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Let founders find the gap themselves
Most people who ask for honest feedback don't want it, and the best founders need it anyway. Delivering it takes the right way at the right time, with the right tone, the right words, and examples. It is almost an art.
Doug Leone's example: telling a founder that their VP of sales sucks gets nowhere. Suggesting a couple of VPs of sales worth meeting, just so the founder can gauge their own, gets somewhere. The founder meets two people who know what they're doing and suddenly sees how far off their own hire is.
The same logic applies to kids. A list of everything they shouldn't do goes nowhere with them either.
Why does direct criticism often backfire?
In a 1996 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi reviewed hundreds of studies of feedback. In more than a third of them, the feedback interventions lowered performance rather than raising it. Feedback aimed at the person instead of the task was especially likely to hurt, since it shifts attention to self-image.
Why do people learn better from their own discoveries?
In 1978, Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf showed that words people generated themselves were remembered better than words they simply read. The finding is called the generation effect. Reaching a conclusion forces a person to build the reasoning behind it, and that effort strengthens memory for the result.
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