Get to know your employees better and they’ll take your feedback better, says Urs Koenig, business leadership consultant and former NATO peacekeeping commander.

Excerpted with permission from Urs Koenig’s 2025 Axiom Business Book Award winner and 2025 National Indie Excellence Award winner Radical Humility: Be a Badass Leader and a Good Human (Amplify Publishing, March 2024).

CHAPTER 7: I LOVE YOU, AND YOUR WORK IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. —Attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, John Maxwell, Earl Nightingale, and others

How Do You Deliver Feedback That Builds Up Versus Tears Down?

I was out of breath from pushing my bike up the steep hill. My backpack, filled with clothes, a sleeping bag, and camping cookware, was strapped to the back of my bike and felt incredibly heavy. I took a brief rest to catch my breath and scanned the top of the hill.

I was twelve years old and on my way home from a fun but intense and tiring weekend camping in the woods with my Boy Scout troop. My parents were tough. While other kids were picked up in their parents’ cars, my mom and dad made it clear: “We support you attending Scouts, but you must be willing to ride your own bike. We are not shuttling you back and forth.”

Which is exactly why I was now hauling my bike with my heavy backpack up that damn hill.

My parents loved me; I knew that. They were tender, but they were also tough. Want to join an activity? Go for it. But you figure out how to get to and from there yourself.

Just as I started to walk uphill again, I spotted my dad riding his bike toward me. I was surprised to see him. He slowed down, did a U-turn, and greeted me with his trademark “Mano” (one of his many nicknames for me derived from “man,” which I now use with my own boys as well).

“How was it?” he asked. “I thought I would meet you halfway so you don’t have to make your way back home by yourself. Would you like me to take your backpack?”

I felt elated to see him and grateful that I did not have to make the long way home by myself (and yes, I was thankful he was offering to carry my heavy backpack). Meeting me on my way home so we could spend some time together was my dad’s way of showing me that he loved and cared for me. As we started to walk up the hill together, both pushing our bikes, he inquired about the activities I enjoyed and about my Scout friends. As a former Scout and avid outdoorsman, he truly cared about my experience and genuinely wanted to know about it. I was excited to tell him everything. He was a caring and understanding listener. This feeling of being truly heard then made it easier for me to hear the hard feedback he had for me a few minutes later: “Mano, you forgot one of the most important items on your packing list at home. Do you know what it is?”

I honestly had no idea. He answered his own question.

“Your emergency first-aid kit. Not good, Urs. Not good. Weak, very weak.” Forgetting your emergency first-aid kit at home might not seem like a big thing to you, but it was for me, and my dad knew it. His highly disciplined military approach of always having the complete gear list (including emergency supplies) for outdoor adventures was deeply ingrained in me. It has served me well during many trips up to this day. Rarely do I forget anything on my various travels.

He rode his bike to accompany me on my way home. He offered to take my heavy backpack. He genuinely asked and cared about my experience. He showed me that he loved me. And at the same time he made it abundantly clear that forgetting my first-aid kit was not acceptable and he disapproved: I love you, and your work is not good enough.

Radical Candor

The notion that feedback is much more likely to be heard and acted upon by your team members if you’ve built strong relationships with them might seem obvious today. However, this is a very recent phenomenon. The leader-as-hero paradigm I covered in chapter 2, with an all-knowing, sole expert at the top directing and commanding his people—and it almost always was a he—like pawns on a chessboard, has been deeply ingrained in us for many generations. Connecting with and caring for team members was unnecessary for someone in that position. The leaders knew best and made all the decisions, and if the rank and file disagreed, he simply got rid of those who dared question him and brought someone new in. This is an oversimplification, of course, but the fact stands: relationship building between boss and employees was not a high priority.

This has started to change over the last decade. Former Silicon Valley executive Kim Scott popularized for the mainstream business world the importance of giving direct and honest feedback in her outstanding book Radical Candor.

Scott describes the two dimensions crucial to becoming a great boss. The first she calls “caring personally,” which is building deep personal relationships with your people, bringing your whole personal self to work, and encouraging the people who work for you to do the same.

Importantly, there is a second dimension, and that is telling people when their work is not up to par. It is delivering hard feedback about the quality of your team members’ work and holding them to high standards. Scott calls this dimension “challenging directly.”

Of course, directly challenging people you care about can be difficult. Many people struggle with it. But as a leader, you must accept that sometimes people will be angry with you for the decisions you are responsible for making. In fact, I would argue that if they are not, you are not doing enough challenging. Combining caring personally and challenging directly is what makes a kick-ass boss. When your people know you care deeply about them, they will be able to hear both your praise and criticism.

Jacqueline Carter and Rasmus Hougaard, in their book Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, demonstrate with quantitative research how doing hard things courageously and in a compassionate way greatly benefits you as a leader. Their data shows when you embody Shift II (tough on results, tender on people), you get promoted faster, reduce your stress, and are half as likely to want to quit your job. Further, it positively impacts your team members. Teams of tough and tender leaders report higher job satisfaction, better engagement, and less burnout. Importantly, they also produce better business results.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is another powerful example of a highly ambitious and humble leader. His career took him from his Harlem childhood as the son of Jamaican immigrants to top positions in the US military and federal government before ultimately being marred by the misleading speech he gave at the United Nations that justified the Iraq invasion in 2003.

Yet Powell had the humility to own that disastrous misjudgment. Only a few years later, he publicly stated that he had been gravely mistaken. Powell’s rise to the top showed his ambition, but he also had the humility to admit when he was wrong.

Powell’s “I love you, and your work is not good enough” leadership principles are as follows:

1. “The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”

2. “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.” Aside from the importance of caring for your people, Powell highlights in his first principle an important challenge you must tackle as a leader. In many organizations, asking for help is seen as weakness or failure. Whether it’s said in so many words or merely implied, the prevailing principle often is this: don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions. As a result, people often cover up their gaps, and results suffer.

Let me be clear. I am not advocating that your people should act helplessly and run to you with every little trouble. But you do need to make yourself accessible and available when you’re needed and when you might be able to help your people find a way to overcome an obstacle. You can show genuine concern for their challenges and provide support even as you demand high standards.

As Powell writes in his second principle, strong leadership means being a responsible adult in the room and taking full ownership of business outcomes. This means some people will get angry at your actions and will disagree with your decisions. It’s inevitable when you’re the boss. If you make the tough decisions and confront people who need to be held accountable, you will piss some people off, and you are doing your job well!

I often joke with my clients that upsetting everyone a little is a sign that you are doing an excellent job as a leader. By procrastinating on difficult choices by trying not to make anyone mad, you’re simply ensuring the only people you’ll wind up angering are the best producers on your team. Don’t fall into that trap.

Sometimes that means firing someone. When individuals break rules, take immoral or dangerous shortcuts, or repeatedly refuse to adhere to agreed-upon norms, letting them go can be the most productive response. As a leader, you are always onstage, and your people are observing your every move. They observe what you do and don’t do, what you say and don’t say. When a firing is a productive response on your part, your people will notice that you took swift action.

The power of pissing off your people is beautifully displayed in one of my favorite sports movies, Miracle, which tells the story of the 1980 US men’s Olympic hockey squad, which beat the highly favored Soviet Union juggernaut. Coach Herb Brooks pushes his team so hard that they despise him. He unites his players by giving them a common enemy: him. It also becomes clear, though, that he personally cares about each of his players. Only with time do they start to appreciate and value his approach to coaching.

The moral is this: As a leader you must work on building authentic relationships while also accepting the reality that you are going to be disliked and maybe even hated at times.

[Editor’s Note: We are also pleased to share this link to Urs’ white paper: “From ‘Show of Force’ to ‘Show of Vulnerability'”]