Want to see your co-workers run away in terror?

Offer to give them feedback.

It could be feedback on a big presentation, a critical project, or simply your opinion on a fashion choice, with real potential for serious career damage. Whether major or minor, positive or negative, feedback is workplace nitroglycerine and must be handled with care.

And speaking of care, it doesn't matter that your willingness to give feedback shows that you care. Nobody cares that you care. If providing feedback is not in your job description, it's not in anybody's interest that you insist on doing it.

Unless, of course, you know how to do feedback right.

"How to Share Tough Feedback, According to Experts," a helpful article by Jancee Dunn in The New York Times, is full of feedback on the fine art of sharing feedback. Which, as it turns out, nobody wants to do.

Case in point — a 2022 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which a cadre of "research assistants asked people to fill out a survey while the assistants had a blob of lipstick or food on their faces." (You can relate, of course. How many job interviews have you blown simply because you had a splotch of spinach peeking through your teeth or a hunk of hamburger hanging from your lower lip?)

Though the research assistants had flagrant problems with their appearance, "less than 3% of those surveyed pointed it out." This shows, according to Professor Vanessa Bohns, that "being honest is hard for many of us because we don't want to hurt someone's feelings."

Perhaps. But what if that blobbed-up person was your chief competitor at work? Would you provide helpful feedback or would you decide it would be just peachy if your competitor spent their day going from meeting to meeting, looking like a slob?

This raises a critical concept. Not all feedback is designed to help the recipient. Sometimes, feedback helps the feedback giver. And heaven help the person who accepts it.

For example, you are encouraged to share if the feedback is beneficial, not harmful. But beneficial to whom? If you can provide feedback that will unsettle or even silence a competitor, that could be extremely beneficial — to you.

Feedback is also allowed if the timing is right. Perhaps the recipient of your feedback is testing out some new ideas that you know will be warmly received by management. This is the perfect time to give them the "Let me reflect on those ideas and get back to you" response. While you're reflecting and they're waiting, you do a quick runaround, taking those ideas, polishing them up and getting them to management first. Sure, they're not your ideas, but you would have thought them up yourself, eventually, if people weren't always bugging you for feedback.

The experts also recommend that you hold back when "honesty will lead to emotional harm without instrumental value." This is a very humane approach, but shortsighted. Certainly, it will cause emotional and even career harm when you helpfully extract all the good ideas out of a work friend's presentation to the board of directors. And sure, your idea of inserting sections of horrorcore rap in the presentation may not play well with sclerotic zombies on the board.

But the major career advantage you could gain makes the feedback well worth sharing. After your friend's disastrous performance, you step forward with your own, rap-free presentation. This may seem sneaky and inappropriate, but in the afterglow of your super-successful presentation, you can explain the pressure your colleague is under with their pathetic need for feedback and their frantic attempts to leave the company.

What are friends for, right?

If you are still not sure whether or not to share feedback, the experts suggest you consider what would be the consequences if you removed yourself from the situation. "Do you still feel that the person should receive the feedback?" If you believe your colleague could make mistakes that damage their career, which in turn could help your career, there is certainly every reason to keep your opinions to yourself.

Remember — it's not your job to help your work friends succeed. It's your job to help yourself to all the spoils available — the raises, the perks, the ISOs and ESOs and RSUs that make work satisfying.

That's my feedback for you. And as for that piece of pastrami hanging off your nose, I say leave it. On you, it looks good!

Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at [email protected]. To find out more about Bob Goldman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Caleb Minear at Unsplash