(Influential Leadership) Carefully Consider How You Critique Someone’s Work

When one of your staff messes up, how you deal with it will speak volumes about your leadership to the entire group, not to mention others in your organization.

If you roundly criticize that person in anyone else’s presence, you will add a huge dose of embarrassment to the feedback you provide. While your employee may be careful not to make a mistake like that again, they will be even more careful about letting any future mistake come to light in any public setting, or perhaps at all.

This can lead to an atmosphere of distrust, and to employees trying hard to conceal mistakes. It also has a chilling effect on everyone who witnessed your outburst, knowing that they, too, could be subject to your laser-focused barbs.

You may be saying to yourself, “That’s obvious. I would never criticize my employees in public!”

But consider whether you have ever fallen into one of these traps:

• Finding fault with someone’s work when it’s just ‘the team’ and no one else from outside.
• Criticizing the work of someone who isn’t in the room.
• Including critique in an email on which someone else is copied.
• Making a face or otherwise showing a strong negative reaction via your body language.
• Making a joking comment that you think masks your annoyance.

No one’s perfect, and you will slip up from time to time, but the more you can follow this golden rule, the stronger the loyalty of your team: Critique in Private, Praise in Public.