Say the Hard Thing

This is such difficult but important advice. I've been sitting in nearly a year of unproductive meetings for a project that goes nowhere because of one middle-manager's abrasive personality and an upper-manager's inaction on the behavior. This problematic manager comes to every meeting ready to shoot down every single proposal in the most dismissive and belittling manner possible.

The problem is, as the author notes, the longer you let the behavior go, the harder it is to correct it. When I worked at the Coast Guard, we had an abrasive personality who simply shot down everyone else's ideas. Management's solution was to establish a rule that you could not criticize a proposal without offering a solution. Suddenly that abrasive individual started looking really silly blinking dumbly when they were asked, "So you've identified a problem. What's the solution?"