At one point in my career I reported to a Deputy County Manager who provided executive management oversight for five very diverse departments. My relationship with him had a closer connection than others, because he had hired me and was the former director of my department before his promotion to Deputy.

In the transition after being hired I did get the opportunity to sit in with him to finish annual evaluations for senior staff. Over time he even consulted with me regarding employee relations actions he was contemplating taking in his Deputy role.  

I was able to observe and evaluate his management style, for reference as to how I might have to function in the transition. Privately, he would berate a staffer and tell me I should fire the lazy no-good */#@! Yet in the written evaluation and meeting with the person he would tell them he wished he had a hundred more like them…

 At first I just thought he was trying to get better performance out of a bad employee by developing some sort of a positive personal loyalty. After all, it is human nature to want to work harder for a boss that appreciates you. But finally, I realized that he was just avoiding direct conflict. 

The bad manager tends to conjure images of the blood-vessel-bursting screamer looking for a handle to fly off. But these types are increasingly rare. Far more common, and more insidious, are the managers who won't say a critical word to the staffers who need to hear it. In avoiding an unpleasant conversation, they allow something worse to ferment in the delay. They achieve kindness in the short term but heartlessness in the long run, dooming the problem employee to nonimprovement. You can't fix what you can't say is broken.

It’s is all to common to observe bosses who want to avoid any discomfort using generalities so people really don't know what they're talking about.  Instead, they tend toward one-size-fits-all comments: "pay a little more attention to detail" and "improve the way you communicate" and "develop better organization skills."

As an employee substanceless feedback can stick you with one of the worst performance-related torments: Being left to your own imagination. 
Hearing nothing is often worse than hearing something, you might say.

It almost makes you wish for the boss who throws venomous tirades. It could be said that those kinds of people may not control their emotions but at least they're honest about it. Have you ever been in a situation where your boss didn't assign you any projects for an extended period of time and never hashed out why?

Such avoidance is a recipe for an employee blindsiding.  I don’t know if this has happened directly to you, but you do hear stories about the employee who has gotten glowing periodic reviews through the year, even meet and worked with their boss on a regular basis. Then in the annual review the previous year’s generality "improve the way you communicate" becomes a claim that the employee’s performance was not meeting the expectations for the position." This type of stress will certainly level your appetite, memory and sleep. 

Nonconfrontational people will nurse a grudge. Early in my working career I had a supervisor who called me in for an annual review. In front of me, he dug through his middle desk drawer for scraps of paper he had made notes on, which were critical of my performance in one area or the other. 

Completely placid as I walked into the room, you could see the veins in his neck start to expand as he read through these two or three slips of paper. When he began with the first one, I had to interrupt to say, “Yes but John (not his real name), this happened 9 months ago, why didn’t you communicate the need for change then?

My overall evaluation was satisfactory, but I was convinced that I could not grow under this supervisor. As I was later to learn, his otherwise quiet nonconfrontational demeanor was to lead to a tragic end. After a couple of year’s absence from the organization I had the occasion to call a former coworker. He asked if I had heard about John. The full story had a number of agonizing bits to it that I will leave out here. But, apparently, John had shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself in a homicide-suicide.

The lesson here is that nothing good comes from a deceptive peace and quiet.  If you are the type of person that avoids confrontation at work, that style may well follow you home. One of the first things taught in virtually any coupling training is to keep things in the present, don’t harbor negative feelings. Sounds like good advice to me both on and off the job.