Supervision Advice from 1936

"Make the fault seem easy to correct."  This is one of the principles from Dale Carnegie's classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Although this book was written in 1936, in 2013 it was still listed as a one of the nation's best-selling management books.  As Carnegie does throughout the book, he uses stories to illustrate this principle:

"A bachelor friend of mine, about forty years old, became engaged and his fiancée persuaded him to take some belated dancing lessons.  'The Lord knows I needed some dancing lessons,' he confessed as he told me the story, 'for I danced just as I did when I first started twenty years ago.  The first teacher I engaged probably told me the truth.  She said I was all wrong; I would just have to forget everything and begin all over again.  But that took the heart out of me.  I had no incentive to go on.  So I quit her.

"'The next teacher may have been lying, but I liked it.  She said nonchalantly that my dancing was a bit old-fashioned perhaps, but the fundamentals were all right, and she assured me I wouldn't have any trouble learning a few new steps.  The first teacher had discouraged me by emphasizing my mistakes.  The new teacher did the opposite.  She kept praising the things I did right and minimizing my errors...

"'Now my common sense tells me I will always be a fourth-rate dancer, yet... I know I am a better dancer than I would have been if she hadn't told me I had a natural sense of rhythm.  That encouraged me.  That gave me hope.  That made me want to improve.'"

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