This is from my days working in an agency. A week after our company announced a restructuring, I sent Piyush, one of the strongest designers on my team, a message that read, “Can we talk tomorrow about the onboarding redesign? I expected more from the second half.” I typed it between meetings and sent it without a second look. In my head it was a compliment with an edge, because I had seen what he could do and wanted him to reach for it again.
Piyush read it quite differently. He told me months later that he spent that evening updating his résumé for the first time in three years. He arrived at our next meeting guarded, defended every design decision, and over the next quarter shipped only work nobody could criticize. I read the caution as lack of ambition until a skip-level conversation surfaced the real story four months on. My best designer had stopped taking risks, and I had drawn the wrong conclusion about him from a sentence I had already forgotten writing.
Psychologists have long studied the intention-behaviour gap, the distance between what people mean to do and what they end up doing. Leaders live with a close cousin of it, often called the intent-impact gap, which is the distance between what we intend a message to do and what it does when it arrives. It is not confined to writing. I have done the same thing aloud, with a remark tossed off at the end of a meeting, delivered in a tone that sounded warm to me and clipped to everyone else.
Why the message lands harder than we mean it to
Researchers have measured how wide the intent-impact gap can be. In experiments by Justin Kruger, Nicholas Epley, and colleagues, people wrote sentences meant to be read as serious or sarcastic over email and predicted that readers would catch the intended tone about 78 percent of the time. Readers got it right 56 percent of the time, not far above what a coin flip would produce. The sender hears the tone because the sender supplied it, whereas the reader has only the words.
When words are ambiguous and the reader is anxious, the ambiguity tends to resolve toward threat. Restructuring week made that worse for Piyush, but a bad quarter or a new boss can do the same. In a meta-analysis of 607 effect sizes, Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi found that feedback improved performance on average, yet over a third of the time it made performance worse, and its effect weakened as it drew the recipient’s attention toward the self and away from the task. My message did exactly that. It handed Piyush a judgement of himself and no information about the work.
What I do now
It’s taken me years, built off of my own experience and the work we do with leaders at The Core Questin, but here’s how I do it differently now:
Put the reason inside the message. My rewrite would say, “Can we talk tomorrow? Nothing is wrong. I want to push on the second half of the redesign because I think you can do better than that, and I’d like to hear what got in the way.” It runs about thirty words longer than the original and would have saved me four months.
Describe the work and leave the person out of it. “I expected more” is a verdict with nothing to hold onto. “The second half doesn’t yet show the thinking from your last project” points at something Piyush can act on, and it leaves him room to tell me the brief changed midway.
Read the room before you speak. Feedback lands inside whatever is already going on, so I now ask what the person has been carrying lately before I say anything hard. The week I messaged Piyush, the whole team was wondering whose role might change next, and I knew it but gave it no thought while typing. A restructure, a heavy quarter, or a new manager can make a neutral sentence sound like a warning. Sometimes the answer is to wait. More often it is to open with a line of reassurance, so the hard part has somewhere safe to land.
Listen to learn. When work falls short, my instinct is to explain it, and with Piyush that instinct produced a story about ambition that was wrong. Now I ask before I conclude anything: “What got in the way on this one?” or “Is anything blocking you that I can help with?” Then I stay quiet long enough to hear the answer, which is often something I did not know, such as a brief that changed midway. I keep checking in over the following days so the conversation stays open.
I still send quick messages between meetings. Before I hit send, I reread them the way Piyush would have.
Feedback is one of the most direct levers a manager has on performance, and how it is delivered decides whether it works. At The Core Questin, much of our work with people managers focuses on this part of the job, meaning how feedback is relayed and what happens in the days after. If you are looking for similar support for the managers in your organisation, we would love to see how we can help. Let’s chat.
