printed sheet of 46 bullet points, ‘there’s a concern that your administrative filing is lagging. We need those reports to be more detailed. However, your energy in the classroom is just infectious, and we really value you on the team.’

In that moment, the praise felt like a bribe and the criticism felt like a hidden trap. I walked out of that office not thinking about my filing system or my classroom energy, but wondering if anything she said was actually true. Did she really like my curriculum, or was she just saying that so I wouldn’t quit when she told me my paperwork sucked? This is the fundamental failure of the feedback sandwich. It is a psychological buffer designed not for the person receiving the news, but for the person giving it. It is a tool for the cowardly, a way to avoid the visceral discomfort of telling another human being that they are failing in a specific area.

The Condescending ‘No’

I recently tried to return a monitor that cost 556 dollars to a local electronics store. I didn’t have the receipt-a classic Jasper move, losing the one piece of paper that proves I exist in the eyes of commerce. The clerk at the counter had clearly been trained in the same school of polite obfuscation as my manager. He told me the store looked great with customers like me, but the policy was the policy, yet he hoped I’d come back soon for their spring sale.

I stood there, clutching a dead piece of hardware, feeling fundamentally unheard. The politeness didn’t make the rejection easier; it made it feel condescending. It was as if he thought I wasn’t adult enough to handle a simple ‘no’ without a sugar coating of corporate platitudes. We do this in our professional lives every single day, treating our colleagues like children who might shatter if they encounter a raw truth.

The Efficiency of Truth

As a digital citizenship teacher, I spend 126 hours a semester telling students that clarity is the highest form of respect online. If you are flaming someone, be specific. If you are praising someone, be specific. But in the adult world, we have traded specificity for safety. We are terrified of the silence that follows a hard truth. We fear the 6 minutes of awkward tension that might occur if we just say, ‘This project isn’t meeting the standard, and here is exactly why.’

So we bury the ‘why’ in a heap of ‘you’re a great person.’ This creates a culture of chronic ambiguity. When I tell my students that their code is inefficient, they don’t cry; they fix the code. They appreciate the lack of fluff because it saves them time. Why, then, do we assume our peers are less resilient than a group of 14-year-olds?

Infantilization and Ambiguity

The avoidance of direct, respectful feedback reveals a profound lack of psychological safety in an organization. If I have to wrap a correction in two layers of fake praise, it means I don’t trust you to handle the truth, and I don’t trust our relationship to survive a moment of honesty. It infantilizes the workforce. We become like the 26-year-old interns who are too afraid to ask for a coffee refill, tiptoeing around each other’s egos until the work itself becomes secondary to the preservation of a manufactured harmony.

This scripted reality also destroys our ability to be vulnerable about our mistakes. Because I know the ‘sandwich’ is coming, I spend the first half of every meeting waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m not listening to the praise; I’m just bracing for the impact of the ‘but.’ It creates a defensive posture that is the exact opposite of the ‘growth mindset’ that these leadership seminars claim to promote. You cannot grow when you are in a permanent state of flinching.

True Kindness is a Mirror

We need to shift our perspective on what ‘kindness’ actually looks like in a professional setting. True kindness is not protecting someone’s feelings in the short term while allowing their career to stagnate in the long term. True kindness is the clarity of a direct path. When a professional seeks out excellence, they aren’t looking for a hug; they are looking for a mirror.

In a world of endless corporate jargon and ‘synergistic’ nonsense, there is a massive market for the unfiltered truth. It’s about removing the unnecessary smoke and getting to the core of the matter.

The Quota of Praise

I once sat through a 266-page manual on human resource management that dedicated an entire chapter to ‘The Art of the Positive-Negative-Positive.’ It suggested that for every one correction, you should provide three affirmations. If you do the math, that means in a standard work week, you are spending 76% of your time manufacturing praise just to justify a few necessary corrections. That is an exhausting way to live. It’s a performance that everyone knows is a performance.

I think back to that monitor return. If the clerk had just said, ‘I can’t do the return without the receipt because the system literally locks me out, but I can show you how to download the digital copy for next time,’ I would have left feeling empowered. Instead, I left feeling like I’d been handled by a polite machine.

The Courage of Directness

We have to be willing to be the person who breaks the script. It takes a certain amount of social courage to be direct. I remember a moment in my 36th year when a mentor sat me down and told me my writing was ‘indulgent and lacked a point.’ There was no sandwich. No ‘but you’re a nice guy.’ It stung for about 6 seconds, and then it changed my life.

When we stop treating honesty like a dangerous weapon and start treating it like a necessary nutrient, the entire culture of the workplace shifts. The ‘sandwich’ is for people who want to be liked; directness is for people who want to be leaders.