Sugar-coated feedback isn't a gift to your team. It's a tax they pay later. Want to guarantee your team stays weak? Here's the recipe. Protect them from every piece of information that would make them better. Soften every correction until it carries no instruction. Tell them "good effort" when the work was wrong. Do it consistently, and you'll build a team that feels great and can't do anything hard. There's a scene in this week's Bloomberg profile of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy that stuck with me. Early in his career, in a packed meeting, Jeff Bezos catches wrong numbers in Jassy's slides and asks him in front of everyone: "Why should I listen to anything else you have to say the rest of this time?" Brutal. No cushion. Public. Jassy didn't transfer out. He fixed the rigor. Bezos later made him his technical shadow, the job where he sat in on every meeting and helped conceive AWS. The man who runs the fifth-largest company on earth got there partly because of one afternoon that would get a manager hauled into HR today. I'm reading intent from outcome here, and I'll own that. Maybe Bezos was just a jerk who got lucky. Jassy was tough. But the test isn't tone, it's whether the bar was real and the person could clear it. "Bring correct numbers" is something Jassy could go fix by Monday. "Be less annoying" is not. Cruelty for sport and hard feedback against a meetable standard feel identical to the person taking it. Only one of them builds anything. Soft feedback builds little. It feels generous and works like theft. You withhold the one thing the person needs to improve, quality feedback. The cost shows up later, quietly, in someone who is 35 and has never once been told the truth about their work. Two honest caveats before we end this article. This only forged a leader because Jassy had the constitution to absorb it, and a real opportunity sat on the other side of clearing the bar. Take away the opportunity, and you don't have Bezos building talent. You have a bully with equity. We remember Jassy. Nobody profiles those the same culture broke. Then read the rest of that article. The same scrutiny that built Jassy is the thing his own employees now say is choking Amazon: every decision second-guessed, talent walking out the door. The strength and the liability are the same behavior. Still. If you lead people and you've never made one of them uncomfortable with the truth, you might not be protecting them. You might just be making them weaker. Worth a read. https://lnkd.in/e_aRV9S7