What situations require a Gentle Hand and when is a Firm Hand required? An unofficial guide
Disclaimer: ''This should not be taken as parenting advice, a manual on teaching, or as an all encompassing treatise on leadership and management. Each person is unique and therefore each person will require a more nuanced personalized “touch” instead of pigeonholing them into requiring any particular style. This is an extremely broad generalization and take that with a pinch of salt if you’ll please.
As stated on the Main page, studies have shown that children do a lot better at basic learning with a gentle approach. Therefore, using the Gentle Touch will work better when getting a kid to learn their ABCs and 123s as well as other fundamental skills like saying words, forming sentences, reading simple words and sentences and understanding basic arithmetic - addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and comparison. But once the child has the fundamentals down pat and most importantly, has started to become more mature, a firmer hand can now be applied when the now older child has to learn more and more rules instead of how to’s. In short, a gentle hand is needed to make sure the kiddo can read and write basic sentences, but a firmer hand may be needed to teach him grammar. The important factor here is maturity - if a child understands that rules exist and why they exist, she will also be much more receptive to someone who has to strictly enforce those rules. Otherwise, being strict and firm, when a child may not yet understand the reason for such firmness, will only cause her to either tune out and shut down completely, or become rebellious.
As a converse, there are scenarios where a firm touch is necessary for even young children - making sure they don’t endanger themselves. If your little girl is trying to write the letter “W” with a pen, she needs a gentle touch for sure, but if she is about to poke an electrical socket with that pen, she needs a firm hand to yank her away and scold her to never do something like that ever again. This is because your kid will require way too long to properly understand that certain things like hot objects, sharp objects, electricity, chemicals, firearms, falls from a height, deep water etc can seriously hurt or even kill them. So enforcing hard and fast rules to stay away from such dangers will have to suffice until the kid matures and understands the danger. From this point on, a gentle hand is required to slowly help these children learn to better navigate these dangers. Otherwise they might grow up unable to cook food for themselves, incapable of swimming, terrified of heights, mortified when dealing with any electrical appliance and generally unable to take care of themselves.
Different approaches are needed when someone attempts to pick up the Fundamentals of a skill, progresses to an Intermediate level and makes it to an Advanced level.
Fundamental Level: No person exists who can perfectly pick up a skill after just one demonstration or instructional session. Everyone learning a skill for the very first time will make mistakes and may make numerous mistakes as they iteratively pick up that skill. If a firm critical touch is applied to them at this stage, learners may get discouraged. Those who can wash out of the learning program, will do so, while those who cannot, will learn to do the bare minimum just to keep that firm critical hand off their backs. If on the other hand, an encouraging gentle touch is applied throughout the learning process, the student will be encouraged to keep trying, keep practicing, keep iterating until s/he gets it. Now the student feels confident enough to learn the skill at the next level.
Intermediate Level: This person will require a hybrid approach, depending on what exactly is being learned.
Advanced Level: Once a student has decided to learn a skill at an advanced level, a firm critical hand is what they will need. This is because at this stage, it is not about learning but about intense practicing; about honing the physical actions or mental focus or both to levels that allow for peak performance. The student requires a trainer who has an eye for small detail and isn’t afraid to point out imperfections in technique when he sees them. The student is also mature enough to understand that his teacher is being critical because he wants the student to hone the skill further.
When you get to the workplace, the common expectation is that your employees generally already possess the skills they need to do the jobs they’ve been given. Personality types can be used to determine what skill is a good fit for a certain individual, but irrespective of the actual skill or talent in question, employees can be sorted into four types and each type requires a different touch, as outlined below.
The High Ability High Energy employee aka the Hypercompetent Sidekick : This guy knows what needs doing, knows how to do it and is supremely confident in his ability to accomplish those tasks. Therefore, someone using a firm touch and constantly barking at him like he’s an army mule, will only cause the employee to lose all respect for that leader and leave. A gentle touch, that reminds him just how valued and appreciated he is, will go a long way towards keeping him invested in the success of your organization.
The High Ability Low Energy employee aka the Brilliant, but Lazy guy : This guy knows what he is capable of - but most of the time, he just lacks the drive or incentive to actually get out there and do something. A gentle touch will therefore just continue to coddle his laziness. A firm hand that threatens to kick his butt unless he gets it moving, may just be the incentive - or challenge he needs. But if you start to notice that the firm approach has successfully kicked the laziness out of this guy, you must then transition to a gentler approach.
The Low Ability High Energy employee aka a Determinator with Japanese Spirit : This guy knows that he is actually deficient in the skills required to do the job. Either because he is a newbie who just needs actual field experience to eliminate certain preconceptions or an Incompletely Trained sort trying to learn on the job, he knows that working hard and busting his butt may be the only way he can get better. While it may appear that he needs a firm hand to improve, based on the previous folder’s statement about a firm hand being needed to hone a skill to perfection, this is actually the wrong approach to take with an employee. It is because he is already applying a firm touch to himself and pushing himself to work harder. A firm critical hand from his supervisor might just convince him that he’ll never get good enough to actually do this job well. He will therefore consider himself a failure and quit. Applying a gentle touch encourages him to keep going, to keep trying until he eventually does get good. At which point, he graduates into a Hypercompetent Sidekick. And he already has loads of respect for you for believing in him. Continuing the gentle touch will further keep him motivated to remain by your side.
That said, maintaining that gentle touch can be an experience that will test your patience. Because until this type of guy gets good, he will make mistakes along the way. And due to his high level of motivation, he’ll just keep on going and keep making more and more mistakes! And in some cases, mistakes in tasks you never even asked him to do. This leaves you with a constant amount of mess to keep cleaning up after. And when you spend day after day cleaning up his mistakes, it is really tempting to just harden that hand and whack him now and then.
The Low Ability Low Energy employee aka The Millstone : This guy requires a firm touch applied just once - to terminate his employment! Unless you like having a resource hog around!
When supervising senior level executives, the rules stated above do not apply anymore. This is because you aren’t dealing with worker bees given individual tasks to accomplish; you are now dealing with queen bees in command of their own hives of worker bees and thereby with different styles of leadership. So the type of hand you need to use, will now depend on that leadership style. Here’s how it breaks down.
The Visionary: This is the kind of leader who is always bustling with ideas about what the organization should do next. He may have even been the entrepreneur whose big idea spawned the organization in the first place. But the problem with these kinds of guys is that 70% of their ideas tend to be nonsensical or impractical. And as for the 30% of their ideas which are feasible, they tend to not focus on any one; instead stretching themselves and the organization thin, chasing all of them simultaneously. They are therefore in serious need of a firm disciplining hand that keeps them grounded to reality and focused on one task until completion.
The Operative: This is the guy, who when given a feasible achievable task from a Visionary type, will run with it, break the job down into parts, delegate those parts out, get the required resources and find a way to accomplish the task. Like the Hypercompetent Sidekick in the previous folder, he knows what needs to be done and what he and his team are capable of. So, applying a firm touch and barking at him like a junkyard dog, only means he loses all confidence in your ability to lead, and is out the door with his team following him. He requires a gentle affirming encouraging touch to keep him invested.
The Enforcer: One problem with an Operative type of leader is that he may too often rely on heroic efforts, the Indy Ploy, Gambit Roulette or other out of the box improvisational ways to get things done. So, on the few occasions when he isn’t there, nobody else may be able to step into his role and replicate his success. Usually because he never documented or recorded anything, or trained anyone to succeed or fill in for him. Therefore, for the good of the overall organization, another leader must exist who comes up with guidelines, processes, quality standards etc and applies a firm touch to everyone when needed, in order to ensure a robust organization that isn’t overly dependent on last minute desperate heroic efforts to survive everyday. This guy will therefore not need a firm touch at all - because he will apply it to himself as much as he applies it to everyone else. A gentle touch is what he needs to sometimes prevent him from becoming too fastidious or too heavy handed with his discipline - and make sure he doesn’t morph into an Obstructive Bureaucrat.
The Harmonizer: This type of leader isn’t an idea generator, nor is she a git’er’done go getter and she is definitely not a fastidious rule enforcer. But what she is really good at is being the one who can get a Visionary, Operative and Enforcer to go through one meeting without ripping each other to shreds and/or driving them out. She is the Team Mom who can get everyone to play nice!! She is usually the one who uses the gentle touch to soothe wounded egos or prevent feelings from being hurt, and thereby bringing a sense of belonging, togetherness and harmony. But if allowed to go too far, the organization’s sweetheart risks turning the place into one giant country club where everyone feels great, love each other and morale is high, but nothing is ever getting done. Therefore, she will need a firm hand to occasionally remind her that all those happy people working for her, need to be doing things to meet the organization’s goals. Or remind her that resources are finite, so they’ll have to be prioritized - thereby hurting a few people’s feelings.
