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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the

Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to make sure that critiques are aimed at being helpful

and that you are direct when giving them. So I recently learned about a leader who

likes to tell her team, the devil doesn't need another advocate. In other words, don't feel

the need to play devil's advocate by expressing an opposing point of view just to do so. So if you find yourself

starting to say, if I had to offer one criticism, stop, you don't have to offer any criticisms.

Now, I do believe there is a place for robust discussion.

Nothing is ever perfect.

But I do think this leader is on to something that playing devil's advocate is not always helpful.

When people refer to playing devil's advocate, they are not expressing the alternative view in their own voice.

They are voicing the perspective of this hypothetical devil's advocate.

Likewise, when people say, if I had to offer one criticism,

they are not standing behind their feedback.

They are presenting it as though offering a criticism were compulsory,

as though someone said they had to offer one critique.

But that is almost never the case. If something is fine, it is fine. If you see something that you believe needs to be changed, then state what that is and what you would like to see be

different. For instance, you could

simply say, I think we should consider how newcomers might experience this new procedure.

Or, overall, I thought the event was great, but there was a bottleneck when people were checking

in. Maybe we could explore a different system for next year. Neither of these comments feels overly negative or critical.

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