You're frustrated with someone on your team. They're not meeting your expectations, they're not "getting it," and you can feel resentment building every time they miss the mark. You've been giving them direction, assigning tasks, course-correcting their work - and yet nothing changes. Before you conclude that this person isn't capable, it's worth asking a harder question: have you actually told them what the problem is?

The slow build of unspoken frustration

This pattern is remarkably common among busy leaders. Someone on your team isn't performing the way you'd like, and because you don't have time to sit down and address it properly, you start working around the problem instead. You give increasingly specific direction, hoping they'll read between the lines. You ask their peers to nudge them. You start checking their work more closely. You duplicate instructions because you don't trust the first attempt will land.

None of this is feedback. It's supervision masquerading as communication.

What makes this pattern so insidious is that it feels productive. You're still engaging with the person, still giving them work, still involved. But the actual message - "here is what I'm observing, here is why it concerns me, and here is what I need to change" - never gets delivered. And the longer it goes unsaid, the more your frustration compounds, and the harder it becomes to raise without it feeling disproportionate.

Get clear with yourself first

One reason leaders avoid giving feedback isn't just a lack of time - it's a lack of clarity. You know something is wrong, but articulating exactly what it is can be surprisingly difficult. Why don't you trust this person? What specific behaviours are driving your frustration? Is it the quality of their output, their communication style, their follow-through, or something less tangible like a lack of initiative?

Taking even thirty minutes to reflect on these questions can be transformative. Often, what feels like a broad performance problem turns out to be two or three specific, observable behaviours. And specific behaviours are things you can actually talk about. "I've noticed you tend to wait for direction rather than proposing solutions" is a conversation. "You're just not performing" is not.

This clarity also protects you from delivering feedback that's really just accumulated irritation looking for a target. If you can't articulate the behaviour, the impact, and what you'd like to see instead, you're not ready to give the feedback yet - and that's fine. But that means the next step is getting ready, not continuing to silently stew.

Deliver the feedback, not a proxy for it

Once you're clear on what you need to say, the next challenge is actually saying it - directly, to the person, in a dedicated conversation. Not buried in a task assignment. Not relayed through a peer. Not implied through increasingly granular direction.

This is where time-poor leaders struggle most. Feedback conversations feel expensive. They require preparation, emotional energy, and follow-up. When your calendar is already full, it's tempting to convince yourself that your ongoing direction is "basically the same thing." It isn't. Direction tells someone what to do. Feedback tells someone what you're observing and what needs to change. One manages the task, the other develops the person.

The irony is that avoiding the conversation almost always costs more time than having it. Every workaround you build - the extra check-ins, the duplicated instructions, the peer-relayed nudges - is time you wouldn't need to spend if the person understood what was expected and had a fair chance to meet those expectations.

Separate expectations from auditing

There's a related trap that's worth naming. When leaders finally do address a performance concern, there's a temptation to conflate setting expectations with checking up on someone. The conversation becomes half "here's what I need from you" and half "and I'll be watching closely to make sure you do it."

This is counterproductive. People can feel the difference between being trusted with clear expectations and being put on notice. If every piece of feedback comes packaged with surveillance, you're not setting someone up to succeed - you're documenting a case for their failure.

Set the expectations clearly and give the person genuine space to meet them. If you need to follow up, do it as a separate, supportive check-in rather than as an extension of the original critique. The goal is to create an environment where someone can actually change their behaviour, not one where they feel they're already being managed out.

Make feedback a habit, not an event

The leaders who rarely struggle with this problem are the ones who give feedback continuously rather than saving it up. When feedback is a regular, low-stakes part of how you operate, individual conversations don't carry the weight of months of accumulated frustration. A quick "I noticed X in that project and I'd like to see more of Y next time" is easy to deliver and easy to receive when it's just part of how your team works.

The uncomfortable truth is that if you've been frustrated with someone for weeks or months without telling them, the performance problem is no longer just theirs. You've contributed to it by withholding the information they needed to improve. That's not a comfortable realisation, but it's a useful one - because unlike someone else's behaviour, your own communication habits are something you can change immediately.

Find the time. Get clear on what you're seeing. Say it directly. Then give them the space to respond.