I am working at a client site as an IT Consultant. Recently the client has provided feedback to my employer:
“His communication is direct and straight forward to the point. But most of the time it is very crude and blunt. He needs to improve on presenting his points more sophisticated and in a sweet way. Especially we have observed when conveying negative things or the points which are related conflict of interests to someone or some team. As a lead he needs to learn to add honey to his communication without impairing the facts”
I agree that sometimes I am very direct, blunt and sometimes it appears as rude to others. Based on the feedback I want to improve on my way of communication or presenting the things to others.
What does it mean to "add honey" to my communication?
I am not sure even how to start improving. What techniques can I use to improve with both the sophistication and sweetness of my communication?
Please note this question was originally written by someone who is not a native English speaker. It has been rewritten to help communicate to a native speaking audience.
Few Scenarios of my communication to add clarity to my question
Scenario:
Context is here. I am lead for web UI development team. I found an issue with web service due to which some part of the functionality of web application is not working. Hence I have talked with other team lead who is responsible for that web service. Since he can not reproducible the issue in his machine he debug and make code changes in my machine. That code changes worked fine and I confirmed that asked to commit the code into TFS branch, where is our central code repository. He says that he would like to check in from my machine it self since he has some issue with his machine. I denied because I am not comfortable to commit other than my changes. Here is the conversation
Myself: Hey Service Lead(SL), Your changes are working fine. Please go ahead and commit the changes.
SL: Good to hear that. I have some issue with TFS which not allows me to commit the code. Hence I would like to do it from my machine.
MySelf: I am not comfortable to commit other changes from machine. Please do it from your machine itself.
SL: OK. I will do it after the issue with TFS has fixed.