Is the carrot stronger than the stick?

Over the years, I have worked with many leaders of varied styles – Some were unforgiving for any mistakes and made sure I listen to the music for each of these failures while some were more inspiring in nature and instead of beating me up for my mistakes, tried to find why did I do that and helped me overcome those shortcomings of mine and not repeat the same again.

I have seen leaders of both styles greatly successful in their career in their own ways. Honestly, personally I flipped into each role from time to time, deliberately or unknowingly. However, when I looked into my own performance, I have seen a sharp difference in how I reacted as recipient.

By nature, I am a dreamer and always go for perfection even if that risks failure. I cannot stop totally no matter with whom I work with. However, when I work in a situation where I get a beating for any mistake, I have seen over time I shift my focus on lifting my “low water mark” so that my worst day performance gets elevated and not so much trying to lift my “high water mark” so that my best performance gets even better. In essence, my performance is plateaued. Again, my nature will still push me and there will be some spikes within the flat but not to something that can change the orbit.

On the contrary, when I work with someone who backs me in failures (while highlighting that it must be avoided in future), tries to listen to me on what is the challenge I am facing (even if he knew what it was), shows he still has confidence on me (even after this pathetic miss), it kind of brought a new energy in me even after a failure to rebound from that low point to something spectacular high.

It is human nature that when someone points fault in us, we do not like that. So in the first case above, a typical feeling is anger due to perceived insult. While in second case when you know within that you messed up and someone is paying for it, yet your manager taking that hit on him, we feel ashamed. It is a 180 degree difference in reaction. We achieve result in second case which was intended in first.

I recall two examples from decades back. In first case, the test cases my team created was not comprehensive and there was defect leakage. The task of review was given to a new person junior to me and in presence of him & my team I was told (if not insulted) how pathetic I was. From that day I only counted when I could move out. In second example, I reviewed around 70% of RCA of defects I got from my team and passed on to clients. There were few glaring misses in the explanation in rest. My mentor Umashankar Kotturu told me (I can still see that moment in my mind) that in economics there was a saying that you cannot reach local maxima unless you go through a local minima and let me to bounce from this low point and prove that. That particular project was delivered zero defect in production.

Honestly, I want to be like my mentor. Believe me, I do. Both in professional life but much more in personal. But often following that doesn’t yield results and matters drift to different direction. I wonder if there is any magic bullet for all solutions or like horses for courses there should be leadership styles based on whom you are leading. Or it is simply a matter of talent of the leader to make it happen either ways and successfully. Please share your thoughts so that me and other readers can get a broader context.