The cheap wool of the suit jacket brushes against your arm. He leans in, a forced confidential tone, the air suddenly thick with the smell of stale coffee and mints that aren’t winning their fight. ‘Great energy out there today, really fantastic,’ he begins. The words are smooth, practiced, and utterly meaningless. Your stomach clenches. You know what’s coming next. It’s the ‘but.’ That awful, inevitable pivot that invalidates everything that came before it.

‘But,’ he says, right on cue, ‘we need to see those payouts happen a little faster. You’re hesitating on the turn.’ And then, the grand finale, the soggy piece of bread on top to complete this miserable sandwich: ‘Just keep up that great attitude. You’re a real asset.’ He claps you on the shoulder, a gesture meant to convey camaraderie but which lands with the thud of a closing door. You’re left standing there, the ghost of his touch on your shoulder and the echo of one word in your head: ‘slow.’ The praise wasn’t praise. It was a runway for the criticism to land.

The Corporate Theater of Deception

This is the corporate theater of communication, and the feedback sandwich is its longest-running, most tedious play. It’s a technique born from a deep-seated fear of honesty, a misguided attempt to pad the truth so it lands like a feather. But it doesn’t.

Every time a manager uses this script, they are not softening a blow; they are teaching their team that their words have layers of meaning, that they must be decoded rather than trusted.

My Own Cowardice: The Teal Mistake

I confess, I used to be a disciple of this method. I read the books. I went to the seminars that cost the company a ridiculous sum of $888 per person. I learned the scripts. I thought I was being a modern, emotionally intelligent leader. I remember sitting down with a junior graphic designer, a kid with real talent but a crippling addiction to a specific, hideous shade of teal. I constructed the perfect sandwich. ‘Your grasp of negative space is brilliant,’ I started, which was true. ‘But this reliance on teal in every single project is making all our clients look like they’re sponsoring a regional dental conference.’ Then, the final layer: ‘Your passion is infectious, keep bringing that energy.’

He nodded, seemingly taking it in. The next week, he presented a new project. The typography was fixed, the layout was clean, but the teal was back, now accompanied by its cousin, a sickly seafoam green. When I asked him, he said, “You said my energy was infectious and my use of space was brilliant, so I figured you just wanted me to lean into my signature style.” He heard the praise, held onto it like a raft, and let the actual, critical feedback wash away.

Maria T.-M. and the Truth of the Steel

It reminds me of a woman I met years ago, Maria T.-M. She’s a vintage sign restorer, working with those huge, beautiful neon behemoths from the fifties and sixties. I spent a day in her workshop, a cavernous space that smelled of ozone, hot metal, and dust that was probably older than my parents. She was working on a sign from a defunct motel, a gorgeous piece of Americana from 1968. It was rusted through in sections, with 8 layers of peeling paint and half of its 28-watt bulbs shattered.

She wasn’t being cruel to the sign. She was respecting it. She knew its potential, its original strength, and her job was to restore its integrity, not to coddle its flaws. The honest, sometimes brutal, act of scraping away the failure was the only path back to functionality. The final bill for a project like that could be upwards of $18,888, and clients paid it because they weren’t buying a paint job; they were buying the truth of the restored object.

Respect, Not Infantilization

Why don’t we treat people with that same respect? The belief that adults need to have criticism cushioned by fake praise is profoundly infantilizing. It assumes fragility. It assumes they aren’t serious about their own growth. In any environment where skill acquisition is paramount, this method is laughed out of the room.

It’s absurd. In high-stakes, performance-based professions, feedback is direct, immediate, and unvarnished because the goal isn’t to protect an ego; it’s to build mastery. The best training environments, like a top-tier casino dealer school, are built on this principle of immediate correction because a tenth of a second of hesitation can change the entire outcome. There’s no time for a sandwich when chips are down.

The Illusion vs. The Solution

So why does it persist in the corporate world? Because it protects the person giving the feedback, not the person receiving it. It’s a shield against an emotional reaction. It’s a script that allows a manager to check the ‘had a tough conversation’ box without actually having to engage in the messy, unpredictable, and deeply human work of real mentorship. It’s the illusion of communication. I find myself doing it still, sometimes. I’ll catch myself softening my words, wanting to be liked more than I want to be effective, and I have to stop and think of Maria and her scraper, finding the truth of the steel beneath the paint.

The real alternative isn’t brutal, unfeeling criticism. The opposite of the feedback sandwich isn’t just a slice of moldy bread. It’s a respectful, direct conversation rooted in a shared goal.

It frames feedback as a tool for growth, not a judgment of worth. It’s a conversation between two professionals, not a parent placating a child.

We have to stop performing communication and start actually communicating. We have to be willing to sit in the momentary discomfort of honesty to build the long-term foundation of trust. It’s messier. It requires more skill and genuine emotional investment. But unlike the sandwich, it actually works.