Kind Silence Ruins People [Kim Moon-kyung’s Leadership Tech] (29)

[Financial News] During a feedback exercise at a recent team leader training session at a company, one team leader cautiously raised a hand.
“If I speak honestly and get called a stuffy old boss, then become a topic of discussion on an anonymous message board, who is responsible for that damage to my reputation?”

Nods of deep agreement rippled across the lecture hall. These days, what leaders fear most is not poor organizational performance but damage to their own reputations. So many leaders choose to dole out praise while swallowing the criticism that is actually needed, and dress up that choice as respect and consideration.
But this choice rests on a fatal assumption: that if I say nothing, the problem will quietly go away too. Feedback never disappears. It is only postponed. And postponed feedback always comes back as a harsher, more difficult message. A mild correction that could have been offered in a meeting today can turn into the lowest performance rating six months later, or exclusion from key assignments or notice of termination a year later. Leaders often wonder whether they should say something now, but the real question should be, “Will I say it gently now, or deliver a much harsher message later?” It is like leaving a cavity untreated. If you go to the dentist when your tooth becomes sensitive, a simple treatment may be all that is needed. But if you put it off for fear of the immediate pain, you may end up having to endure the agony of a root canal. You have not avoided the pain; you have scheduled a more severe one.
The person who experienced this structural contradiction most painfully was management thinker Kim Scott, who worked as a manager at Google and Apple. When she was running a startup, she gave an underperforming employee nothing but gentle encouragement for a full 10 months. When she eventually reached her limit and had to let the employee go, what the employee said was not an expression of resentment but a pointed question.
“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”
Ultimately, those 10 months of kindness deprived the employee of a valuable opportunity to fix the problem themselves, leaving only the most devastating outcome at the very end. Drawing on this painful experience, Scott coined the term “destructive empathy” for the attitude of caring about someone while failing to say the hard thing that needs to be said. She identified it as one of the most common and fatal mistakes managers make.
Why, then, do leaders keep making choices that come at such a high cost? Scott’s confession was chilling. She later admitted that the real reason she had not been honest with the employee was not that she feared hurting the employee’s feelings, but that she wanted to protect her own reputation as a good person. Kind silence may appear to protect employees, but in reality, the first person it protects is the leader who does not want to be disliked. The emotional cost is shifted onto employees’ futures, while the leader preserves their own immediate psychological safety. We cannot call that consideration.

A study by global leadership consultancy Zenger Folkman, published in Harvard Business Review, backs this up. Fifty-seven percent of respondents wanted corrective feedback that helped them improve their actions rather than simple praise, and 72% said their performance would improve significantly if their boss gave them such feedback. What employees truly fear is not a leader’s criticism, but wasting time stagnating without growing. If leaders believe their silence is protecting employees’ feelings, much of that belief is little more than self-comforting fantasy.
Of course, there is a counterargument. We have seen countless tyrannical leaders who used “honesty” as an excuse for verbal abuse and personal insults. Today’s leaders may be cautious as a natural reaction to those oppressive times. That counterargument is valid. But the answer should not be silence; it should be innovation in how feedback is delivered. In the study mentioned earlier, employees did not accept negative feedback from bosses who had not first listened to what they had to say. The problem was not honesty itself, but honesty without listening. When leaders first open their ears and speak about specific actions and work standards rather than attacking someone’s character, feedback can finally be received as a solid source of support, not an attack.
This week, write down in a notebook one piece of feedback that has been on the tip of your tongue over the past month but that you swallowed. Then, in your next one-on-one, instead of opening with the accusatory “You always...,” try starting with “This part of this report...” and communicating the clear standard you expect. And before offering criticism, ask this first:
“What could I do to support you, or what behavior could I stop, to make your work much easier?”
Only leaders who first accept this reverse-direction feedback earn the right to give their employees genuine feedback.
Silence in an organization is never free. A remark swallowed for the sake of convenience now does not disappear without a trace; it comes back as an enormous cost, with interest compounding. Will you make tomorrow’s employees pay that heavy price, or will you, the leader today, bravely shoulder it?
Real leadership is decided in that very moment of choice.

/Kim Moon-kyung (Adjunct Professor at Kookmin University and Vice President of the Korean Leadership Association) 




[email protected] Jung Myung-jin, Medical Specialist Reporter