For this I have a personal experience, where I was leading a team for a client project and one of my team members was not really putting her weight and once I gave her the criticism, she did not take it very well and began to show signs of decline in her quality of work. Once I noticed this, I approach her and explained to her to basis of the criticism, how it will affect the over project, my expectation of her as I believed she could do much better and she understood it better and opt her game.

In my experience the so called feedback "Sandwich" model with first providing something positive, then the critical area of improvement and then a positive thing again, causes more confusion than effectively communicating your feedback. Instead, my experience is that it works better to firstly explain the situation, then the impact/observation/consequence it had in that situation, to then lastly provide constructive, suggested feedback as a way to move forward together. Agreeing to have a follow-up conversation afterwards is also a good way to enforce the agreed upon way forward and emphasizing that you take this seriously.

As someone who used to take criticism hard, what helped me change was realizing that my inability to take criticism was hurting the whole team and causing tension. My colleague did great by allowing me to explain how I came by the idea and its development, saying how great it was and then pointing out that doing it that way had caused certain losses to our workflow and made things harder to understand in the longrun. She visualized it for me: my goals, my work and the impact on the company. So I believe that ultimately it's easier to provide constructive criticism to someone who has the company at heart and truly wants what's best for the company or team to achieve its goal.

It's common to struggle with taking criticism. Who wants to hear they're doing something badly? But: this resistance can be much more harmful. Feedback is a gift: It means that you are investing time, thought and energy into a relationship that you want to be successful. This is something that you can state before even giving your feedback to someone, to help them understand that you're on their side. The key is to come prepared and touch on the points in a constructive, understandable manner. Remain clear, do not bubble wrap anything and be prepared to hold some tension - this is normal.