[agf]

> you being by default direct can give some people the opposite impression

Definitely rings true.

> Make it into a cooperative discussion so they don't feel like they're the only one criticizing the subject

If these are people I have time to have regular 1:1s with, then what you're saying does make sense. But there are a lot of people I work with where the benefits from saying the difficult thing would be large that I don't work closely enough with to be able to spend that kind of time. I guess what I'm really asking is how to translate that into a culture; either raise the average trust level or lower the required trust level for difficult conversations.