Direct and Empowering: A Coaching Style That Trusts People With Authority
There's an asymmetry in how people respond to feedback, and I've watched it play out for years. The people who are doing it well usually assume they aren't doing it well enough. The people who aren't doing it usually assume the message isn't aimed at them and ignore it.
That asymmetry is the lens for everything I'm going to say in this post. Once I started seeing it, every general broadcast I sent to a team turned into something different. It became a message that landed harder than I wanted on the wrong people, and softer than I needed on the right ones. The whole apparatus of "be more diligent about X" or "we need to tighten up Y" is calibrated against a population that doesn't exist.
Recognition First, Pressure Second
The coaching habit I trust most is to lead with recognition and follow with pressure, in that order, and to weight the recognition heavier than feels comfortable.
Naming someone publicly for doing the thing well, by name, for a specific action, is the cheapest, highest-signal thing I can do as a coach. It tells the asymmetry-vulnerable people that the standard exists and is achievable. It makes them feel seen. It also tells the people who aren't doing the thing that the message is, in fact, aimed at them, because someone else just got recognized for it. Recognition isn't soft, it's a forcing function.
Pressure is what comes after, and only after. It rides on top of the recognition, where it can survive landing a little harder than expected. Pressure first, recognition never, is how teams lose their best people in slow motion.
A practical version of this: when I notice someone consistently doing something well, I'll DM them privately, thank them for it, and ask them to help others on the team improve. That converts a recognition signal into peer pressure that comes from the right direction. The people who would normally take a "be better at this" broadcast as something aimed at them now have a peer-level path to act on it.
Authority over Instructions
The other thing I rely on is to give people authority instead of just instructions.
What this looks like is small but consequential. Instead of "here's what I want you to do, run it past me before you ship it," I'll say something closer to "here's the outcome we need, you're the owner, if anyone gives you grief about it tell them to talk to me." That backstop converts a task into a mandate. The person now has cover to defend the work on their own terms, which means they can say no to the predictable interruptions without having to escalate every one of them through me.
Authority isn't permission to do whatever they want. It's permission to make decisions inside a defined scope without needing to relitigate the scope every time someone pushes back on it. The producer's job, when this is working, is to be the visible boundary that the person can point at when they're being asked to step outside it.
This works because most of the friction that wears people down on cross-functional teams isn't about the work itself. It's about the meta-conversation about who gets to decide what, and how often. Pre-deciding that, in writing, with public backing, removes a category of friction wholesale.
Asking to Be Called Out
Something I've added over the years: I tell the people I coach that if they ever feel I'm getting it wrong, I want them to tell me. Out loud. As soon as they think it.
This isn't a humble-brag, and it's not a request for performance reviews on demand. It's a deliberate inversion of the usual coaching power dynamic. Most coaching feels like a one-way street where the senior person evaluates the junior person and the junior person nods. Saying "please call me out" turns it into a two-way relationship. It also lowers the cost of raising a concern. Once the precedent is set, future concerns don't require the same activation energy.
The people who take me up on it are the ones whose feedback I most want, and they're also the ones who would never have offered it unsolicited. The people who don't take me up on it are also fine. I've made the offer, the door is open, and they'll use it when they need it.
The cost of this is that I have to actually accept the feedback when it comes, gracefully, in real time, in front of whoever is around. The first few times that happens are uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the price of the contract I set up.
Direct and Empowering as One Stance
The phrase "direct and empowering" sounds like a contradiction the first time someone hears it. The reflex is to read "direct" as "harsh" and "empowering" as "soft," and to assume one cancels the other.
It works because the directness is about the content and the empowerment is about the frame. Saying plainly what I think, with the recognition that the other person is the one who decides what to do with it, treats them as a peer in the conversation rather than a subordinate receiving instructions. Direct without empowering is dictation. Empowering without direct is hand-waving. The combination produces the kind of conversation where someone walks away knowing both what I actually think and what they're actually going to do about it.
Designing Processes for Humans
Underneath all of this is a principle I've come back to often enough that I've started writing it down: don't deny humanity, design processes for humans.
Teams are made of people with finite attention, varying communication styles, ADHD, anxiety, recent grief, sick partners, lapses in sleep, and lives that are larger than their job descriptions. Coaching that pretends otherwise is coaching that works on a hypothetical team rather than the actual one. The asymmetry I started with is one expression of that fact. Recognition first, authority over instructions, and asking to be called out are all attempts to build coaching practices that work for the team I actually have.
The teams I have most enjoyed working with were the ones where this kind of practice was the default rather than the exception. The teams that produced their best work were almost always the same ones.