The Real Cost of Ignoring the Little Problems (And How to Change That Habit)
From the Reimagine team member vaults… an anonymous true story about what not to do when it comes to feedback.
In my first grown-up job, I worked in a non profit, as a supervisor with a team of 4 people reporting to me. One of them was always late. Every morning. Not by a lot, just 5 minutes or so, but enough to make things chaotic. He’d bust through the door with a half-eaten bagel in his mouth, coffee dripping out the side of his travel mug, shoelaces untied.
And I said nothing. I liked him, he was otherwise good at his job. So I covered for him and his peers covered for him, and it wasn’t a “big deal”... except that those five minutes, every day was enough to let resentment build.
And that employee felt the “off” vibe without being told that something was wrong.
What was happening was actually pretty simple, looking backwards: different expectations were quietly colliding. He saw a casual, flexible, fun place to work (which we were). The rest of us saw a colleague who was unaware of others, and didn’t care about the need to hit the ground running when programming started. Him being late DID have an impact, and it was felt by everyone.
Naturally, 22-year-old me defaulted to passive aggressive behaviour and loaded silence over a direct conversation.
And he eventually quit. When he did, our last conversation went like this: He said “I feel like nobody likes me and I’m not sure what I did wrong. It’s uncomfortable, like there’s a club everyone else is a part of here that I don’t belong to”.
He didn’t know what was wrong, and that was because I didn't have the guts to tell him. I hadn’t addressed a simple problem, hoping it would get better, and instead of getting better, it got worse. Something fixable with a direct conversation about expectations ended up with a good employee leaving, and worse than that, a team who now saw their manager as someone who would let things slide.
(You can guess how that went afterwards, but that’s another “don’t do this” anecdote.)
I made this about me, and a story about one “manager miss”, and this is a simple example with a straightforward issue. But this story is about more than a bad exit I contributed to. It’s also about what builds up in the gaps whenever feedback doesn’t happen, no matter how big or small the situation is:
Resentment and frustration become an underpinning of the team's culture. Things feel tense, we don’t have a name for why, and it impacts everything.
We don’t give someone a change. If they don’t know, they can’t fix it. In my story, the employee was capable, and he cared. He didn’t know there was a problem. This was also his first “grown-up” job. The feedback he didn’t get, was the one thing that might have cleared the air and let us keep him.
Manager credibility was non existent, and lax behaviour was the norm. When nothing gets talked about or addressed, people don’t bring things to you. They assume you’ll ignore it (or make it weird). That’s hard to come back from, and when people think you don’t care, they’re not going to care, either.
So, why we don’t say anything?
The conversation is almost never as bad as the silence, but our brain frames difficult conversations as a threat, and that “I’m being chased by something” feeling triggers avoidance. So we wait for the right moment, avoiding the imaginary predator, and hope it resolves on its own.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t resolve, it compounds, and usually, it also multiplies, becoming about things it wasn’t before. And the longer something goes, the harder it is to bring up (why now?)... procrastination ad infinitum.
What I know almost 20 years later…
The conversation is never as bad as the silence. Even when it doesn’t go exactly as you hope, clear is kind, and it allows things to move forward. In this story, what I needed to say was simple, and it should have been said the first time the problem came up: “Hey, when you’re late, we all have to cover for you, and things get chaotic. I need you to show up on time.” That’s it. Specific, timely, honest, anchored in an observation. And then I could have dealt with whatever he chose to do next.
Instead, I let it run, hoping it would get better, and that didn’t work and was an expensive choice (in a few ways).
The thing I know now is that people can’t fix what they don’t know it’s broken. To set someone up for success, they have to know what “good” looks like. Withholding to save people’s feelings isn’t kinder, it’s just quieter. Feedback is giving people the essential information they need to do their work. If you’re not doing that, you can’t be surprised when performance doesn’t hit the mark.
As managers, it’s so tempting to circle the problem. Wait for the perfect conditions. Pre-emptively anticipate and script and try to manage someone else’s emotions. And it doesn’t work.
If you’ve got a situation you’ve been managing around, the hardest part is usually deciding to address it.
Our two-hour virtual workshop on Managing Performance and Giving Feedback is running next week, and it’s built around giving you the tools and accountability to do that. Bring a real situation, and we’ll tackle it together.
If you have other questions or just want to know more about what we do, let’s keep the conversation going at connect@reimaginework.ca.