“I’ll defend you to the death, but I will always need the truth.” That was one of my mom’s rules when we were growing up. It wasn’t negotiable. If you got in trouble at school, she wasn’t going to hang you out to dry. But she needed to know what actually happened before she’d go to bat for you. The deal was simple: give her the real story, and she’d fight for you. Lie or hide something, and you were on your own.
That rule has followed me through my entire career, first as someone on the receiving end of leadership, and later as someone doing it. And the thing I keep coming back to is how rarely leaders hold themselves to the other side of it. They want the truth from the people under them, but when it comes time to deliver hard feedback, they don’t do the work of making sure the feedback itself is true.
The Conversation
I once had an executive leader tell me, to my face, that no one wanted to work with me. Not “there’s been some friction on a project” or “here’s a specific situation we need to talk through.” No one wanted to work with me.
That’s a gut punch of a thing to hear. And my first reaction was to take it seriously, because I take feedback seriously. So I started digging. I went to colleagues I was close to inside the company, people I worked with regularly, and told them what I’d been told. The reaction was uniform. They thought it was absurd. These were people who actively sought me out to work on things. They had no idea where this was coming from.
So I kept pulling the thread. And what I eventually found was that the whole thing traced back to a single person. One of this executive’s direct reports, someone they put a lot of stock in, sharing opinions about me. That was it. One person’s perspective, unverified, unchallenged, laundered through an executive’s authority and delivered to me as though the entire organization had weighed in.
The feedback doesn’t make them better. It makes them smaller.
The executive later admitted, to their credit, that the whole thing had been handled badly. But by the time that acknowledgment came, the damage was already done. I’d spent weeks questioning myself, questioning relationships that turned out to be completely fine, and carrying a weight that wasn’t mine to carry.
It Wasn’t Just Me
A colleague of mine at the same company went through his own version of the same thing with his direct manager. Different specifics, but the same underlying failure. Instead of validating what they were hearing, instead of tracking down what actually happened and whether the expectations had even been clearly set, his manager just passed it along. Here’s the sentiment. Here’s how bad you apparently are. Good luck with that.
Someone close to me experienced the same thing at a completely different company. Their direct manager told them that things were going incredibly badly on their project, that there were serious concerns. Made it sound dire. When they dug into it, the reality was far less severe than what had been presented. The manager had taken unverified feedback, inflated it, and dropped it on them like a bomb. No validation, no context, no specifics they could act on. Just a crisis that wasn’t actually a crisis, delivered in a way that made them feel like the sky was falling.
Three people, three different situations, the same pattern. This isn’t a single bad manager or a single broken culture. This is a failure mode that’s everywhere. Leaders hear something negative, skip the part where they verify it, and pass it along, sometimes making it sound worse than it actually is, because relaying a complaint feels like doing something about it. It isn’t.
What It Does to People
When you tell someone there’s a problem but you can’t tell them what specifically happened, what was expected, or what they should do differently, you haven’t given them feedback. You’ve given them anxiety. They can’t fix it because there’s nothing concrete to fix. So instead of correcting a behavior and moving forward, they sit in it. They replay every interaction they’ve had recently, trying to figure out which one was the problem. They start second-guessing themselves in rooms where they were fine. The feedback doesn’t make them better. It makes them smaller.
And it compounds. The next time they speak up in a meeting, there’s a voice in the back of their head. The next time they push back on something, they wonder if this is the thing that’s going to generate the next round of whispers. The vagueness is what makes it so corrosive. A specific piece of feedback, even a hard one, gives you something to work with. “You were too aggressive in that client call on Tuesday and here’s why” is something I can reflect on, learn from, and change. “No one wants to work with you” is a hole with no bottom.
What I Do Differently
I’ve been on the leadership side of this enough times now to know what the job actually requires. When I hear feedback about someone on my team, my first move is to request cited examples. I want to know what the issue was, what was expected, what actually happened. I want to know that the expectation was explicitly defined and made available, no mind reading required, and that the person was given an opportunity to correct before anyone escalated it.
Because if I show up and tell someone they did something wrong, but I can’t tell them what it was or how to fix it, I haven’t led. I’ve just passed along noise.
I’ve also been on the other side of it in a different way. Defending the people doing the work when the complaints were coming from above. I once had a client start pushing back on a delivery team for a project I had sold and written the SOW for. The client kept using vague language about expectations, trying to get things added to the scope, implying that the team wasn’t delivering what had been promised. One of their asks was essentially a complete rework of their data schemas, something that was nowhere near the agreed scope.
I went point by point. I argued on the specifics. I stood by the team because I knew the work, I knew the SOW, and the team was right. That’s the job. If you’re a leader and you believe your people are doing the right work, you defend them. But you can only do that if you’ve done the homework. If you don’t know the specifics, you can’t defend anyone or hold anyone accountable.
The Actual Rule
The principle is the same on both sides. Whether you’re delivering feedback or receiving a complaint about someone, you owe it to the people involved to deal in specifics. Was the expectation clearly set? Was it documented? Did the person know what was expected before they fell short of it? If you can’t answer those questions, you don’t have feedback.
If you’re a leader and someone comes to you with a complaint about a member of your team, don’t just relay it. Go dig. Find out what actually happened. If the complaint holds up, you now have something you can actually work with. If it doesn’t, you’ve just protected someone on your team from getting blindsided by something that wasn’t real.
And if you’re the one giving feedback about someone, do the work. Don’t just say you’re frustrated with them. Say what happened, what you expected, and what they actually did. Ask yourself whether the expectation was clearly communicated in the first place. If it wasn’t, that’s not their failure. That’s yours.
My mom had it right. Defend the people you’re responsible for. But make sure you’re working from the truth first. The whole system falls apart without it.