The Program Manager Who Was Brutally Honest — And Nearly Lost His Team

    A brilliant technical program manager thought brutal public feedback was leadership. Here's how the Wheel of Change rebuilt his behaviour — and why his story is a warning for every high-IQ manager in India Inc.

    The Program Manager Who Was Brutally Honest — And Nearly Lost His Team

    The Program Manager Who Was Brutally Honest — And Nearly Lost His Team

    A program manager I studied for this book was everything a company wants on paper — sharp, technically superb, promoted fast. And he was, at the same time, quietly pushing his best people toward the door. His weapon was feedback. His problem was that he thought honesty and cruelty were the same thing.

    In short

    Where this sits on your Winning Kite

    The Wheel of Change is Technique #2 under Productivity (PQ) — the bottom side of the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework). But notice where this particular story actually bites: it is a productivity tool solving a relationship problem. A manager can be technically outstanding and still fail, because EQ, RQ and PQ don't operate in silos — they hold each other up. Weaken one corner of the kite and the whole thing loses lift, no matter how strong the other three sides are.

    The Manager Everyone Feared, and Nobody Trusted

    Here's the set-up, drawn straight from the case files I use in my leadership sessions. A program manager — sharp, capable, the kind of person who solves technical problems faster than anyone else in the room — had risen through the ranks purely on the strength of his skills. But the higher he climbed, the more people management became his actual job. And that is exactly where he began to unravel.

    His colleagues saw him as selfish, overly critical, and unsupportive. Not because he lacked competence — he had plenty — but because of how he treated people once they reported to him. His approach to feedback was harmful. He made hurtful remarks. He behaved inconsiderately. His comments caused real distress among team members, and it wasn't occasional — it was his default mode.

    Underneath it, he had a story he told himself: his team wasn't putting in enough effort. They were lazy. They took things for granted. And because he believed this, he also believed it was his duty as a boss to be brutally honest with them — in public, in front of others, without softening a word. In his mind, that wasn't cruelty. That was integrity.

    But his coworkers didn't experience it as integrity. They experienced it as an attack, repeated often enough that they stopped respecting him and stopped trusting him. And that is the trap so many high-IQ, high-output managers in India Inc walk straight into: they confuse volume of honesty with quality of leadership.

    The Business Risk Nobody Wanted to Say Out Loud

    Here's what made this case study urgent rather than just uncomfortable. Top management had big plans for this program manager. They saw him leading an entire business unit — a real promotion, a real vote of confidence in his technical and strategic ability.

    But there was a quiet, serious problem sitting underneath that plan: if he were promoted as he was, several key employees would leave the company. Not underperformers. Key people. The ones the company could least afford to lose. His management style, unchanged, would have converted a promotion into an exodus.

    This is the exact moment I see repeated across Indian offices, factories, IT floors and startups — a genuinely capable person about to be handed more scope and more people, with no plan for the one behaviour that could sink the whole investment. Skill got him promoted. Feedback style could undo it. The company needed him to change — specifically in how he gave feedback to his team — before it handed him the keys to a bigger ship.

    Applying the Wheel of Change: The Program Manager's Plan

    This is exactly the kind of situation the Wheel of Change is built to solve — not vague advice to "be nicer," but a specific plan across its four quadrants: Creating, Preserving, Eliminating, Accepting.

    1. Creating — Build the Sandwich Approach

    First, he needed to create a completely new habit: the Sandwich Approach to feedback. This means presenting both positive and negative comments in a deliberate sequence — begin with genuine positive remarks, gently introduce the negative aspects, and conclude with more positive, forward-looking feedback. It's not about hiding the truth inside compliments. It's about delivering the same honest message in a form the other person can actually hear and act on, instead of one that makes them shut down or check out. Alongside this, he needed to create the habit of listening more patiently to his colleagues — not waiting for his turn to correct them, but actually hearing what they were saying before responding.

    2. Preserving — Keep the Honesty, Lose the Weapon

    This is the part people often get wrong when they try to "fix" a harsh manager — they assume the goal is to make him softer and less truthful. It isn't. The plan explicitly told him to maintain his honesty, because genuine feedback drives real productivity — sugar-coating everything into meaninglessness helps no one. What needed to change was not the truth he was telling, but the language he used to tell it. Same substance. Different delivery. Preserve the rigour; soften the blade.

    3. Eliminating — Stop the Public Blame

    Third, and this is the hardest quadrant for most managers like him: he had to stop blaming others and stop making general, sweeping criticisms — the kind that label an entire person or team as lazy or careless rather than addressing a specific, fixable behaviour. He also had to eliminate his condescending, authoritative tone. Public callouts, humiliating comparisons, blanket judgments about someone's character — all of it had to go. Not because honesty is wrong, but because that particular packaging of honesty destroys the very trust a manager needs to lead.

    4. Accepting — Feedback Is a Skill, Not a Personality Trait

    Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he had to accept a hard truth about himself: giving feedback is an art, and a crucial part of his job — not a side activity he could bulldoze through. He needed to genuinely understand that his previous approach had been harmful rather than helpful, however good his intentions were. And he needed to accept that changing this would take time and require patience with his team, who wouldn't trust the new version of him overnight, no matter how sincere the change was.

    Why This Case Study Matters Beyond One Manager

    I use this story often in my corporate sessions because it captures a pattern I've seen across sectors — IT, manufacturing, defence-adjacent PSUs, startups. The most technically gifted people are frequently the ones most at risk of this exact failure mode, because their early career success came entirely from being right, not from being trusted. Nobody taught them that once you manage people, being right in public without empathy stops being a strength and starts being a liability.

    This is also where I bring in a thought from Daniel Goleman's work on emotional intelligence, purely as supporting colour: he found that how a leader delivers difficult messages predicts team performance far more reliably than the leader's raw intelligence. The program manager in this case study had the intelligence. What he was missing — until the Wheel of Change gave him a concrete, quadrant-by-quadrant plan — was the delivery.

    By implementing these strategies, a manager like this can genuinely improve his interpersonal skills, rebuild trust with his team, and create a work environment people don't dread walking into. That's not a soft outcome. That's the difference between a promotion that strengthens the business and one that quietly bleeds it of talent.

    If you want to see how the same Wheel of Change played out at a completely different scale — a national cricket team rebuilding itself from repeated defeat — read the companion piece on the Wheel of Change framework. And if you're building leadership capability across your organisation, explore our corporate training topics or the Signature Programs built around exactly these real-world scenarios.

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    Avinash Chate

    TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · Author of Stars at India Inc.

    Avinash has trained the Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership, emotional intelligence and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Why do technically brilliant managers often give harsh feedback?

    They are usually promoted for technical skill, not people skill, and they mistake bluntness for honesty. They believe being 'brutally honest' in public is their duty as a boss, without realising it destroys trust and psychological safety.

    What is the Sandwich Approach to giving feedback?

    It means opening with genuine positive remarks, gently introducing the area that needs improvement, and closing with encouragement. It keeps feedback honest while protecting the other person's dignity and motivation.

    Which quadrant of the Wheel of Change applies to a harsh feedback giver?

    Mainly Eliminating (stop the public, blaming, condescending style of feedback) and Creating (build the new habit of the Sandwich Approach and patient listening). Preserving keeps his technical rigour and honesty; Accepting means acknowledging that his old style, however well-intentioned, was harmful.

    Where does this fit on the Winning Kite framework?

    This is a PQ (Productivity Quotient) story — the Wheel of Change is a bottom-of-the-kite productivity technique. But its real impact plays out on the RQ (Relationship Quotient) side, because feedback style is what determines whether people trust and follow a manager.

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