Any fool can criticize and complain — and most fools do. Criticism is like a home pigeon, it will always come back to you. When we criticize someone, we are putting that person in defending position and in place of working on our feedback, he will start thinking to defend himself and complain us in return.
When someone does not work well in a team, what we always do, we write him a long feedback email that what you are expecting from him and how miserably he failed in all areas. What do you think that when that guy reads this email, what he feels? Will he take this email positively that you helping him to identify his lacking areas and will start working to improve? No, he will feel pretty sad to see that this is what you think about him even while he is doing his best. He will start spending his time to prepare his response to justify himself. He will also start complaining about you and at the end either he will quit team or job. In any case, this will not be end result which you wanted.
In other example, when a team does not follow coding guidelines, we usually tell them that how fool they are if they are not writing code based on coding guidelines. What happens after that? Some of them follow guidelines for few days and stopped. Then we threaten them about consequences, give them long feedback and complain to seniors. Do you think that it works? No, Never.
Let’s realize that we are not dealing with people of logic. We are dealing with people of emotions. In place of threatening, try to understand from team that what are challenges they are facing to follow coding guidelines and resolve those. At the same time, tell them in pleasant voice that why following guidelines is beneficiary in their career and arouse an eager around that. Once team understand that writing good code is a skill and why learning this skill is more important than new technology, they will work to get that skill and automatically follow given guidelines. Chances are high, they will update your guidelines to next level.
What was secret of success of Benjamin Franklin? He said, “I will speak ill to no man and speak all good I know of everybody”.
So instead of criticizing people, let’s understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do this. This will be more profitable than indulging with them in criticism. So next time when you are about to criticize, bite your tongue and speaks all goods about him.