Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.

Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.

Created with Tess Gouws, clarity coach and facilitator at Goya XD.

Stop us when this starts to feel familiar: You gave someone feedback, after really thinking it through and picking your words carefully. You were even nice about it.

But weeks later, the same thing is still happening. And now you're sitting there wondering whether they heard you at all.

Your words? Probably. 

What you wanted them to hear? Probably not.

And there’s a good reason why.

The curse of context

In your head, the whole picture was right there; the context, the reasoning, what "good" was meant to look like. All of it was very obvious to you. And that’s the trap.

See, the more deeply you know something (the more skilled or experienced or entrenched in your own business you are), the worse you get at remembering what it's like not to know it. 

Psychologists at Stanford showed this in 1990 already; they asked people to tap out the rhythm of a well-known song on a table, and then made them guess how often someone else would be able to name the song.

Most people predicted 50%. They were way off.

The real number was 2.5% – just 3 songs out of 120. Why? The tapper hears the whole tune in their head; their taps are just the beats. The listener does not have the context of the full song (and if they were just busy with a task, they probably still have the tune of their own different song in their head), so it literally just sounds like a bunch of knocking to them.

Your feedback works the same way: You are giving beats to a full tune playing in your head (your vision for where this needs to go next quarter/year), and all they hear is a bunch of nonsensical tapping (critique or “extra work”).

It gets refiltered on the way in

Your message doesn't arrive the way you send it; it runs through their own personal lenses, their style, and comes out the other side as something a little different.

Some examples:

It isn't a small risk, either. The largest review of feedback research ever done (607 separate results) found that feedback lifted performance on average, but actually made it worse in more than a third of cases.

So, how do you tell if your message landed? The easiest thing in the world: Ask. Get confirmation before they leave the room. Clinical psychologist, Dr Marshall Rosenberg, was a big advocate of ending every feedback session or instruction with a quick “What did you hear me say?” Adding one extra minute to the conversation may just save you weeks (or months) of pain.

This Youth Month, Sandi Richardson, Chief People Officer at RCS, said that when it comes to youth, hiring is the easy part. What counts is whether you can actually map a meaningful career out for a young person in your organisation.

Filling quotas helps no one. At RCS, she can point to specific, planned journeys for every young hire — from agent to team lead to specialist, for example.

The question worth sitting with: First, did you bring on enough young people this year? Then, how many have a real route to a better role in 12 months?

64.3%

is how many South African companies now give their top performers a bigger increase than everyone else. The flat, across-the-board raise is disappearing as companies realise that your best people are quietly being underpaid against a market that's courting them, while your weakest are being overpaid to stay.

The lever isn't a fatter budget; it's deciding, on purpose, who gets more and why.

Source: Remchannel (Old Mutual) HR Quarterly, 2026

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