I’ve had many discussions with other managers about the performance of people on their team. Everyone is imperfect, and one of the jobs of managers is to identify weaknesses in people’s performance and give guidance to them to address them. In these discussions, something that I’ve seen over and over is managers coming up with a message the recipient is almost certain to misunderstand.

Suppose you have a software engineer who is shipping buggy code. This seems pretty clearly to be a result of them not being careful, so their manager says, “be careful.” Stop for a moment. When the software engineer is writing the buggy code, are they thinking “I’m being careless?” Unless they’re a jerk, they’re not. They think they’re being careful already. They don’t realize that you mean something else by that word. They don’t understand that what they think of as “careful” is not what you think of as careful. That’s excusable, but for you as the manager to give that advice shows that you don’t understand what the problem is. It’s not about the intent. It’s about how the intent translates into action and judgment.

There are infinitely many examples of this advice anti-pattern. In any kind of technical discipline, you’ll hear people say, “use the right tool for the job.” Suppose you have someone who uses the wrong tool. Telling them to use the right tool helps nothing because they believed they were using the right tool. You have to show them why what they thought was the right tool was in fact the wrong one.

Another popular topic is development process. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say they wanted “just enough process,” I’d have like a hundred dollars. Who ever says they want too much process? Who ever says they want too little? Everyone who is doing something too much or too little probably thinks they’re doing it just right. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be doing it that way!

The root of this problem is ironically closely linked to the problem the manager is trying to fix: the manager’s guidance can only be properly applied if the team member already understands the thing they obviously don’t understand. You can’t tell them to do what they already think they’re doing and expect a different outcome. You have to give the guidance in a way that highlights how what they think they’re doing is not what they’re actually doing. Otherwise you’ll live the cliche: “the greatest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place.”