I'm perceived as being harsh by people

@LadyGrace Thanks a lot for the advice. 'Anything worth doing is worth doing well' the say. I try to give everything my best shot. Just wish i could carry on without stepping on too many toes.

@MaryN Don't blame yourself for nothing, Mary. You've done nothing wrong at all. Their feelings actually have nothing to do with you. Their response to you is simply their feelings of insecurity. Don't take that onto yourself. There is something in them that is lacking, which would come out no matter who they are with or who they observe.

@AnonymouslyYours I try that but it doesn't seem to be working so far.

@IHateMyLife0MeDie A good number of them have confessed to me how things have improved. But the same people who confessed their satisfaction with the level of improvement today, will start grumbling about how bureaucratic you are being tomorrow.

Well goodluck. It looks like you're trying your best. Maybe they're taking what you're doing personally? Are they also able to come to you for concerns and questions before you even go to see their work?

Well I don't think I'm so good with understanding people myself.

Hope you find your answer.

I'll just leave you with an interesting story of Richard Feynman, that scientist with the colorful personality.

"What they had to do was work on IBM machines--punching holes, numbers that they didn't understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly.
I said the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we're doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited:"We're fighting a war! We see what it is!" Now they knew what the numbers meant: If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more energy released and so on. They now know what they were doing.
Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn't need supervising; they didn't need anything. They understood everything; they invented several of the programs that we used.
So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was they were doing. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, they now did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten times as fast."
--Richard Feynman, Los Alamos from Below

@PhoenixPhail Trying to be as friendly as possible but there will always come a time when you're required to put your foot down.

@SW-User You don't have to tell me 🙂

@MaryN you're ok