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These approaches and how effective they are are both culturally and individually sensitive. The "Yes, but" approach works well in a context where people unders
by Kalium 3y ago
These approaches and how effective they are are both culturally and individually sensitive.
The "Yes, but" approach works well in a context where people understand it as feedback that they should change. Softening the criticism with praise works for many people. It can also backfire in a context where people distrust praise, where the criticism is not understood as such, or when people have trouble with American business idioms.
The more direct approach works better in other contexts. I have had coworkers who responded much better to blunt criticism about why they should do things differently than to a praise sandwich.
This gets very tricky if you are interacting with multiple very different people at once. What is a strong enough criticism for one person might be well below detectable for another. There isn't one ideal answer or approach.
- thegrimmest 3y agoIt's a lot easier to teach many people how to receive communication in one style than it is to teach everyone to send communication in many styles. We can, and many organizations do, write style guides for internal communication. The most successful such style guides (eg. military, intelligence) emphasize the ABCs (accuracy, brevity, clarity) any to avoid extraneous verbiage. If your coworkers respond negatively to a simple, direct question like "Why didn't you do it this way?", they can be trained to handle professional communication more dispassionately (more professionally).
- gabereiser 3y agoThere’s a whole division dedicated to undoing military communication style to adapt it to the real world in the private sector. Just FYI. Also, the word “didn’t” doesn’t exist in that communication style… “unable”, “status red”, “negative”, “not able”. The words “can’t” and “didn’t” are stricken.