Criticism without the sting

Have you ever wondered why people get upset when you try to point out that something that they did was wrong? If so, then this article is for you. You would have come across this phenomena at lot of places - at office, at home and generally at all those places, where people will have to stay together and get some work done. If you have not already guessed it, it is a “Team” of people that I am hinting at.

Let us see what happens in a typical team; never mind whether the team is your family or your own at the work place. It is a fact that teams comprise of humans. Also well known, is that humans tend to make mistakes. So there is a necessity for course correction by way of criticisms. Through this article, I suggest some ways of providing the course correction criticisms, but without the after effects.

There are many well researched literature by experts on the subject of self esteem. Every person has some amount of self esteem, although the degree varies from person to person. What happens when a person receives criticism is that there is a direct attack on the person’s self esteem. The immediate reaction of the person receiving the criticism, varies from outright anger to hidden angst. This reaction to the external stimuli, unless moderated can lead to unpleasant consequences leading to conflict.

When we look at how people criticise, it is easy to note that, more often than not, they tend to criticise the person and not his/her actions. These might be due to so many previous unexpressed angst towards the person being criticised. The criticiser uses his/her opportunity at hand to show “Who the real boss is”.

When in such situations, even though the action was needed to have been criticised, the criticiser loses the opportunity to point out the mistakes done and only goes on to increase personal animosity.

What is the solution to such situations? Well, adopting the following methods may help up to some extent:

# Tell the person as to what actions of him/her made you angry at the first place. The important thing to note here is to stay calm and focussed on the actions that need to be criticised. Never offend the other person by criticising his/her self. One could start criticising by mentioning the actions, for instance:

@ “John, I agree with you that competitor’s ad campaign swung sales to their side. But what I did not like about your response to it was the failure to follow up with our ad agency persons and looking to counter attack”. This is a lot better than just blaming John for the setback and calling him an incompetent employee


# In any argument, there will be certainly points on which both the parties agree. Make a quick list of such items and close them. Then try to work on the grey areas by strictly following the manner of criticism as outlined above. For the rest, agree to disagree and promise to find out what makes the disagreement between both the sides.



# In case you are not able to practice these points for the initial few days, don’t fret. For anger management is an art that needs to be mastered. Even though you may have criticised a person using caustic words, make attempts later on to explain what made you lose your head. An explanatory mail always helps in case you don’t want to explain in person. Gradually you will learn to temper yourself.



# In case none of these methods are useful and the mistakes keep continuing, then it is time that you and your team member decide to part ways as friends.


Well, one may ask as to what benefits are accrued from the above approach.

Firstly, there is more objectivity to the criticism by way of focussing on the problems at hand rather than personal vilification. This helps to foster trust between team members.

The team member being criticised is not asked to partake on his self esteem for he/she knows the precise reasons as to why the criticism came in the first place. This helps to correct the course and gradually the team members know of each other’s expectations from them.

Now, in case you read this and don’t practice, you know what I would say, “Just go to hell”.