Your Review Said You're "Hard to Work With." You Thought You Were Being Direct.

Two true things in the same document

The technical section is the best on the team. You shipped it, you caught the thing in staging that would have cost the company a bad weekend, you're who people escalate to at 2am. Then the 360 summary: abrasive, dismissive of other people's ideas, hard to work with. No examples, because the responses were anonymous, so there's nobody to ask and nothing to check.

Start with one line you said in Tuesday's design review, and the version of it that carries exactly the same information.

"That's wrong." → "That doesn't match what I'm seeing. The retry fires before the timeout, so we'd double-charge."

The first one adjudicates. It's a verdict on a person, delivered in front of an audience, and it's finished before they can be any part of it. The second puts the disagreement on the table where two people can look at the same object, and it costs you almost nothing.

The distance between those two sentences is the whole review. Honesty was never what anyone was reacting to. It's the compression. You ship the conclusion and bin the working, because the working is overhead, and at speed that is very hard to tell apart from contempt.

Which is also why the usual advice bounces off you. They'll tell you to use I-statements, and to soften your language, which you will hear as an instruction to lie more slowly. You'll refuse, and you're right to refuse, because that isn't the problem either. Nothing in the pairs below asks you to agree with something you think is wrong, or hedge, or perform an uncertainty you don't have. The position survives intact. What changes is what the delivery says about your opinion of the other person.

"We already discussed this." → "We landed on X last week. Has something changed?"

What people hear in the first one is that you're being made to repeat yourself and they should have remembered. The second is genuinely open, and it earns you information, because sometimes something has changed and you're the one who doesn't know it yet.

"Obviously…" → nothing. Delete the word.

There's no second register for this one. Every time you use it, anyone in the room who didn't find it obvious has been told in front of colleagues that they're slow. The word buys you nothing at all. It's pure cost.

The counterargument that starts at word six. → "So you're saying we hold the release until the audit clears. I'd push back on that, because…"

You began responding before they'd finished, because you had the shape of the argument early and waiting felt wasteful. What it communicates is that you weren't listening, you were queuing. The fix isn't a theatrical pause. It's one clause of their point, said back, before you take it apart.

"I don't have time for this." → "I can't get to this today. Thursday?"

Same refusal in both. One of them is about the task and one of them is about the person.

Twenty silent approvals and fourteen comments on the bad one. → "The way you handled the pagination edge case is right."

Go and look at your last two months of review comments. If you approved twenty pull requests with no words at all, and left fourteen comments on the one that was badly done, then from that author's side your entire communication history with them is criticism. That isn't a personality read. It's arithmetic. Saying what's good, once, specifically, fixes it, and it costs you a sentence.

Now the aside you've been wanting to make since the first paragraph, which is that some of this feedback might be unfair. It happens. Review processes get used against people who were right about something expensive, or who blocked something a senior person wanted, and anonymous channels are occasionally weaponised. And if you're the only person in the room from a different background, identical behaviour can get read more harshly: Kieran Snyder's 2014 analysis of performance reviews in tech found personality criticism, "abrasive" among the words, running through women's reviews and almost absent from men's.

Test the boring explanation first anyway, because it's the commoner one and it's the only one you have any control over. If you clean up the phrasings, ask the narrow questions below, and six months later the same feedback comes back with still no examples attached, then you're looking at something structural, and the question stops being how do I fix this and becomes whether this is the right building.

The questions, then. You can't source anonymous comments and you shouldn't try, but you can generate your own examples, and this is the part that moves things. Pick three or four people you work with regularly, and not the ones you suspect wrote it, because that's an investigation and it will be obvious. Go to each of them separately. Ask one narrow, past-tense, specific question. Not "do you have any feedback for me", which gets you nothing, because the honest answer is socially expensive and they know it. Something closer to: "When I pushed back in the architecture review last month, how did that land with you?"

Then the hard part. Whatever they say, you say thank you and stop talking. No context. No explanation of what you actually meant. No "right, but the reason I said it that way was…" One defensive sentence and that person never tells you anything true again, and nor will anyone they mention it to. Write the rebuttal at home if you need it written. The moment of receiving it has to be clean or there is no second sample.

Emma is TrueTalk's EQ advisor, and she's an AI, not a witness, which is the only reason you'd type out Tuesday's sentence word for word and ask how it read from the other chair. First conversation free, subscription after. She's working off your account of it, so she can't tell you what your colleague felt. Nobody outside their head can.

One more thing, about timing, because it's what catches people out. Behaviour changes on Monday. Reputation doesn't. It updates slowly, after enough new evidence has accumulated to overwrite what people already believe, and in the first few weeks some of them will notice you being careful and decide you're managing them, which reads worse than blunt did. That's a fair reaction to a sudden change nobody explained. Saying it out loud once to your immediate team — "I got feedback that I come across as dismissive, I'm working on it, tell me when I do it" — shortens that considerably, and it's about the most credible thing available to you, because it's not a sentence a contemptuous person tends to say.

Nobody is asking you to be less direct, whatever the review made it sound like. Directness is why they escalate to you at 2am. They're asking for the sentence to carry the information and the fact that you don't think they're an idiot, which is usually one clause longer than the thing you said.

"We landed on X last week. Has something changed?"