A Case for Directness

I still recall a small incident that happened a few years back.

I was learning to do free-weight squats, when a middle-aged guy came up to me with some unsolicited advice.

“You’re doing it completely wrong; you have no idea what you’re doing. Go and ask a trainer to show you how it’s done.”

I remember thinking, ‘what an asshole’.

Imagine going up to someone you don’t know only to tell them curtly they’re totally wrong. And saying this so loudly that everyone around is forced to hear, even if they’re not interested.

And then going off, not even bothering to show that person how to correct himself.

I also remember randomly recalling this event a few years after it happened and realizing that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

That guy had absolutely no obligation to correct me.

That he bothered to inform me I was completely wrong wasn’t a sign of his rudeness or arrogance, but a testimony to his kindness.

He could have easily ignored it and let it go – the natural course of action for most of us.

Sandwiching and Sugarcoating

You can always try to fault his behaviour.

He could have put it nicely, said what he had to in a sweeter way.

Perhaps, but I’m grateful he didn’t.

There are two things that usually hold true, though not always.

The first, that people don’t like hearing negative things about themselves, and the second, that people love hearing positive things about themselves.

HR folks know this.

That’s why there’s something called a ‘sandwich approach‘.

When you want to give a negative feedback, sandwich it between two positive ones – like a tomato sandwiched between loaves of bread.

This ‘eases the blow’. It makes it less likely the person responds emotionally and thus defensively, and instead listens and tries to act on the feedback.

Which is the goal after all – to change behaviour.

A similar approach is ‘sugarcoating‘ – instead of saying ‘you’re completely wrong‘, you could exaggerate the positives and tone the negatives down.

Such as saying something along the lines of ‘you’re doing well, and you could try this to make it even better‘.

The problem with sugarcoating often is that only the sugar remains and the message fades away. And with sandwiching, that the tomato is hidden by the loaves of bread.

Every time someone fluffs and coats their message, it becomes harder to filter to arrive at the core because you have to separate the signal from the padding.

And unless you’ve made a conscious effort, you tend to cling to positive reinforcement and shun negative criticism – because we usually like hearing good things about ourselves, and don’t like hearing negative things.

Which means that you might take to heart a compliment or positive feedback that wasn’t really meant to be anything more than a sandwich or padding for the real negative feedback that someone meant to share.

Worse still, most likely, you won’t take notice of the negative feedback at all, or if you do, you dilute it and undermine its importance.

That’s completely understandable, because you’ve no way of knowing the real purpose of the interaction was to inform you of the negative feedback; the positive feedbacks were just padding to cushion the blow.

If there was no padding, sure, the blow would have hurt more, but at least there’s a higher chance you’d have known of the true priority order – the negative feedback was the essence, the rest extraneous.

Now you can always argue that if the person was eager to improve, he’d act on the feedback anyway, padding or no padding, but that’s perhaps not the point.

If you’d like to leave the person better off, the point would be to maximize the likelihood that the person you’re interacting with benefits from that interaction, regardless of what sort of person he is. A driven person would course-correct either way – you don’t need to think about him.

Emotional Responses

Because people usually don’t like hearing negative things about themselves, the response to direct, blunt criticism is usually an emotional and defensive one.

Defensive, because you attempt to counter the allegation rather than ascertain its truthfulness.

It’s like immediately responding that ‘my squat form doesn’t suck’ rather than asking yourself, ‘does my squat form suck?’

It’s also emotional because the answer to the question isn’t an attempt to logically find a true answer.

The aim is to emotionally defend your ego which you associate with the issue – which means you’re not trying to find the true answer, but the answer that saves your face..

Admitting that the rude, perhaps arrogant guy running you down has a point might become an emotional issue now, like a competition between you both where if one wins the other has to lose – if he’s right, you’re ‘wrong’.

Soft Approaches

Sandwiching might work in a lot of cases.

Sometimes, it can feel artificial though.

It might be just lying to say something nice when you can’t think of anything.

But when you tell someone something nice, even if it’s true, if the sole reason you’re doing it is so that you can ‘sandwich’ the real negative message between this nice thing, you wonder how genuine it is.

It’s not very different from saying nice but true things simply to make people feel better.

And people aren’t dumb.

They realize this.

They too might wonder if you really meant it, or you just said it to make them feel better about the negative message you delivered.

You might lose credibility too – any compliment of yours henceforth will come with this suspicion.

Sugarcoating has similar drawbacks as well.

Again, the compliment might or might not be meant sincerely. The person receiving it is going to wonder about that.

Also, sugarcoating usually tones down the message, diluting it. If someone’s service technique or squat form is terrible, praising it might blind them to just how wrong it really is.

Avoiding sandwiching and sugarcoating doesn’t automatically mean you always have to fall to the other extreme of bluntly telling people harsh truths.

Sandwiching is coating a negative with a different positive, sugarcoating is sprinkling some positivity on a negative.

I’m sure there are many other ways to go about it.

One is just stressing more on the ‘what is to be done‘ rather than the ‘how badly wrong you are‘.

After all, that’s more important – the solution.

The problem is important only to the extent you need to understand it to solve it; you don’t need to describe how bad it is – that doesn’t solve anything.

Like telling someone to hold his racquet a particular way while serving, and how he should not be holding it – both what is to be done and what is to be avoided – instead of pointing out how badly he’s doing it.

Johari Window

The Johari Window is a well known model, useful for thinking about a lot of things.

There are 4 parts to it:

1. Arena: What you know about yourself, and others do too.
2. Facade: What you know about yourself, but others don’t.
3. Blind Spot: What you don’t know about yourself, but others do.
4. Unknown: What you don’t know about yourself, and other’s don’t either.

It relates here in two ways.

The first is if you’re at the receiving end of feedback.

You’d want to try to get some value out of it.

The most useful is if it’s something you don’t know.

It can’t be in the unknown, because then others wouldn’t know it either, and so they can’t tell you about it.

Therefore it’s in your blind spot, and now it’s a chance to become aware of it and bring it to the arena, the part of the Johari Window known to both yourself and others.

Of course, it doesn’t mean you accept it uncritically, others can often be wrong.

But at least not responding emotionally means you’re open to the possibility of accepting criticism.

In fact, more than just being open, you should welcome it – criticism is the chance for you to get better; praise doesn’t make you better.

Finding an Approach

But what about when you deal with others?

Let’s assume the only objective is to be effective – meaning to tell someone something they benefit from.

The objective is not to make someone feel good (it’s fine if it happens, but it isn’t the direct objective), and definitely not to make yourself feel good by saying nice things.

This is not the same thing as intentionally trying to make someone feel bad. Given a choice, you’d try to make them feel good, but not at the cost of effectiveness. That’s all it means.

What approach works best – sandwiches, sugarcoating or bluntness?

It’s not as simple as one answer for every situation; even for the same person the same approach might not always work well.

If someone’s doing something ‘wrong’, the question is – are they aware of what they’re doing or not?

This is where the Johari window comes in.

Arena

If a person’s aware, then informing him that he should change might not have any effect; he already knows what he’s doing and he clearly thinks its right, or he’d have changed already.

This is the Arena in the Johari Window – something a person as well as others around him are aware of.

Instilling any change here requires something drastic if it’s got any hope of succeeding – perhaps a lot of gentle, patient effort, or some direct, blunt truths that don’t cushion the blow.

You have to ‘make the deaf hear’ – make someone who knows what he’s doing and thinks it’s right change his ways. He’s probably already deaf to most criticism because he’s heard it before.

Blind Spot

Now suppose that he’s not aware of what he’s doing.

Then maybe there’s a chance all you need to do is point it out gently, and he’ll agree.

Imagine you’re dealing with someone’s blind spot – that means the behaviour is known to others (like yourself) but not to the person himself.

This is something about him that you know but he doesn’t.

Do you need to be harsh here?

Perhaps not since you’re providing him new information, something he doesn’t know already.

There’s at least a chance he’ll act on it now that he’s aware (so long as you don’t lose the core message in a lot of sandwiching).

It’s still possible that blunt, harsh truths could deliver the message faster and more effectively.

But they also carry a risk of triggering an emotional defiance.

You’re telling someone something new, and you’re not shielding him from the impact of it – his first response might be to shield himself, to lessen the blow.

Harsh Truths

There’s something to be said for harsh truths, though I know I’m biased on this issue.

“I must be cruel, only to be kind“

Hamlet, Shakespeare

I think the best investor, the kindest investor is the one who can tell a person that his idea is total crap when it really is.

It’s not easy to do – not just because you might flinch from someone’s reaction, but also because you can come across as a jerk to others. And to yourself – later, you might feel you were too harsh.

But the one who spins it out and sugarcoats it might dilute the message so much that it doesn’t get across.

Perhaps the best thing would have been to give up and start something new.

But because you didn’t have it in you to say that straightforwardly, the message didn’t go through.

There’s a chance your padding made it seem that there are only a few minor issues to be ironed out, when the whole thing sucks.

Whereas, with harsh truths, usually you provide benefit either way.

Either you open someone’s eyes to their mistake, or you give them a powerful motivation to prove you wrong.

I’m also partial towards harsh truths because I can recognize that I’ve benefited the most from them, even if, at the time, I resented them.

When it’s toned down it’s easier to ignore.

Whereas, although you might resent it and defend against it on the spur of the moment, you usually find that there was some, and often a lot of, truth behind the harshness.

And so there’s delayed gratitude for harsh truths and for those who had it in them to give it to you.

I think it’s also not a mean achievement to be able to take blunt feedback.

To separate your emotions and ego from your thinking, to be able to accept and act on harsh criticism.

Which means that both receiving and accepting harsh truths take something.

That’s why if you’ve ever benefited from them then you’ll probably have a lot of respect for people who dish them out, and you’ll be less likely to judge them harshly for it.

Effectiveness

A lot has been said about the person who’s on the receiving end, but looking from the other side helps too.

Putting the point across in the fewest possible words, eliminating all that’s extraneous, has a lot of benefits for you.

It’s a skill, to be able to eliminate what is redundant.

It also increases the probability that the core message is likely to go through because there’s only signal, no noise.

It also means you’re able to reach out to more people.

If you spend 50 minutes saying what you could have said in 5, you’d reach one tenth of the people you could have.

Besides, you typically have a short amount of time per person – to be able to do anything for someone in that limited time, you’d want to be as direct as possible, unless you’re willing to spend ages.

A lot of help seems to be a kind of knowledge transfer – ‘A’ wants to do something, and connects with ‘B’ who’s done that or something similar.

Now ‘B’ has to transfer some of his knowledge – in a way, take ‘A’ along a certain mental path, helping him cover some distance along it after which he’ll be able to find his way.

The onus is now on ‘B’ to cover that distance with A.

You can cover the same distance in five days if you move at a snail’s pace, with low velocity.

Or you can accelerate and raise your velocity, and cover it in a few minutes. This is what directness really is.

It’s socially desirable if it helps you reach more people since you spend less time per person, and have a similar impact.

And it’s personally desirable too.

Although it sounds selfish, you might want to do other stuff with your life beyond just answering people’s questions, especially if you get the same questions repeatedly – which chances are you will, if people think you’re good at something and you can help them with it.

Which is where putting the message across in the smallest amount of time rather than spinning it out helps you.

Perhaps you’d also want to spend more of your time on helping those people who’ll actually benefit, who genuinely intend to act.

I recall someone appearing for an exam, which he’d supposedly been preparing for many years for, but didn’t know the first thing about.

Some of my friends gave him some generic advice – what more could they possibly have done? You can’t fight someone else’s battles.

When he asked me for help, I told him he should do something else with his life; this wasn’t for him, he shouldn’t waste yet another year.

I still think it was the best thing I could have said to him.

When someone needs only a little bit of guidance you might be able to push them in the right direction. Because they’ve taken some steps on their own – you can only help those who help themselves.

When someone has made no effort on their own and expects you to carry them the whole way, you can’t help them.

There’s no way I can sit and spend weeks with every such person helping them, even if I wanted to – my whole life would go in that and I wouldn’t ever be done. And it would be pointless, because there are enough resources for that already – the additional contribution would be zero.

More pointedly, it would all be a waste. You can’t help those who won’t help themselves.

If a person has been twiddling their thumbs waiting for someone to come along and do the heavy lifting for them, they’ll always be disappointed because it doesn’t work that way.

And it’s an insult when someone does nothing themselves and expects you to do their work for them.

It’s not helping to do for someone what they can easily do for themselves.

So the question is – what is the best thing you can do for someone in these cases?

If you go gently, you have to put in a lot of time per person, and you don’t reach many people. Perhaps, though I don’t believe it’s necessarily true, you might do more good per person, but less good per unit time.

Or you give them the truth, as directly as possible for their sake so they benefit, and as efficiently as possible for your sake.