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

Start with Tuesday's sentence

Your technical review is the strongest on the team. You shipped the work, caught the staging fault that would have cost the company a bad weekend, and remain the person people call at 2am. The same 360 summary calls you abrasive, dismissive of other people's ideas and hard to work with. Because the comments are anonymous and contain no examples, you cannot ask the authors what they meant.

Use something you can inspect: one line from Tuesday's design review.

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

Both versions reject the proposal. The first is a verdict on the person in front of an audience. The second names the observation and gives everyone the working. Your honesty survives; what disappears is the compression that colleagues can reasonably read as contempt. You do not need to adopt I-statements, soften a conclusion, hedge a position or perform uncertainty you do not have. Hearing that advice as an instruction to lie more slowly is reasonable; the replacements below keep every disagreement intact and change what its delivery says about your view of the other person.

The Center for Creative Leadership's Situation-Behavior-Impact model asks for the specific time and place, the observable behaviour and its impact, without inserting opinions into the behaviour description. CCL also recommends asking about intent so feedback becomes a two-way conversation rather than a monologue (Center for Creative Leadership). Use that same discipline when you disagree.

Change five repeatable habits

“We already discussed this.” becomes “We landed on X last week. Has something changed?” The new question leaves room for information that arrived after the earlier decision.

Delete “obviously.” It tells every colleague who did not find the point obvious that they are slow, and it contributes no technical information.

When your counterargument begins at word six, first return one clause of the other person's position: “So you're saying we hold the release until the audit clears. I'd push back on that, because…” You often recognise the shape early and start preparing the answer before they finish. Repeating one clause demonstrates that you heard the claim; a theatrical pause does not.

“I don't have time for this.” becomes “I can't get to this today. Thursday?” The refusal stays. The task, rather than the person, receives it.

Finally, inspect your last two months of review comments. If twenty pull requests received silent approval and the badly executed one received fourteen comments, that author's whole visible history with you is criticism. One specific positive observation, such as “The way you handled the pagination edge case is right,” fixes the arithmetic of a criticism-only history. CCL says its SBI structure applies to both positive and negative feedback, while Acas recommends regular informal feedback alongside formal reviews (CCL; Acas).

Collect your own examples

Some feedback is unfair. Anonymous review channels can be weaponised after someone blocks an expensive proposal or contradicts a senior person. Identical behaviour can also be judged differently across backgrounds. Kieran Snyder's 2014 analysis of performance reviews in technology found personality criticism, including “abrasive,” throughout women's reviews and almost absent from men's.

Test the more common, controllable explanation before deciding the process is structural. Choose three or four regular colleagues, excluding the people you suspect wrote the review; approaching suspected anonymous reviewers would be an obvious investigation. Ask each person separately about a named past event: “When I pushed back in the architecture review last month, how did that land with you?” A broad request for feedback makes honesty socially expensive and usually produces nothing useful.

Acas says performance objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, and gives an example that specifies a 48-hour reduction in response time with a review after three months (Acas). Apply that specificity to your own change: identify a sentence, define its replacement and check the result in a later one-to-one.

When a colleague answers, say thank you and stop. Give no context, correction or explanation of what you meant. One defensive sentence and that person never tells you anything true again, nor will anyone they mention it to. Write the rebuttal at home if you need to see it written.

Clean up the five phrasings, ask the narrow questions, and watch what happens for six months. If the same review returns without examples, a structural problem becomes more plausible and you can decide whether this is the right organisation.

Expect reputation to lag behind behaviour

Change the sentences on Monday. Colleagues' expectations will update only after repeated new evidence, and some may initially read your care as managing them, which can feel worse than your earlier bluntness. That suspicion is a fair reaction to a sudden change you have not explained. Acknowledge the review 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.” Saying it once to your immediate team considerably shortens the reputation lag. That disclosure is credible precisely because a contemptuous colleague rarely volunteers it.

A published South Korean study analysed 529 valid responses from frontline employees and found that psychological safety affected team performance indirectly through team learning behaviour and efficacy. It defines psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for the interpersonal risks of team behaviour (Frontiers in Psychology via PubMed Central). Your extra clause matters because it leaves room for those risks.

Nobody is asking you to be less direct; your directness is why colleagues escalate to you at 2am. Keep the technical position intact. Deliver the conclusion with the observation behind it and one clause showing that you do not think the other person is an idiot.

Emotional Intelligence Emma is TrueTalk's AI EQ advisor, not a witness. You can paste Tuesday's exact sentence and ask how it reads from the other chair, but the answer still rests on your account and cannot establish what a colleague felt. The free tier includes ten conversations and one hundred messages per day.