There is a strange inversion I have watched play out over thirty years, and I have never heard anyone name it directly.
The loudest leaders in an organization — the ones who dominate every discussion and have never met a silence they did not want to occupy — frequently go completely quiet in the one moment their voice would actually matter: when someone who works for them needs meaningful feedback.
They are loud when making a point because the volume reflects on them, and they know it. Visibility is currency, and speech is how it gets minted.
But then a direct report sits down for a one-on-one, a review, or a career conversation, and the fountain of words runs dry. What comes out instead is vague, high-level, and hollow. “Keep doing what you’re doing.” “You’re on the right track.” “No major concerns.”
The person who could talk for forty minutes about a strategy or slide deck cannot manage four specific sentences about your performance.
I have written before about what quieter folks should do to receive better feedback from their managers. Namely, ask specific questions, ask for criteria instead of affirmation, and avoid ambushing a manager who has not prepared, because an ambushed leader retreats to generalities every time. That advice stands, but it puts all the work on the person receiving the feedback, and today I want to talk about the other side of the equation.
On the manager’s side, the feedback void is not a communication problem. It is a courage problem, and occasionally a cruelty problem, and the people it damages most are the ones performing well. Especially the quiet ones.
Somewhere along the way, our industry decided that all feedback must be “constructive,” and constructive quietly came to mean “not positive”. “Feedback” became a formal permission to deliver criticism, and praise became seen as something soft or suspicious that might make people complacent.
Many of us absorbed this long before we started working. If you grew up with parents who ran primarily on negative reinforcement, the pattern feels natural by the time you first enter a workplace. Attention means something is wrong, silence means you are fine, and praise is for children.
Based on this, we built organizations where the entire feedback apparatus points one direction. And the result is a workforce that hears from leadership only when something breaks. Praise is nowhere to be found.
Now, I am not calling for hollow praise. Hollow praise is worse than silence; people detect it instantly, and it devalues every honest word that follows. What I am pointing to is the total absence of the real thing: specific, earned recognition of something that mattered.
Think about the best people you have worked with. How often did anyone tell them, concretely, what they were doing well and why it mattered? In my experience, almost never. We assume excellence is self-aware, but it usually is not. The strongest people I have managed were frequently the least certain about which of their behaviors actually made the difference.
My default correction to this “praise void”, built over a long time and after getting it wrong plenty, is simple: correct in private, praise in public.
A remarkable number of leaders today run the opposite configuration. They correct in public, sometimes deliberately, on the theory that visible correction teaches the whole team at once. It does teach the whole team something: to hide mistakes, avoid risk, and manage their exposure to the leader. It doesn’t necessarily teach them whatever the leader intended as the lesson. Public correction produces fear, and fear produces silence. This silence can eventually cause the leader who inspired it to be blindsided by the information their team was too afraid to share.
I will occasionally correct someone in public, but only in two specific situations.
The first is when a mistake has been repeated enough times that the team needs to see the process change, not just the singular action. Even then, the target of my correction is the process. The individual may still feel some discomfort, and their peers will understand why, precisely because I do this so rarely that it carries meaning.
The second is during a crisis, when everyone needs to learn the lesson in the moment. I once had someone sit on a problem during an incident and present it late, after trying to resolve it quietly. I deliberately corrected that in front of the room, not to punish the person, but because everyone needed to hear the principle immediately: during a crisis, bring me the problem the moment you see it. I will never be upset that you raised something that turned out to be nothing. I will absolutely be upset by information that arrives late. In a crisis, more information is almost always better than less, and the room needed to learn that before the next hour of the incident, not in a retro two weeks later.
Outside those two cases, correction happens behind a closed door, where the person can actually hear it instead of performing their reaction to it.
Praise is the other half of the feedback ecosystem, and it is the half that costs almost nothing, yet gets spent almost never.
The mechanics of praise are not complicated: Catch something real, name it specifically, and say why it mattered. That is the entire skill.
In public, it can be one sentence in a team meeting: “X did more here than I expected, and it moved the whole timeline. That is what exceeding expectations looks like.” Ten seconds. The person remembers it for a year, and the team learns what good looks like without anyone being diminished in the process of teaching it.
In private, the most effective version I know is even shorter. A specific example, then five words: “That. Do more of that.”
I have watched that small sentence redirect careers. Not because it is clever, but because it solves the problem I named earlier: your best people frequently do not know which of their behaviors is the differentiating one. They are running twenty behaviors and guessing.
This is where the primary misconception about praise comes into play: Specific praise is not a reward. It is information. It tells a high performer where the signal is.
The leaders who withhold this are sitting on the cheapest, highest-leverage tool they have, usually for the simple reason that praise feels awkward in their own mouths. That awkwardness is worth examining and challenging because, while the discomfort is ours, the cost of it is paid by someone else.
I want to return to the inversion I opened with. I do not want to let it off the hook.
A leader who has volume for every status meeting but none for your development is telling you something about where their attention actually goes. Speaking to the room builds their standing, while speaking to you, specifically and privately, builds yours. One of those is an investment in themselves; the other is an investment in you. The ratio between how much a leader invests in themselves and how much they invest in you is the most honest measure of a leader there is.
If you lead people, the ratio applies to you. It applies to me.
The question I would leave with you:
Think of the strongest person on your team. Not the loudest. The strongest.
When did you last tell them, specifically, what they do well and why it matters?
If you cannot remember, they cannot either. And the silence you think of as “no news is good news” is being read, on their side of the desk, as no news at all.
They will not ask. The strong ones rarely do.
Telling them is on you.
