I’m rubbing my forehead because the bridge of my nose still vibrates from the impact. I walked into a glass door this morning. Not a clunky, aluminum-framed door, but one of those seamless, floor-to-ceiling sheets of absolute transparency. It was so clear I forgot it was a barrier. There is a specific kind of shock that comes with hitting something you were convinced wasn’t there. For about 11 seconds, your brain refuses to accept the physics of the situation. You feel the cold sting on your skin, you hear the resonant thrum of the pane, but you’re still trying to move forward into the space that looked so incredibly open.

I’m currently sitting at my desk, nursing a small bruise and thinking about how that glass door is the exact opposite of a performance review. In a performance review, managers usually spend 31 minutes trying to convince you that a wall is actually a window. They use the feedback sandwich-that soggy, cowardly stack of praise, criticism, and more praise-to hide the fact that they are standing in front of a barrier. They think they are being gentle, but they are actually just being opaque. I’d rather have the glass door. I’d rather see the boundary, even if it means I occasionally bump my nose on the reality of my own shortcomings.

The Cost of Opacity

Yesterday, a friend told me her manager used the sandwich on her during a quarterly check-in. The manager said, ‘You’re doing a great job with client relations. By the way, your last report was a complete disaster and we lost the $41,001 account because of those errors. But we really value your positive attitude!’ My friend didn’t leave that meeting feeling valued. She left feeling like she was being played. She spent the next 51 hours wondering if ‘positive attitude’ was just code for ‘too stupid to realize you’re being fired.’ This communication style breeds a very specific, very toxic kind of mistrust. Employees learn to brace for the impact of criticism the moment they hear a compliment. Praise becomes the sound of a hammer being sticked back.

Clarity as a Survival Mechanism

I’ve been thinking a lot about Simon P.K. lately. Simon is a refugee resettlement advisor I worked with briefly during a volunteer stint about 21 months ago. Simon has a face that looks like it was carved out of a very determined piece of oak. He’s seen 411 different versions of the same human tragedy, and he has zero time for the three-part harmony of corporate feedback. In his world, clarity isn’t just a professional courtesy; it’s a survival mechanism. If he is helping a family from a war zone navigate the 101 different forms required for permanent residency, he doesn’t tell them their handwriting is beautiful before mentioning that they forgot to sign the page that prevents their immediate deportation.

He told me once, while we were drinking some of the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted in a fluorescent-lit basement, that sugarcoating is a form of theft. ‘When you hide the truth in a layer of fluff,’ Simon said, ‘you are stealing that person’s ability to react properly to their own life.’ He wasn’t being mean. He was being precise. He understood that the stakes were too high for ‘vibes.’ If a client’s English wasn’t proficient enough for a specific job tier, he told them. Directly. Without the sandwich. And because he was direct, the clients trusted him. They didn’t have to look for hidden meanings in his praise. When Simon said you were ready, you were actually ready.

It occurs to me that we’ve built our modern office culture on a foundation of avoided conflict. We call it ‘soft skills,’ but often it’s just ‘soft spines.’ We are so afraid of the 1-on-1 friction of a difficult conversation that we wrap the truth in so much bubble wrap that the recipient can’t even find the object inside. It’s a failure of courageous leadership. A real leader understands that their discomfort in delivering bad news is secondary to the employee’s right to know where they stand.

The Sunroom Analogy

I keep coming back to that glass door. There is a structural honesty to a high-quality material that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. When you look through the products from Sola Spaces, you aren’t looking for a filtered version of the sky or a distorted view of your backyard. You want the light, unadulterated and sharp. You want the protection of a barrier without the visual weight of a wall. That is what we crave in our professional relationships, too. We want the transparency of a sunroom, not the murky, wood-paneled basement of a ‘constructive’ feedback session.

I’ve made this mistake myself, of course. I remember managing a team of 11 people a few years back and trying to ‘soften the blow’ for a junior designer who was consistently missing deadlines. I spent 21 minutes talking about how much I loved her color palettes and her ‘innovative spirit’ before spends 1 minute mentioning the missed deadlines. Guess what happened? She kept missing deadlines. Why wouldn’t she? I had told her she was an innovative spirit. I had given her a trophy for her colors and a footnote for her tardiness. I was the coward in that room. I prioritized my own desire to be liked over her professional growth. I didn’t give her a window; I gave her a maze.

The Dignity of Difficulty

There’s a weird dignity in being told the truth, even when the truth is that you’ve failed. It implies that you are strong enough to handle it. It implies that you are a peer, not a child who needs to be tricked into eating their vegetables. When a manager uses the sandwich, they are essentially saying, ‘I don’t think you are resilient enough to hear the truth without a hug on either side of it.’ It’s patronizing. It’s a micro-insult wrapped in a macro-delusion of kindness.

If we want to build environments where people actually improve, we have to stop being so afraid of the impact. Yes, direct feedback can sting. It can feel like walking into a glass door. You might need 31 seconds to compose yourself. You might even have a small bruise on your ego for a day or two. Но (as Simon P.K. might say in one of the 11 languages he probably knows), at least you know where the door is. You can adjust your stride. You can open the handle. You can move through the space with a clear understanding of the obstacles in your way.

I think about the 171 hours I’ve wasted in my career trying to decode what my bosses actually meant when they said things like ‘we’re looking for more synergy in your output.’ If they had just said, ‘your writing is too wordy and it’s boring the clients,’ I could have fixed it in 11 minutes. Instead, I spent weeks trying to provide ‘synergy,’ which is a word that means absolutely nothing to anyone who has ever actually had to do a day’s work.

The Power of Unmanaged Frustration

We need to demand more transparency. Not the fake kind that involves glass-walled offices where everyone still whispers behind each other’s backs, but the real kind. The kind where a ‘no’ is a ‘no’ and a ‘this isn’t good enough’ is an invitation to get better, not a secret code for ‘I hate you.’ We need to stop acting like the truth is a dangerous weapon that needs to be concealed in layers of polite nonsense.

Simon P.K. once told me about a resettlement case where he had to tell a family that the home they had been promised wasn’t ready yet. He could have told them about how beautiful the city was, or how great the local schools were, before dropping the news. Instead, he met them at the airport and said, ‘The house is not ready. You will stay in a hotel for 11 nights. It will be frustrating, but we are working on it.’ That family didn’t like the news, but they trusted Simon implicitly from that moment on. He didn’t steal their right to be frustrated. He didn’t try to manage their emotions. He just gave them the facts.

The Final Choice

Do you want to be ‘handled,’ or do you want to be heard? Do you want a manager who protects your feelings, or a leader who protects your future? The answer seems obvious when you’re standing in the light, but it’s much harder to remember when you’re the one holding the sandwich. Put the bread down. Just say the thing. It might be the only real kindness you have left to give.