#537 The Pseudo Criticism Problem: Why Many Organisations Ask for Feedback and Then Punish the People Who Give It | Article by Niels Brabandt
The Pseudo Criticism Problem: Why Many Organisations Ask for Feedback and Then Punish the People Who Give It
Article by Niels Brabandt
Introduction: When openness becomes theatre
In this leadership episode, Niels Brabandt examines a pattern that many decision-makers recognise but too few organisations address with sufficient discipline: the organisation that publicly invites criticism, privately resists it, and quietly penalises the people who provide it. The issue is not criticism itself. The issue is the gap between the declared appetite for criticism and the actual leadership behaviour once uncomfortable information reaches the table.
Brabandt calls this the pseudo criticism problem. It describes environments in which leaders claim that feedback is welcome, yet respond defensively when criticism points towards management, leadership quality, decision-making, internal politics or broken processes. For business decision-makers, this is not a soft cultural concern. It is a strategic risk. Organisations that punish truthful feedback slowly disable their own early-warning systems.
The promise of criticism: why organisations need people close to the work
Niels Brabandt begins with a principle that should be uncontroversial in modern leadership: people closest to the work often see problems before senior management does. Sales teams notice changing client expectations. Production teams recognise process failures. Service teams identify recurring complaints. Operational specialists understand where supply chains, purchasing, onboarding, delivery or internal systems fail in practice.
No Chief Executive Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Information Officer or Chief Technology Officer can be as close to every operational detail as the people working with those realities every day. Asking the community, in Brabandt's framing, is therefore not a sign of weak leadership. It is a sign of intelligent leadership. The frontline is not merely an execution layer. It is a source of organisational intelligence.
The leadership test: what happens after criticism is voiced
The decisive moment is not the invitation to criticise. The decisive moment is the reaction. Brabandt describes the familiar sequence: employees are asked for criticism, they provide it, and the response suddenly shifts from openness to defence. The person raising the issue may be told that they lack the overview, do not understand the big picture, do not have the right qualification, or should not have raised the concern publicly.
This is where feedback becomes conflict. Not conflict about solving the problem, but conflict with the person who named it. In Brabandt's analysis, some leaders do not truly want criticism. They want criticism of other people. They want information that helps them locate blame elsewhere. What they resist is criticism that points towards leadership, management behaviour, structural incentives or the decision-making culture at the top.
Self-reflection: necessary, but never complete
A central point in the episode is the limitation of self-reflection. Brabandt argues that self-reflection can be strengthened through coaching, qualification, experience and evaluation. Yet it is never complete. No leader sees 100 per cent of their own impact. This is precisely why external evaluation, structured feedback and professional reflection matter.
Brabandt illustrates this by referring to his own work as a self-employed trainer, speaker, coach, mentor, consultant and project and interim manager. After training, coaching and interim mandates, he is evaluated. The point is not that evaluation is always pleasant. The point is that serious professionals do not rely exclusively on their own self-image. Decision-makers who claim to be above feedback are not demonstrating confidence. They are demonstrating risk.
The right to respond: why feedback is not automatically correct
The episode also avoids a simplistic view of criticism. Brabandt makes clear that feedback is not automatically accurate simply because it is expressed. Leaders and professionals have the right to respond, clarify and correct misunderstandings.
He gives the example of a participant in a public time management seminar who would have liked additional content on Copilot, artificial intelligence and time management. Brabandt explains why such criticism required context: the topic had not been promised, it was not on the agenda, and the request would have moved a public seminar towards individual coaching. The lesson is important. A mature feedback culture does not mean accepting every claim without analysis. It means creating a fair process in which criticism is heard, evidence is examined, context is provided, and the organisation learns.
Insider deals: when loyalty replaces competence
The pseudo criticism problem becomes more dangerous when weak self-reflection is combined with insider deals. Brabandt describes insider deals as arrangements in which people advance each other's careers not primarily because of competence, quality or organisational need, but because of mutual obligation. Someone promoted me, therefore I will promote them. Someone protected me, therefore I will protect them.
For decision-makers, this is not merely a moral concern. It is a governance concern. Insider deals distort promotion decisions, reduce accountability and make criticism ineffective. When a leader is protected by informal loyalty networks, even accurate feedback may be dismissed. The organisation then no longer promotes the strongest capability. It promotes proximity, convenience and political dependence.
Cliques: the point at which criticism becomes structurally impossible
Brabandt draws a clear distinction between networks and cliques. Networks based on competence, skill, quality and mutual professional respect can strengthen organisations. Cliques are different. A clique is a closed group that protects its members regardless of performance, conduct or evidence. If one member fails, others redirect blame. If one member succeeds, the whole group expects credit.
In such environments, criticism is no longer a learning mechanism. It becomes a threat to group protection. The consequences are severe: talented employees disengage, honest voices disappear, poor leaders remain insulated, and organisational learning is replaced by internal theatre. Brabandt's warning is direct: cliques harm teams, departments, organisations and eventually even the clique members themselves, because they may be pushed into roles for which they are brutally unprepared.
Power, hierarchy and fear: why open criticism often fails
The episode addresses a reality frequently underestimated by senior leaders: power changes the feedback dynamic. In theory, employees can criticise their leaders. In practice, many will not do so if they believe their job, income, reputation or career progression may suffer.
Brabandt describes the situation of an employee who depends on the role, has limited protection, and is expected to criticise a powerful leader with prestigious qualifications and direct authority over their employment. In such circumstances, silence is not a sign of agreement. It may be a rational survival strategy. Leaders who interpret silence as satisfaction misunderstand the organisation they are supposed to lead.
Anonymous systems: why they can be necessary
For larger organisations, Brabandt argues that anonymous feedback systems often become essential. Some employees are unable or unwilling to criticise leadership openly because they fear negative consequences. This is not necessarily cowardice. It is often a realistic assessment of power.
Anonymous systems are not perfect. They require safeguards against abuse, poor data quality and vague accusation. Yet, when designed well, they allow organisations to capture information that would otherwise remain hidden. The larger and more hierarchical the organisation becomes, the more important it is to create channels that reflect the reality of employee risk rather than the fantasy of effortless openness.
Process: from annual ritual to leadership accountability
Brabandt recognises that annual appraisal interviews can be a starting point. They are not enough. A serious organisation needs a process that connects feedback to action and consequence. When employees perform poorly, consequences usually follow. The same principle must apply to leadership. If a leader repeatedly receives serious negative evaluation and nothing changes, the organisation is not collecting feedback. It is collecting evidence of its own inaction.
The process must therefore answer practical questions: Who receives the feedback? How is it assessed? What evidence supports it? What action follows? How is progress reviewed? What happens if the same criticism appears again? Without such questions, criticism becomes a symbolic exercise rather than a leadership mechanism.
The danger of performative listening: why "I hear you" is not enough
One of the most memorable observations in the episode concerns the phrase 'I hear you'. Brabandt criticises it as a passive-aggressive workplace line when it is used as a substitute for action. In many organisations, 'I hear you' means that the concern has been acknowledged at a superficial level while the underlying issue will remain untouched.
This matters because performative listening damages trust. When a sales team says that the organisation needs a better CRM system, a leader cannot hide behind polite acknowledgement indefinitely. If the concern is legitimate, it needs evaluation, decision and follow-through. If it is not legitimate, the reasons must be explained. What is unacceptable is the managerial ritual of appearing receptive while doing nothing.
Action: the missing bridge between feedback and trust
The positive message in Brabandt's episode is that improvement is possible. When leaders know that feedback will be revisited, evaluated and connected to accountability, behaviour changes. A leader who might otherwise ignore a concern has a stronger incentive to act when they know that people will later assess whether promises were kept.
This is where awareness, process and action meet. Awareness helps leaders understand their blind spots. Process ensures feedback does not disappear. Action demonstrates that criticism is taken seriously. Over time, these elements create a culture in which criticism is no longer treated as disloyalty, but as a necessary input for better decisions.
What excellent leaders should do next
For decision-makers, the implication is clear. Do not ask for criticism unless the organisation is prepared to handle it professionally. Do not ask employees to speak up if the real rule is that only comfortable criticism is welcome. Do not praise openness while protecting cliques, insider deals and managerial defensiveness.
Excellent leadership requires the discipline to hear inconvenient information, the fairness to examine it properly, the courage to correct leadership failure, and the humility to recognise that seniority does not equal omniscience. Niels Brabandt's episode on the pseudo criticism problem is ultimately a warning and an invitation. The warning is that organisations can easily turn criticism into theatre. The invitation is to build leadership systems in which criticism becomes intelligence, accountability and progress.
Conclusion: criticism is not the problem, hypocrisy is
The central lesson of this episode is not that criticism is always right. It is not. The lesson is that criticism must be handled through credible leadership behaviour, not slogans. Organisations that genuinely want to improve must protect honest feedback, challenge defensive leadership habits, dismantle insider deals, prevent cliques from controlling accountability, and create processes that turn feedback into action.
For Niels Brabandt, the decisive message remains practical: apply, apply, apply. Leadership improves when organisations stop performing openness and start institutionalising it. The pseudo criticism problem ends only when criticism is no longer punished, ignored or redirected, but used as one of the most valuable sources of organisational learning.
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Mehr zu diesem Thema im dieswöchtigen Podcast und Videocast: mit Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
Das Transkript zum Podcast und Videocast befindet sich unter diesem Artikel.
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Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Criticism. And of course, you know, the organization is always open for criticism. We'd like to hear criticism. It helps us to grow. Have you heard that phrase? What did you experience now? And of course, I hope that many of you watch this and say, oh, I actually told them my criticism and they reacted accordingly and they changed things. And that's the great side of it. However, I had a quite significant amount of emails where people told me, look, I actually said my criticism, and after that I was sidelined. After that I was criticized for criticizing, or after that I faced negative consequences for actually giving them criticism for which they asked. And that is now exactly the point. We have to talk about one important issue, and that is called the so-called pseudo-criticism issue.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Of course, organizations should be open for criticism. The question is, how do you deal with it? And we have to get straight into the point here. First, of course, the idea of telling people to criticize you and giving you not only feedback but also straightforward criticism. First, that's great. Why is it great? You have people who have a different point of view than you. I give you an example. When you are the sales leader, you're not in the field, so they can probably tell you what are client developments, what do clients want, what do we do right, what do we do wrong. Or when you produce a certain product, people who work in a production plant facility and the facilities there in the factory can tell you, oh, maybe we should have a different process, or our supply chain isn't too great, or purchasing is always a bit too early or a bit too late, just not on point, or maybe the sales team has to onboard our clients differently, or check for other aspects. Asking the community is always a great thing because the community is closest to the aspect with which they work. No CEO, CMO, COO, CFO, CIO, CTO, call it as you like, no senior executive can be as close to the subject matter as the people working with exactly that subject matter every single day.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
The main question now is, as soon as they face a criticism, how do they react? And when they react, quite often people say, well, it didn't go too well. I told them something and they said, how dare I, I don't have the view, I don't have the overview, I don't see the big picture. Sometimes they even say things like, I don't have the qualification, how dare I bring this forward, how can I say this in public? And that exactly is the problem. Some people want criticism, but what they actually want is criticism of others. Tell me where in the organization something goes wrong so I can point to others and join the blame game. And that is of course not very good leadership. It's actually really bad leadership. So what they do is they go from criticism straight into conflict. And going into the conflict to solve something is a good thing. However, what they do is they go into conflict with you, the person who said something, and then they will tell you, why you are wrong. And don't get me wrong, in certain cases criticism is not justified. We get to that in a minute. However, we unfortunately have a high level of leaders that lack self-reflection.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And by the way, when you now say I am not one of them, I give you a very simple example. I'm self-employed. There's a reason where after every training I get externally evaluated, after every coaching I get evaluated, after every interim mandate and during it I get evaluated. Why is that the case? Your self-reflection can be due to coaching and qualification, can be very, very well on a very high level. However, it is never 100%. You never see 100%. And of course, very important here, some people have the wrong information and they say, oh, feedback, you have to take it. That's wrong. Feedback that you— when, when someone gives you unsolicited feedback, you don't have to take it. And also With every feedback, of course, you have the right to state when something is wrong. I give you an example. This year I had one participant in a seminar who said, oh, we had a great time management training, amazing. However, I would have loved if you taught me something about Copilot AI and time management. However, first, that was never on the agenda. Second, it was a public seminar, so it wasn't on the agenda for a reason. And third, It is something that is basically a one-to-one coaching, not a public seminar content. You simply want to save money because when I tell you something about Copilot and time management, which of course could have been possible, others in the room will say, well, we don't have Copilot, we have Claude, we have ChatGPT, we don't use that system. Why does this person now get a virtual private classroom? VPC it's called, by the way. And then it's perfectly fine to say, look, it wasn't on the agenda, it was never promised. I can understand why you want it, but we can do one-to-one coaching. And by the way, he fully understood that I said that, and he accepted that. We both agreed on it. So it's important that criticism— when you get criticism, you have the right to make a statement. You have a right to make yourself heard.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
The main problem now arises when you have people who do not only lack self-reflection, but they are part of other people who brought their career forward, and they will always stick together under certain circumstances. When people say, look, This person promoted me, so next time I am going to help them with their promotion. And we basically push each other up the corporate or the organizational ladder. That's called insider deal. These insider deals are of course not great, not neither for the people and especially not for the organization. And when it gets really bad, you end up with cliques. And a clique means a group of people, 2, 3, 4 people, and they stick together whatever the cost. If someone does something wrong, they will always blame someone else. Someone does something right, they all expect praise, every single one of them.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
So, and by the way, the main issue here when people say, but a network is important— yes, a network based on skills and quality is actually helpful. You should have your network. Networking is extremely important. However, insider deals and cliques are not network. Insider deals and cliques are, I chose people randomly that helped me and I will push them forward even if they are not competent for the job. So these kind of cliques are not helpful. They are harmful for the organization. They're harmful for teams, the departments. And by the way, they are finally harmful to you because sooner or later you will end up somewhere where you are brutally incompetent and you will fail massively, and then you will not recover from that. That's a very important point here.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
The question is, what can we do now? Because we are here to talk about how to make things better, not to complain about things. First, of course, when people think they have a great self-reflection and they know it all, you have to bring them to awareness. There's coaching available. You can make Leaders aware of that, probably, maybe they are not the only source of knowledge, information, or wisdom.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Very important with this awareness, by the way, now very important is when you say, well, regarding feedback and criticism, we do this once a year. That's as a first step, that is good. However, let's say a person evaluates you and you evaluate your leader. When you can do that, amazing, thumbs up, go for it. Some people will now say, look, I'm a factory worker, I'm relying on this job, I'm working in a country where I have no layoff protection, I should criticize my leader who is a double MBA prestigious university person, and I got into this business by recommendation by a friend. I'm hanging on a thread, and, and now they expect me to criticize the person that can fire me on the spot? Here's the hint: it's not gonna happen. And of course, that is understandable. It's not for everyone.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
So that's why some people have anonymous, an anonymous system in place. When feedback becomes very straightforward. Anonymous systems win because many people are unable or unwilling or both to criticize their leaders because they fear the negative consequences. So you need to have a process in place, and the process must reflect on absolutely anyone's needs.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
When you're a small organization, you know each other well, so you all talk together every single day anyway. You probably do already have a process in place which happens every single day. The larger the organization becomes, The more processes you need in place— annual appraisal interview is the first starting point, then evaluation of leaders. However, when now a negative evaluation happens, what's the consequence? Not only for the person working there. When you have a worker that's really bad, doesn't produce great quality, there will be consequences. What happens when you have a leader who's not doing well? Because many people say, as soon as I criticize my leader, they get everything put together in a paper, they get it served via email, then they read it and they delete it. Nothing's happening.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
So you must have this bonus-maler system, the good and bad system, with consequence, of course, on both sides, not only on the lower end of the hierarchical pyramid. It's very important that this process needs to be in place. The good thing is that as soon as people know there's a process, leadership usually becomes better. I give you a very simple example. When your sales team says, we need, we need, we really have a bad software, we need a new CRM system, and you say, oh yeah you know, at the end of the day We have to make our clients happy. I just take a note, and then you say the magic phrase, I hear you. I don't know why there are still coaches out there who tell you that I hear you is remotely acceptable. I hear you means I hear you and I couldn't care less. When you think that I hear you is a good phrase, or you have trainers or coaches who tell you it is, here are the news: it's not. Because "I hear you" is one of the most passive-aggressive lines we have in the workplace as of yet. So be aware that you get rid of that line the quicker the better.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And when you now have a process in place where people say, "Look, I actually wanted to say 'I hear you' and then do nothing. However, I know there's a process in place. Next year they're going to evaluate me. They evaluate me based on what I just said." And they will probably say, "He promised something." 'Niels promised something and he didn't keep the promise.' And that's not great, is it? So as soon as people see there's a process in place, the action actually goes forward way quicker. And when you then have the action in place and the reflection goes up—better awareness, excellent process, action being taken—by time, things will become a lot better in your organization. I wish you all the best implementing that in your organization as well.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And when you now say, 'Wait, I have a couple of questions about this. This is rather complex, isn't it?' Yes, of course. So first, of course, when you now watch me on YouTube, feel free to to leave a like there, subscribe to my channel, feel free of course to leave a comment there. I'm always looking to have discussions with you. When you now listen to me on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you can also leave a review there. Thank you very much for 5 stars. We put a lot of effort into this, so, and we're also very grateful if you recommend this.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
We again, by the way, side remark, we went top 100 in India. In India! I'm a non-native speaker and we are now top 100 last week. Top of what that— there are 1.1 billion people living there within, with an aeon of podcasts out there, and we went top 100. So thank you very much for being so loyal to this podcast. When you recommend this to friends, family, workplace, absolutely anywhere, I'm very grateful for that. I put a lot of effort into this research and everything, so I'm very happy when you recommend this to anyone who's able to join.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
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Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
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Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
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Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
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Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And of course, you can follow me on social media. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Instagram, leave a like on Facebook, or subscribe to my channel on YouTube. However, and by the way, if you contact me on any of these platforms or via email, I answer every single message within 24 hours or less. So I'm looking forward to hearing from you there.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
The most important message, however, is always the last one I give in every single podcast and videocast. Apply, apply, apply what you heard in this podcast, because only when you apply what you heard, you will see the positive aspects that you obviously want to see in your organization. I wish you all the best doing so. Feel free to contact me anytime. I'm answering every single message within 24 hours or less, so I'm looking forward to hearing from you there.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And at the end of this podcast, as well as at the end of this videocast, there's only one thing left for me to say: thank you very much. For your time.