GROUNDED SERVICE

A blog for all the reluctant leaders who know what needs to get done, step up to shoulder their responsibility, and make a difference

Nik Krpan 2024-09-08 Nik Krpan 2024-09-08

3 cont: Leading By Example

Continuation of leading by example with subsections on:

Work Load Management

Removing the Training Wheels

Flexing Your Style

Be Available (but not too much!) and Pay Attention to Interfaces

3.1.1.2 Project Execution and Work Load Management

Project execution is a form of transformation and it is good to reflect on this quote from Leading Change (Kotter, 2012) in reference to leading organizational change:

“Transformation requires sacrifice, dedication and creativity, none of which usually comes with coercion. Efforts to effect change that are over managed and under led also tend to eliminate the inherent messiness of transformations.”

Caution is advised on the first part of this quote regarding sacrifice. We must balance this notion of sacrifice with the needs of self care ensuring that the sacrifices made are not chronic in nature leading to an unsustainable effort.

This is certainly not to say that projects don’t require disciplined management. They do as Kotter makes so clear with respect to organizational change in the latter parts of Leading Change. What I have observed in the last decade is more and more management in projects and less real leadership. A truly effective project manager is also a leader, and for the transformation inherent in project execution both management and leadership are required. Project managers are a cadre of future leaders that need to be cultivated and closely watched.

A key aspect of good management is work load planning. Excessive work load is obviously a major contributing factor to burn out and the most obvious first thing to address. Putting effort into and successfully managing work load effectively communicates to your team that you care about them. I loathe when I hear a manager talking about needing more “resources” when what they mean is people. Talking about people as “resources” is dehumanizing, disrespectful, and contagious. Before you know it this mindset permeates the organization. This is part of why I have a level of hostility for the department name “human resources”. I find it ironically dehumanizing to treat human beings as simple resources. We resisted having any title in the organization referring to human resources as long as possible, preferring to split the traditional HR functions across multiple other roles: Administrative, Recruitment, Talent Development. We went with a more grounded approach to directly address what matters to the organization and foundationally important people related matters

Leading a team of teams with shared personnel is a challenging dance and requires a lot of coordination and communication between team leaders. For a long time, I owned and coordinated this process and when the time came was able to delegate this to other senior managers. There is a temptation and even a natural gravity for this process to let the transactional aspects become fully dominant. This can not be allowed to happen. This process of workload management has a large relational aspect to it. The leader running this process has the opportunity to get feedback from team leaders to find out where there is friction in the organization, who the high performers are that leaders compete for, which team leaders have higher leadership potential. You get to watch them in action.

STORY reserved for POMASYS customers

3.1.1.3 Remove the Training Wheels

Sometimes the best thing to do to build the confidence of your people is to make yourself absent. This is directly in opposition to the idea of leading from the front. Such dichotomies are everywhere, and Willink explores this in his excellent book “The Dichotomy of Leadership” (Willink & Babin, 2018).

In this case when people are ready to take on a more independent level of work, the continued presence of a leader will hinder the development of people. For instance, as was my case, when in a face to face meeting with a client’s team and the leaders team, a physically imposing leader with a reputation as a knowledgeable, get it done guy will suck the air out of the room pulling the attention of the client away from the growing people who are trying to build their own reputations. If these people are always in your shadow their growth will be stunted. Set your ego aside and get out of their way. Helping these people build their own reputations, especially in a service organization, is part of your job as a leader.

If the leader is constantly the center of attention the future people who need to be front and center with clients will never develop the skills and reputation needed for them to take over and allow the organization to scale. Your ego may like the attention but you are missing opportunities to develop future leaders and you will miss opportunities to do more in quadrant II of the time management matrix in figure 5.

It is helpful to be quite explicit with your people telling them “I trust you. You have the skill needed to do this without me being present. If you need help you can call me in and I will be happy to help”. They will feel empowered, supported and respected.

In addition to feeling respected taking on a new challenge is highly stimulating, a key hunger. Some people will find this new freedom and stimulation very rewarding.

“Leaders create more leaders”

I have applied the above concepts in practice, but not always perfectly: We had a water treatment project (my deepest technical area of subject matter expertise) with a client for whom I had been at the front lines of service delivery for over a decade. Our young and enthusiastic project engineer, Jessica, was running the project and doing a great job of it. We had our first design review meeting with the client, Jessica did a good job presenting, but inevitably when there were questions asked from the client they would end up directed at me because of

my long standing relationship with the client
my reputation
my aforementioned physical presence.

After that meeting I decided to absent myself from future design reviews. They went fine and our work on the project was successful. In the research for this book I spoke with Jessica about her recollection of these events, and what I failed to do was to explicitly communicate to her that she had my confidence. Another interesting insight Jessica told me was that me being present in the meeting actually made her more nervous as in her mind I loomed large as the only person in the room that would have a level of knowledge to call out any errors however minor. So, the added benefit of me not being present was to boost her confidence going into the meetings. In any case providing this space for added responsibility would not have been possible without having made myself available outside these meetings; the investment in formal and informal training, the invisible-to-client interactions in preparing Jessica.

Another way of taking the training wheels off is through process ownership as discussed in section 2.2.1.

3.1.2 Flexing Leadership Style

Good leadership requires using a lot of different tools and this is especially so in personal interactions with people of various social styles. In a group setting where there are a lot of social styles present you can be natural, but it is important to know your organization and know your audience. Section 8.2.1 of Appendix 1 has an exploration of some of the theory behind the Merrill-Reid social styles discussed in the application here. It is recommended that if the reader is not familiar with the social styles of Amiable-Expressive-Analytical-Driver that the Appendix first be reviewed.

If you are naturally expressive and you are working with one or more analytical types, then you may come across as “salesman-like” and not be very respected. It is noteworthy that I am NOT knocking sales people, it is that an analytical person has a natural antipathy to the expressive. In hindsight I made this mistake about a decade ago with a junior employee who was VERY analytical. Depending on where you are naturally it may make sense to flex your social style to the neighbouring quadrant of driver or amiable to be more persuasive with that individual or group. The analytical will appreciate a more dialectical rather than rhetorical approach.

A high performing team will need some diversity of social style to keep it on track. A team of only analyticals will tend to get paralysis by analysis. They need a driver to keep them moving. Without an expressive they may have difficulty in convincing people outside the team of something, maybe budget funding, or pursuit of a particular strategic objective. An amiable added to the mix will be more sensitive to the level of cohesion in the group and help keep it together.

As a leader you may be more dominant in one social style, and it is not productive to surround yourself with clones. It is important to get some other social styles around you to help cover your blind spots.

By flexing your social style towards a direction where you are more compatible with a person you are interacting with, you will be able to connect with them better.

Moving away from social styles and into an adjacent topic of motivation, it is also important to understand how people are hunger driven, and to deliver the appropriate positive and negative, and conditional and unconditional strokes:

An unconditional stroke is based on who they are.

A conditional stroke is based on something they have done

A positive stroke is acknowledgment or praise of something that was done.

A negative stroke is providing criticism of something that was done.

An example of a negative unconditional stroke would be if someone is, and this could be unknown to you, of eastern European descent, and you make a comment about how disgusting eastern Europeans are. Negative unconditional strokes should be rigorously avoided.

A positive unconditional stroke could go in the other direction where some kind of affinity is proclaimed about eastern Europeans. While it might be great for one individual it then leaves a bunch of other people feeling left out and negatively stroked.

In a workplace it is generally suggested that, especially in group settings, unconditional strokes are counter productive.

A positive conditional stroke on the other hand could look like:

“Nancy, great job on the solvent delivery system design, I loved how you came up with XYZ design feature”. You are now acknowledging what the person did and reinforcing the good behaviour.

A negative conditional stroke is the opposite, where:

“Nancy, that design on the heat exchanger really didn’t work, next time lets have another senior engineer review that work before it goes out to client review.”

A good strategy for delivering a negative stroke can be to make a poop sandwich…put the negative stroke in between two positive strokes instead of the blunt delivery above. One of the slices of bread in the sandwich could be the leader expressing their belief that the team member is capable of improvement in performance to the desired level. This depends on the individual you are delivering the feedback to. Some will not even hear the negative feedback if packed in between the positive and come away thinking they are doing splendidly. For these people do not use this tactic or maybe all you need is an open faced sandwich. Some people will come away only having heard the negative feedback and feel beaten down. Ideally over time you develop good delivery skills and good enough relationships with people that relatively direct negative strokes can be delivered without anyone taking it personally. Delivery of critical feedback takes practice. Considering this the above example could look like:

“Nancy, thank you for getting the heat exchanger design done on time, but the unit was oversized and won’t fit in the space available. Please have Jane review the design next time before it goes to the client. Jane is super knowledgeable and likes working with you.”

Then there is the hunger side to consider. If someone has a particular hunger for recognition, then a positive conditional stroke in public is the way to go. More shy people may benefit more from private positive feedback.

If a person is structure motivated, then added structure or praising them for some of the structure they created would be rewarding for them, while someone who is stimulation motivated may find praise over their creative endeavours more rewarding.

Further reading on transactional analysis is recommended.

3.1.3 Be Available (but not too much!) and Pay Attention to Interfaces

In general, the more responsibility that you have for overall organizational performance the less predictable your day becomes as issues and opportunities arise that demand your attention. If you start from a schedule that is nearly full, a few negative things result:

· You have limited your time available for rest and reflection

· You are virtually inaccessible when people need to consult with you about an urgent matter with no notice

· Even when accessed, time stress erodes your presence

The solution is simple:

Put first things first (Covery’s 3rd habit) and don’t overschedule
Schedule in blocks of time to do work
Be available to the people supporting you.

Everyone will have some time-of-day where you will be most productive on deep work that requires a flow state, understand your own rhythm, and this is time that you should seek to protect and not allow it to be “confetti’ed” with interruptions. The amount of work you will get done in this time will then allow you to move on to other interactions that only need shorter bursts of time.

What being available also communicates to the people you are supporting is that they matter to you; that you respect them enough to make time for them. They know you are busy and you still make time for them.

All this said it is counter-productive to be too available. People will abuse this, taking your time for granted, checking in on things they don’t need to. Make sure that they know the limits of their authority, and that they are clear to operate right up to those limits without your permission and that they only really need to check in when operating beyond the limits of their authority or where they are uncertain. So be available, but not too much. As in most things there is a balancing act. A way of introducing intentional friction to make yourself a little less available is to instruct your people to do a little process before coming to you with a question: they should first ask themselves what are two questions that you will ask them. This will make them better prepared when they do come to you with a question and your time will be better utilized.

An axiomatic truth is:

“Interfaces are sources of friction”

In the physical world friction results in a dissipation of energy as useless heat that further energy is used to manage. For young leaders starting out in project management the project interfaces are places for extra attention as likely places for crises to form. Effectively managing these interfaces reduces the risk of crisis. In the leading of an organization with multiple business units, sometimes with hard silos, it is the leader to which these units report to ensure that there is no more than the desired amount of friction in place. Lack of lateral communication across an organization can be deadly, while if there is the right amount of lateral communication possible crises are anticipated, identified and eliminated before they happen. In an empowered team with decentralized authority this will happen without the leader’s direct involvement. Process ownership as discussed in section 2.2.1 can help to reduce this friction.

Part of being available is also not having too many direct reports. While it is desirable to keep an organization as flat as possible there is a limiting number of high quality relationships a single person can maintain. In a professional workplace it is probably in the range of 5-10 direct reports depending on the type of work environment and level of intimacy needed. Maintaining these relationships is harder in a work from home / remote work or hybrid work environment and the number of reports in this type of scenario is at the lower end of the range. Another view on this could be the strength of the work culture that plays into the number of direct reports that is sustainable. In a strong and established culture a higher number of reports will be possible, while in a weak culture, or in a scenario where a major change to culture is underway the number of direct reports may be lower for some period of time.

A great tactic for being available is managing by walking around. In the face to face environment talking with people who are not your direct reports about what they are working on, even asking them “how does what you are working on fit into our strategic plan?” can help gauge engagement, how well the plan is being communicated, a whole host of non-verbal things IF you are paying attention and being PRESENT.

In section 2.2.1 Process Ownership is discussed, and another key strategy for the leader in a rapidly growing small or medium sized organization towards improving availability is delegating process ownership. This is how I managed to keep it together. Process Ownership allows for the compartmentalization and delegation of responsibilities, opportunities for others to grow and for you to free up more time.

Nik Krpan 2024-09-07 Nik Krpan 2024-09-07

3 cont: Leading By Example 2

Be Available(but not too much)

Don’t Micromanage and No Stupid Rules

Always be Teaching and Learning

Contemporaneous Error Correction

Empathetically Listen

Be Grateful Publicly

3.1.4 Be Available (but not too much!) and Pay Attention to Interfaces

You have limited your time available for rest and reflection
You are virtually inaccessible when people need to consult with you about an urgent matter with no notice
Even when accessed, time stress erodes your presence

The solution is simple:

1. Put first things first (Covey’s 3rd habit) and don’t overschedule

2. Schedule in blocks of time to do work

3. Be available to the people supporting you

An axiomatic truth is:

“Interfaces are sources of friction”

In the physical world friction results in a dissipation of energy as useless heat that further energy is used to manage. For young leaders starting out in project management the project interfaces are places for extra attention as likely places for crises to form. Effectively managing these interfaces reduces the risk of crisis. In the leading of an organization with multiple business units, sometimes with hard silos, it is the leader to which these units report to ensure that there is no more than the desired amount of friction in place. Lack of lateral communication across an organization can be deadly, while if there is the right amount of lateral communication possible crises can be anticipated, identified and eliminated before they happen. In an empowered team with decentralized authority this will happen without the leader’s direct involvement. Process ownership as discussed in section 2.2.1 can help to reduce this friction.

3.1.5 Don’t Micromanage and No Stupid Rules

This is really simple. Micromanaging people who are high performers demoralizes them. It is the opposite of autonomy discussed above. They feel disrespected that you think they are so stupid that this level of direction is required. I learned this lesson from a co-op student early in my supervisory career. I had given highly detailed markups on a prepared document and he was kind enough (actually frustrated enough) to share with me that he did not need that level of detail to revise the document to what would be acceptable and found the detailed feedback to be insulting. I was grateful for the feedback and adjusted accordingly improving our working relationship. He went on to have a great co-op internship with us. If you are getting the right high performers on the bus they should not need to be micro managed.

Making rules that can not be followed or are stupid is incredibly corrosive to mutual respect in the organization. The leader and the organization making the rules is respected less. The second level leaders that have to enforce the rules lose respect for you, for themselves and from the people they are leading. The people breaking rules may lose respect of their peers and the leaders. Awful.

A stupid rule that people must break to get their job done pushes people down the path of making rule breaking habitual. This puts people down the path to full corruption.

If you get the right people that are engaged on the bus, in the right seats that understand the leader’s intent, then minimal rules are necessary. A culture is established where people know what the expected results are, the acceptable ways of doing and delegation becomes much easier.

“Make as few rules / policies as possible but as many as necessary.”

A caveat on the above in the case of poor performers: It is a good thing to give people a second chance however, there needs to be a limit. If there is a poor performer on a team, and the leader has authority to decide who is on the team or not constitutes a failure on the part of the leader. In cases of poor performance, the leader should evaluate for a square peg in a round hole situation; it could be the person that is performing poorly is simply in the wrong job. Consider someone who could be great in the kitchen but is stuck out front at the restaurant as a host. Reassignment could be appropriate. A way to evaluate this is for the line manager / leader to get in and for a short period of time and micro-manage, but this needs to be time limited, and the poor performer needs to understand the time limitation to provide them some sense of urgency in performance improvement. If the team member was recruited and onboarded properly this lack of fit problem should not be an issue, but no one is perfect and leaders need to be prepared to deal with this.

Overall, though persistently poor performance should not be tolerated and the poor performer exited after they have been given a chance or two for improvement. Not doing so erodes the level of mutual respect on a team, decreasing energy levels and impairing team performance.

3.1.6 Always Be Teaching and Learning

While this may fall into the overall category of leading by example the concept merits its own section. Every day is filled with opportunities to teach and to learn. If a learning organization is desired, everyone and especially the leaders need to be a part of this. Just because you have attained a leadership role does not mean that your learning has stopped.

When delegating work to a new collaborator there is an efficiency curve where the first few delegations are inefficient, but if done appropriately things get more efficient over time. One of the ways to make this curve steeper is to take full advantage of opportunities for micro teaches/lessons. In a face to face working environment this can be really powerful. Where there are several people available (this needs people not to be overscheduled) more than one person can be brought into the micro-teach. Even if they are not going to apply the lesson immediately, they will now know which of their peers has not only been taught the lesson but put it into application. Then, when they encounter a need to use that skill they don’t need to come to you for the lesson, but will come to their peer instead. The peer will then get a chance to teach and reinforce their knowledge.

In delivery of these micro lessons, there is also an opportunity to test the knowledge of some of the people in the room. If they know part of the concepts being presented, invite them to be put on the spot and get them to explain it the small group. They get a chance to practice public speaking with a friendly audience and by teaching deepen their understanding of the material and the apocryphal quote comes to mind: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it.”

You get to see if they really know their stuff and if they don’t a gentle correction can be applied. It can be made explicitly clear to people that this is exactly what this is. In our engineering business highly technical design concepts would need to be presented to clients, in essence teaching the sometimes lay-person client about some technical concept. Inexperienced people getting a chance to teach is a great way for them to prepare and practice for taking the stage.

A virtuous set of behaviours can be established here:

The example you are setting for the up and comers to “pay it forward”
You are amplifying and scaling your impact in the sharing of your knowledge by bringing it to others so they can now disseminate the knowledge
Relationship building: this is a gift of your time to these others
Preparing people for real world client interactions they will be faced with

We are living in the age of the podcast. Time in the car or train while commuting is a great opportunity to expand your horizons and there is a cornucopia of podcasts that will help with leadership concepts and can be very entertaining. I have found the Jocko podcast by Jocko Willinck to be both entertaining and transmitting some really valuable insights into not only leadership but the human condition. Find a podcast that engages you and make use of this time.

When you learn something new, not only to you but to others in the organization, “geek out” about it with others. For me this is something that is done with a sense of genuine joy and excitement. This is infectious. It creates the desired resonance, raising energy levels.

Another key aspect of this mindset is as it relates to success and failure. The line from IF comes to mind again:

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;”

Success and failure both bring learning opportunities. Don’t get too full of yourself for the triumph and don’t let the failure bring you down too much. Learn from what caused both of these and share these lessons with the team so that successes can be repeated and failures avoided.

Another great side effect of continuously learning is that is helps to keep you humble. A great experience for me was when already president of our company in my mid thirties I decided to get back into martial arts with Jiu-Jitsu / MMA. The interest was reignited when I enrolled my 5 year old son. I had some significant prior experience in Judo but it was a great and humbling experience to start again as a beginner getting your butt kicked (well ribs actually). A second way I have stayed humble is to do my own yard work at home. I could afford to hire other people to do it, but getting dirty, digging, doing that laborious work of tending the gardens, cutting the grass, manually weeding (I do the maintenance totally organically), learning and experimenting with different techniques, keeps one grounded. Other people I know get grounded by working in the garage on cars. In these examples when you screw up, you know it…boy do you know it when you get submitted in Jiu-Jitsu! Everyone should find some way to get physically grounded so that you have a solid connection to physical reality to keep maintain your humility.

A last tip on teaching is the use of story telling. Before the written word people passed knowledge and wisdom from one generation to another through an oral tradition of story telling. When lessons are embedded in a memorable story the learner will be more able to retain the knowledge and most importantly the wisdom. Some of the things I consider the most important things I have learned were through teachers telling me their stories. As a teacher get good at story telling and find these stories of others and of your own that you can tell well. As a leader you will probably need to tell these stories in front of groups of people. If you are uncomfortable with public speaking, learn to be better at it; Toastmasters is an organization many people have benefitted from to learn this skill. One of my most useful courses in university was a drama course on public speaking; I came away with a greatly improved ability to speak in front of a group that has benefitted me throughout my career.

3.1.7 Contemporaneous Error Correction

When errors are made corrections must be applied as soon as possible. Parents know this. If a toddler has made some kind of an error, they will not remember the situation an hour later. Adults may be slightly better. Coaching athletics works the same way. In a practice or game if a player is making an error, a coach will often immediately make a correction, or depending on the player and the error wait for a quiet moment ASAP to make the error correction. The style of how the error correction is made is important. It should not be done as a personal attack. “Why did you do that!!!” is counterproductive.

When the error correction is done properly, and the right people are on the bus (ie: not focused on grievance and not ego dominated) the feedback is treated as a gift and improvements are made immediately. The above average coachable player is more valuable than the prima donna; they may not rise to the heights of what the prima donna is capable of, but they are capable of working in a cohesive team and not only getting better themselves but making those around them better.

Failing to correct the error guarantees that it will occur again…and again…and again. Resentment then build. The person making the error may now have gotten into a pattern of doing things a certain way and error correction will become even harder. Nip it in the bud before the “muscle memory” is set, and before you and the rest of the team become resentful and it is harder to do the error correction in an appropriate way.

By taking advantage of the error correcting coachable moments the competency of the individuals in increased, and mutual respect is increased. A virtuous cycle is established if you are doing the error correction well as now a second generation will do the same thing. Lead by example in this regard.

The error correction is not done in a belittling way, and should be framed in your mind and delivery as opportunity for improvement.

3.1.8 Empathetically Listen

Empathetic listening is one of the most important skills in life and especially in leadership. Active listening can be considered a sub-set of empathetically listening.

This is a valuable skill in mentoring and coaching. It is noteworthy that empathy is not the same as sympathy. Empathy is to understand how another person is feeling, understanding the circumstances around their emotional state. Sympathy is feeling the same way as them, presently or in the past and being in agreement with those feelings. Sometimes sympathy is appropriate, but often not.

One of our biggest needs is to simply be heard, especially when we are struggling. In the high performance, high stress environment that often comes with service-based organizations there is a need for people to vent and be heard.

Empathetically listening basics involve:

Listening! If your jaws are flapping your ears aren’t working
Get rid of distractions and be fully present
- Yes, this means put the damn cell phone away, preferably in airplane mode or out of the room entirely. Simply having the phone visible as a possible source of interruption is enough to degrade the quality of the interaction. Putting it out of sight signals to the speaker that you are engaged and ready to really listen.
Paraphrase back
- Confirm your understanding of what you think you heard by reiterating what you heard in your own words.
Body language
- Adopt an engaged and open body position. Do not cross arms or legs. Lean forward slightly
Listen to understand
- When listening to the speaker do not listen with the intent to reply. Listen with he intent to understand the perspective of the speaker. Asking “why” questions can come off as judgemental and it is better to ask what, how, when type questions. This will be hard for a lot of engineers as we have been trained in root cause analysis techniques such as 5-whys. It will come with practice.

Empathetic listening skill is foundational to servant leadership and engaging in empathetic listening is done with a mind set of being of service to others, and is key to Covey’s 5th habit: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Empathetically listening to someone communicates that they matter to you and will help to make them feel respected.

That said, you are not a therapist and that is not your job. There is an argument to made that as a society we are “over-therapied”. Life is going to get tough and a lot of time the best thing we can do is to simply put one foot in front of the other, getting on with it and through it. What is your job though, is to be aware of when people are struggling and to be able to factor this in when planning and making assignments. You can make the people who are struggling aware of resources that the organization may be able to bring to bear to help them.

As much as possible don’t solve your peoples’ problems for them. When you solve someone’s problem for them, both the problem and the solution are now yours. Whatever outcomes arise therefore, are also yours. Help them to solve it on their own by asking open ended questions and maybe giving the occasional hint. They will get to a point where they will independently solve their own problems. When they have solved their own problem they will now have more confidence to do so with new problems they have never seen before. This ability is a key part of leading: to face the often frightening unknown with the confidence and courage that you and your team will find a way to solve the problem at hand. Actively listening and helping others develop this problem solving ability is key to developing future leaders.

A close friend and business leader gave me the following metaphor: Someone you are seeking to help has a monkey (or maybe a couple of them) on their back. If you lean in close enough when helping them the monkey will climb onto your back.

3.1.9 Be Grateful Publicly

As mentioned earlier the inward expression of gratitude for the vicissitudes in life is powerful, and so is the external expression of gratitude towards those that have contributed.

Simple genuine public expression of appreciation for a job well done can go a long way. It must be genuine and not for every little thing otherwise it becomes meaningless. You should tailor the expression of gratitude to the person on the receiving end. If the person is more shy, and not driven by a hunger for recognition, and more so by stimulation, then the expression of gratitude for a job well done may come with a promise of more interesting work in the future.

The personal practice of gratitude will help with being able to be genuinely grateful. The personal practice can take the form of meditation and for people of faith, thanking their creator on a daily basis. This personal practice even extends to being grateful for hardships and challenges. The ancients including the stoics knew this.

Public gratitude addresses a hunger: recognition, but be careful for the people who don’t really care that much about it as it could even make them a bit cynical. For those not really craving recognition a little goes an even longer way.

The opposite is also true, for those hungering for recognition a public scolding is positively nauseating. Where constructive criticism is needed it should be done in private.

“Praise in public, scold in private”

Even a group dressing down erodes leadership capital. Is it sometimes called for? Possibly if a group does something truly egregious. Even then, caution is strongly advised. See section 3.1.11 for a more complete discussion of the concept of leadership capital.

Any kind of public scolding will be corrosive to respect and engagement and burns leadership capital.