Reach for the word before the whip

When you can make someone comply, it's tempting to skip straight to making them. Write them up. Pull rank. Threaten the schedule, the review, the report to the boss. It's fast, and it works in the moment. But reaching for force first is a tell — it usually means you couldn't be bothered to explain, persuade, or listen. The line cook who gets barked at instead of shown. The junior written up for a mistake nobody walked them through. Power used as a shortcut around the harder work of talking.

Cicero drew the line between two ways of settling things: "we must resort to force only in case we may not avail ourselves of discussion" (De Officiis 1.34, Miller). Discussion is the human way; force is the brute's. Note the word only. Not never — sometimes the conversation has genuinely failed, and then authority is right and necessary. But only then. Force is what's left when reason has been honestly tried and come up short, not the first lever you grab because it's nearest.

When you hold power over someone, the discipline is to spend your words before you spend your weight. Most of what you'd enforce, you could have just explained.