Why Feedback Never Lands With the Most Convincing Person in the Room | Ep5

Both exist to keep a grand self-image intact. The first works by getting you to think well of them. Self-promotion, charm, confident claims about their own capability, a visible effort to be seen as exceptional. Psychologists call this half admiration. The second works by pulling other people down, devaluing them, hostility when contradicted, treating a colleague's success as something subtracted from their own standing.

This half is called rivalry. The reason this matters to you is that the two halves predict opposite outcomes. Admiration predicts being liked, being seen as capable and getting picked. In contrast, rivalry predicts being disliked, being seen as untrustworthy and the collapse of the good standing that admiration built.

A single overall score averages the two and hands you the mean of a positive and a negative. This is little better than useless when it comes to understanding narcissistic behaviour. This is where most people's intuition fails. Neither half is a performance. Both halves run automatically and both feel from the inside like a genuine response to the situation.

The director you heard about was not laying groundwork in month one and not executing a plan in month four. Both systems were running. One starts immediately, the other fires only when something arrives that looks like a threat and in month one of a new contract there's unlikely to be any threat so you don't see the behaviour.

One There's a natural timetable to narcissistic behaviour and it's been measured in more than one way. Over 300 people met in small groups over three weeks. It was filmed throughout with trained observers coding what people actually did rather than what anybody said afterwards. Two parts explain the whole trajectory.

Confident expressive behaviour produced an impression of capability but mattered less as the weeks went by. Meanwhile arrogant hostile behaviour produced an impression of untrustworthiness and mattered more. Three weeks in groups with no hierarchy, nothing at stake and no reason for anybody to hide anything.

A second study ran longer and was done twice. In the first part of the study groups rated each other's leadership across a 12 week period. Among 112 people who'd never met, the admiration trait was associated with higher peer ratings in the period that the group was forming and with nothing at all later.

In the second part of the study, among 152 people who already knew each other, it went with nothing at the start and lower ratings by the end. Think about that second one for a minute because it's exactly what happens after an internal promotion. Think before moving on let's talk about who this doesn't describe because a common mistake here isn't failing to spot the pattern putting the word on someone it doesn't fit gets four different people mislabeled the confident one who doesn't need you high self-esteem is a judgment that you're adequate this is a judgment that you're superior specifically in competence rather than kindness the two barely go together which you would not expect if one was an inflated version of the other the loud one who isn't keeping score extroversion is about engagement with people this is about the extent of your extroversion relative to theirs the high extrovert may simply be enjoying the meeting the quiet prickly one there's a second form carrying the same entitlement with none of the confidence and the findings don't transfer between them everything today concerns the confident form and the one who needs a clinician a qualified professional diagnoses a clinical condition with direct access to the person what i'm describing is a trait based on a continuum that everybody sits somewhere on nothing here can be turned into a diagnosis of anybody and i'd ask you not to read that as a disclaimer bolted on for safety it's a key point because two findings that change how i think about this were both published in the last 18 months when any of us get something wrong the brain fires a small alarm about a tenth of a second later that's before you've consciously noticed anything and it's one of the most studied signals in brain research two competing explanations of what sits under this confidence make opposite predictions if grandiosity is a shell over something fragile the alarm should ring louder if confidence is maintained by not registering the bad news in the first place the alarm should ring more quietly researchers at southampton tested the two against each other 144 people did a task designed to trip them up while scalp sensors recorded what the brains did each time they slipped up then 50 more did a version that told them after every attempt whether they just slipped up removing any question of whether they knew about the mistake or not both times higher narcissism went with a quiet as an alarm signal i'm being careful because this is striking and something that can easily be overstated it doesn't show anybody's incapable of learning from mistakes it shows a difference in fast brain responses during a laboratory test in two groups of mostly white british students and the authors say so themselves another research group examining the same question does not straightforwardly agree The second finding inverts the picture almost everybody has.

Across nine studies and 77,000 people, including a two-week period in which participants logged every moment of feeling left out on their phones as it happened, people hiring trait narcissism reported being excluded far more often than everybody else, looking back and in real time. The narcissist of popular imagination sits at the centre of attention.

The narcissist in this data is the person quietly left off the invitation. Three things drove it and the third is the one that matters to you. They read unclear situations as rejection and not obvious ones. When exclusion is unmistakable, they read it as anybody would. When a situation is genuinely open to interpretation, they land on rejection more often than the rest of us.

The unanswered message, the slightly short reply. Second, people really do avoid them, so some of the feeling of exclusion is not being misread at all. And third, it runs both ways. The trait contributes to exclusion, and exclusion in turn appears to feed the trait. Now watch what that does to the story.

A colleague becomes difficult. The team doesn't confront them, but withdraws instead. Fewer informal conversations, decisions taken before the meeting rather than in it. An email chain that quietly drops a participant. Every one of those is ambiguous by design, which is exactly what makes them survivable for the people making them.

And ambiguous is precisely the signal the narcissist overreads. I should say plainly that the last step there is my reading, not the study's findings. Every link in the chain is separately evidence, so hold it as a hypothesis. It Ask anybody what narcissists lack and you'll get the same response. Empathy.

It may be the most repeated claim about the trait, but it points you to the wrong expectation. Empathy splits into two separate things. First, reading what somebody is feeling. And second, being moved by what you read about what somebody is feeling. A review of 23 studies found this trait sitting apart from the others.

With small positive links to the reading side against consistently negative ones for the traits it gets grouped with. A 2025 review pooled 14 studies and almost 5,500 people found no reliable link either way. What the two rule out between them is a thing everybody believes, which is that the reading of emotions has gone missing.

That matters because manipulation requires accurate reading. You can't press somebody's weak point without knowing where it is. So put this beside the last beat. The mistake registers faintly. The other person's distress registers perfectly well and moves nothing. Two different signals and the same practical consequence.

The say This brings us to what you can actually do with all this. A large synthesis of study data separated two questions the field had paired for 20 years. Does this trait predict who gets picked as a leader and does it predict who turns out to be a good leader? The data predict the first, but not the second.

Even the link to getting picked roughly halved once raters had known the person for longer than a week. This is the same time schedule as before, arrived at by a completely different route. Now the part rarely quoted. Ratings from supervisors, peers and subordinates showed no relationship with this trait at all, while ratings the person gave themselves showed a clear positive one.

In terms of how well this person is performing, the person best placed to know and everybody around them disagree, in a predictable direction. That reads as reassuring, but it's nothing of the kind. A trait that predicts who gets chosen and nothing about performance adds noise to leadership appointments with no compensating benefit in successful outcomes.

One interesting finding published in June 2026, which I suspect anyone who sat through a return to office announcement after the COVID pandemic lockdown will recognise. Three studies. The first involving 259 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies during the pandemic. The second, 359 managers surveyed with the other dark traits measured alongside.

And the third, an experiment with 546 leaders. Across all three studies, narcissism was the only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote working. Not distrust of employees. Not the belief about productivity decline in remote workers. Not the other traits, which were measured in the same survey and didn't predict it.

The mechanism the researchers identified is audience related rather than output related. Remote working removes the room. Repeat One correction before we turn to what to do, and it's aimed at the belief almost everybody holds, that narcissism is increasing. Scores pooled from over 1100 studies, covering 546,000 people between 1982 and 2023, found that narcissism is reducing in virtually every analysis.

Younger people do score higher at any given moment, which is what you'd expect of a trait that falls with age. Mistaking that snapshot for a trend is how everybody was fooled. The epidemic does not appear in the data. B Here are three things you can do and two things you shouldn't do. The first is the one I'd most like you to take away and it's close to the opposite of what politeness suggests.

A clear, unhostile no will almost always cost you less than a vague delay. Think about what you actually do with a difficult colleague. You don't confront them because confrontation is exhausting and rarely goes well. So you withdraw instead. The vague excuse, the delayed reply, the meeting held without them.

Every one of those is chosen precisely because it avoids a scene and every one of them is ambiguous by design. Which is exactly the cue that narcissists overread. The polite version may be the escalating version. Not because you've done anything wrong, but because you can end up generating unclear signals for months for entirely reasonable motives.

The practical form is small. Give a decision rather than let somebody discover it. Say no rather than let a request go quiet. Answer the message you've been putting off, briefly and without hostility. None of that makes anybody easier to deal with. What it does is remove one input that reliably makes things worse.

I should flag this honestly. The findings underneath are solid, but no one has tested this response against these problems in the studies. It's inferred. It's not good. However, the second contradicts almost all conventional advice if the arrest signal really is quieter at source then clarity may not have been the missing ingredient at all and saying it again more firmly or in writing could be addressing a problem that wasn't there what works better in my experience is moving from explanation to sequence and consequence not this you talk over people in meetings that's a characterization it invites a dispute about your perception and that's an argument you'll probably lose because arguing about who's right about a person is the one contest a narcissist is best equipped to win try this instead in tuesday's review he interrupted sarah twice before she'd finished she said nothing for the rest of the meeting and the risk she was raising didn't get three differences each doing some heavy lifting the disputable part is now a fact rather than a judgment it's checkable by other people who were in the room and it doesn't require the other person to feel anything in order to stand which connects back to the empathy finding explaining how their behavior makes people feel assumes they hadn't noticed when the likelihood is they noticed perfectly so drop the appeal to how it landed emotionally which is the move most feedback training will teach you and describe what happened in order with the consequence attached same label as before the mechanism is evidence the response to it more appropriate The third is the dullest in this episode and the only one an organisation can act on by itself.

The damage often runs through information that goes unsaid. In one experiment, each group member received a different piece of what was needed to reach the right answer, so no one had enough information on their own. Leaders hiring narcissism were rated as effective through their displays of authority, while information sharing between members was suppressed and the group performed worse for it.

That's why the cost of these leadership appointments is almost invisible from above. The failure isn't a bad decision you can trace back to somebody, but a decision taken without information that existed in the room and never surfaced. And nobody can point to the moment it went wrong, because the moment consists of things not being said.

From the leader's vantage point, the meeting went well, even without a successful outcome. It's a structural problem and it needs a structural answer. Anything that surfaces information independently of one person's willingness to hear it will help. Written contributions submitted before the discussion.

Decisions recorded rather than agreed aloud. A route for dissent that doesn't run through the person it concerns. Two things I wouldn't do Don't test candidates for narcissism Instruments do exist and several are available as derailleur or dark side assessments rather than as narcissism tests Those assessments were validated in anonymous, low stakes conditions They can be gamed about as easily as ordinary personality tests and that's not great when a job depends on the answer Aggregate scores sum the harmless and harmful halves which misclassifies in both directions while carrying the authority of a scientifically derived number Screening people on a quality this loaded carries real risk for a measure nobody has shown adds anything to a well-run leadership selection process Don't rely on the interview to spot it either because interviews sample the exact thing the favourable half excels at Instead use the strongest lever you already have A structured interview meaning the same questions in the same order anchored to specific past situations and scored against agreed criteria It's the best performing selection method available on current evidence Two honest qualifications Best available doesn't necessarily mean good and nobody has tested whether structure helps with this problem specifically What it does is shrink the share of the decision resting on early impressions which is where this trait does all its work Ok Before we end this episode, an honest caveat.

None of those three moves has yet been tested against this problem. The mechanism evidence is strong, but the intervention evidence barely exists. Anybody offering you a validated method for handling a narcissistic colleague is describing a product rather than an evidence-based framework. Even the alarm finding rests on two student samples with another research group disputing the results.

This leaves us with something smaller and a little less exciting than the version usually sold, but considerably more useful, I think. One last thing. Everything today concerned the confident form of narcissism. There's a second form, quiet, easily wounded and keeping score, where the findings in this video don't transfer and the reassurances you offer tend to make things worse.

That's the next episode. The Quiet Narcissist Nobody Warns You About. If you want the full evidence, with every citation and the parts I couldn't resolve, the article is linked below and the link appears on screen now. Thank you for watching. I'm Dr Nick Kecker. If you found this episode useful, please like and subscribe to my channel.

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