I can't believe I had to scroll this far down to find someone bringing this up. I work for a boss that went to a management school where they taught him a "ret

I can't believe I had to scroll this far down to find someone bringing this up. I work for a boss that went to a management school where they taught him a "retain/improve" method: first tell people which behavior they should retain, to stroke their egos, then tell people how they can improve, which is what you actually want them to do. So every time I hear praise come out of his mouth, I immediately get cynical and think "that's not what he really thinks, he's just saying that because he's been trained to say things like that first." TL:DR of the original article is "show empathy to people." Empathy is not the same thing as flattery, and poor management doesn't know the difference.