Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

by Frances Frei

There’s still a time and place to correct negative behaviors, but we advise doing so sparingly, as it’s much less effective at spurring improvement.12 When you do have to do it, bring evidence to the discussion. Be clear about the future state you envision and the higher-order reasons for it. Whenever possible, frame the behavior change as a small pivot with a big payoff to your shared mission. Let’s call this type of intervention “constructive advice.” For the feedback Scrooges among us, this next part is important: for constructive advice to be credible, it must be layered on top of a foundation of trust. Of course, that foundation requires empathy—the recipient’s conviction that you’re truly seeing them, both the good stuff and the bad. (If someone only sees what’s wrong with us, then we tend to process what they say as judgment rather than as fuel for improvement.) In the absence of empathy, constructive advice can easily become destructive, making the recipient worse rather than better. For example, it could make them more self-conscious in their execution or less confident in their decision making. Note that this happens all the time.