You tell them....then you ask them

Thinking of Jobs': You don't ask people what they want.  You tell them what they want. 

why do we ask people what they want then?  I think you say, "This is what you want"....then you ask "do you need anything else"  ..... you don't start out by asking them what they want. You provide something and then you move to that step.  This seems to be paramount.  And is not necessarily done very often.

The urge to be positive as a leader

You really have to fake a lot to make a lot.  Positive efforts help to exploit the emergence of more positivity.  So if you can help the positive emerge then you can make a lot more than if you boil on the negative.   Being negative all the time leads to recursive improvements on such a small aspect of the effort....that is to say, you can be rigorous on 2 or maybe 3 things and move them forward.  The problem is that things in nature have to die.  And they have to die a lot.  So the thing to do is to start with a lot of different things....then do them at 90%....then you take the small number of 90% things that survive then you ensure that you take a negative focus on the ones that survive because it makes them stronger.

tl;dr - start out at 90% with a bunch of things and then move the things that survive into the negative realm.

Internal Consultants - Focus on Support

An internal consulting service (who has a macro-view of things) can get annoyed or frustrated with executive/leaders when they compare the current way the leader makes decisions (and their current leadership style), with an ideal state of 'how things should be done' [of course, keeping in mind, things can get done in many different ways).  But the service can not let ideal/normative states in between leadership style and decisions.  Internal consulting is about helping, not forcing.  You have to evolve from the current state, not change and compare to a future state.   The key is evolving from the current state.  And the best way to evolve something is start with 1 thing....don't try to change everything, start with one thing.