Don't soften feedback
I feel like there is a fair amount of literature on empowering managers to sugarcoat (or not, as this article says) negative feedback.An alternative point that perhaps a lot of managers have trouble considering – it's perfectly okay to not have any critical or negative feedback if things are going well. If things are fine, just go ahead and say that. Negative feedback or criticism should be relatively rare.I have noticed a pattern where managers, especially new managers, tend to take articles like this and others at face value, and nerdily try to maintain some kind of weird ratio in their feedback. They feel like they have to say something critical every time they give feedback to their reports. This leads to situations where there is no actual problem but they are spinning minor things into critical feedback just so they have something to say in that "column", which quickly becomes off-putting. It causes individual contributors to think, "I would rather get off this constant criticism treadmill, and work for someone more peaceful".Story time: I watched a new manager tear apart an otherwise great team like this once; six months after they took charge, 3 out of their 5 engineers had left for new jobs and higher salaries because the manager kept telling them "Weeeeell, you could have improved upon " every week, when actually they were doing a stellar job under time pressure and hitting all their targets. The appropriate response should have been "Great job, thank you, and please let me write you this large bonus check for year end".