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Truth 14. Criticism Works Best When It’s Compassionate
Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People was
first published in 1937 and is still in print, many decades
and 15 million copies later. How’s that for a bestseller?
One of Carnegie’s best lessons stressed the importance of
making people feel important and appreciated, even when you
are asking them to change what they do.
Criticism is part of working life. We all have to get it and
give it, whether officially through appraisals, or
informally from bosses on a daily basis. However, we welcome
it to varying degrees. If you think about your own
experiences of receiving criticism, the times when you have
taken it best are probably those occasions when someone has
appeared to have your best interests at heart. You’ve
emerged from the discussion with a positive sense of what
you need to do next. This type of feedback can be summed up
as “compassionate criticism.” Carnegie was a master of it.
Carnegie shows how to help someone change by encouraging him
or her to see a situation objectively, rather than through
the filter of personal feelings. You achieve this by
assuming a position of impartiality yourself, behaving not
as negative critic, but as positive mediator, helping the
person realize the difference between inadequate old
behaviors and promising new ones for him or herself.
Describing current behavior in words that are free of anger
or judgment allows you to steer people towards other ways of
thinking or working without causing offense or resentment.
The first stage in delivering compassionate criticism is
careful observation. Before saying anything, devote some
time to thinking about how to describe the other’s behavior
in a neutral way. It can be helpful to think of your eyes
and ears as a television camera, objectively recording his
or her actions. Next, describe what you see to the person,
offering a second picture alongside of what might work
better, so that the gap between the current and improved
behavior is evident. Giving an example of a time when the
person has already shown the desired behavior is often
helpful. It brings a positive to the criticism and shows
your belief in him or her.
The final stage is to discuss together how to close that
gap, focusing on creating a new picture going forward rather
than reflecting back on the negative. When talking to
someone who tends to do things in a last minute way, you
might well say, “When you try to wing it, you tend to come
across as nervous. However, I’ve observed that when you take
time to prepare you do a good job with your presentations.
Even if you don’t always have time to practice the whole
thing, have you thought about just practicing the beginning
and ending several times?”
A new picture is the key to compassionate criticism.
Psychologists have shown that if you simply tell people to
stop thinking about pink elephants, you can guarantee that
is all they will be able to think about! However, if you
then ask them to think about, say, red sports cars, they are
immediately able to stop thinking of the elephants, as there
is another picture in their mind. Likewise, in the
workplace, if you just tell people to stop doing something,
their instinctive reaction, emotionally and psychologically,
is to take up a defensive position. They either continue
doing the same things as before, or focus so hard on not
doing them that their behavior may appear uncomfortable or
contrived. It’s essential to substitute a new picture to
provoke positive change. |
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