You can watch this Meme Lesson on Feedback on YouTube.

The feedback sandwich. It doesn't work. It never worked. 

You have to tell someone their work wasn't good enough.

You hate this more than getting IT to change your laptop.

So you reach for the thing from that 2017 training course — a man in a fleece drew two slices of bread around a piece of criticism and called it a framework — sandwich feedback. 

You wrote it down. 

You believed him.

Your work on the deck this month has been really strong.

I did want to flag that the client meeting on Tuesday didn't land the way we hoped — the pricing slide in particular needed more work.

But overall, you're doing great, and I really value having you on the team.

You leave the meeting feeling you absolutely smashed that.

Honest but kind.

Firm but fair.

You gave them something to work on without crushing them. 

You are, if anyone is asking, a fantastic manager. 

Possibly the best one on this floor. 

Certainly better than that guy Sultanbek.

But here is what the employee actually heard.

Your work has been really strong. I really value having you on the team.

That is it. 

That is the feedback they got. 

The pricing slide issue is gone.

It evaporated somewhere between the first compliment and the second. 

Not because they were not paying attention — they were paying extreme, almost surgical attention, because their entire financial security sits in the hands of the person speaking — but because the moment they heard your work has been really strong, the part of their brain that was braced for criticism unbraced, and by the time the pricing slide arrived it registered as a small correction inside a larger positive assessment.

The tone was friendly. 

The sentence structure was mild. The overall package was reassuring.

They walked out of your office believing the meeting had gone well.

They are going to be spectacularly confused in six months when they find out it had not.

The other version of this is worse.

Because some of your employees have actually read about the feedback sandwich. 

They did a LinkedIn Learning course on it last year. 

They are sitting there watching you assemble the sandwich around them in real time, recognising each ingredient as it arrives. 

The compliment at the start is not a compliment anymore.

It is a warning shot.

They have seen this film before. 

They know the ending.

By the time you get to the pricing slide, they are already drafting their resignation email in their head.

The criticism lands three times harder than you meant it to, because you have just signalled, through the elaborate ritual of wrapping it, that it was bad enough to require wrapping.

A plain sentence would have been fine. A sentence with two slices of bread taped to it says this is bad enough that I had to bring carbs.

Either way, you have failed.

Either they missed the message entirely, or they received it in Dolby Surround sound.

The one thing that categorically did not happen is the thing you thought was happening, which was the kind and skilful delivery of useful information.

The sandwich was never for them.

It has never been for them.

It was for you.

It gave you a way to say the hard thing without sitting in the hard thing.

The compliments on either side were not protecting your employee.

They were protecting you. 

You needed something to say before the painful bit so you could warm up. You needed something to say after the painful bit so you could sprint out of the room. The entire structure existed so that you would not have to be alone with the thirty seconds of discomfort in the middle.

The employee did not need any of this.

They would have been fine.

They would, in fact, have been considerably better off if you had just said it.

The pricing slide didn't land. The client was confused. Can we look at what happened and work out how to approach it differently next time?

Three sentences. Specific. Direct. 

Not unkind — there is nothing unkind about telling an adult what happened at work.

And in a form where they can actually hear it, because it is not being smuggled in between two pieces of emotional bread like a difficult pill you had to hide in the cheese to get the dog to swallow.

Next time you feel yourself reaching for the sandwich, stop.

Ask yourself who the bread is for. If you are being honest, the bread is for you.

Eat it later. On your own time. Not in front of them.