I would add that it's important to remember TO WHOM the feedback should be valuable. Something you need to get off your chest? Worthless to the receiver. It should have undeniable value to the person receiving the feedback. Like "I care about you so you need to know that this is being done wrong and it will make your life better if it's correct"
Something you need to get off your chest is remarkably valuable feedback for a manager to receive. Whether they do anything useful with it or not is a separate matter.
One thing to add is that most of us are terrible at giving feedback; most feedback is typically wrong, vague, or insensitive.
The trouble is that those who are less practiced at giving feedback are usually the worst at giving it, which leads to a downward spiral of not giving feedback.
Yeah, I’d still say it’s managements responsibility to both make people comfortable with providing candid feedback, and to find the value in poorly delivered feedback. If somebody is complaining about something, they will have a reason for doing so, even if they can’t articulate very well. Figuring out how to understand a team members grievances is a managers responsibility. If this sort of thing isn’t happening in a particular workplace, it’s a failure of management primarily.
> What if you don’t speak your mind and create an organization that continuously lowers its expectations, or have to let these people go eventually?
As a manager but not an owner, what actually happens is that I keep the same salary but the expectations are lower. I'm comfortable with that.
The only way to get a meaningful raise is to change jobs every few years anyway. That's pretty common knowledge.
If people are fired or bullied out of an organization by others, but I'm friends with them, then I have a bigger network that can help me get employment at another organization. I look at every friendly coworker that leaves as a probe sent out into the world to see what might be better elsewhere.
It's far more valuable for me to maintain a positive relationship with my coworkers than it is to provide negative feedback. Pick your battles. Who cares if one of your workers isn't very efficient?
There's so much incentive to expand my network of people that would love to work with me or for me, and so little incentive to crack down on employees to try and get them to perform better.
Basically what you do is to put "fences" around dangerous areas as a manager and don't confront them unless it is "too much" - where too much depends on a situation.
That was what I observed when working as developer of a factory control system, while testing I was sitting in place where you basically should not sit ... but I was in control of system so I knew what I was doing. No one confronted me about that, next day there was fence preventing access to that place. First thing I thought was "someone could just tell me", but yeah if you can fix thing without confronting and you have loads of other things to do in a day I totally understand someone rather put a fence than confront some guy he does not really know because he is a contractor.
I can see it is easier to move people to other projects if they don't get well instead of having discussion to make things clear. But such discussion can take too much time and energy from everyone involved.
"Basically what you do is to put "fences" around dangerous areas as a manager and don't confront them unless it is "too much" - where too much depends on a situation."
In your example, putting a fence was apparently an efficient way to mitigate the risk. Just like in risk management, you need to establish your risk tolerance and know in advance what type of behavior you are willing to accept.
Once you have identified the risk, discover the root cause, and then you can choose whether to avoid, accept, transfer or mitigate the risk.
Some risk often remains, and often new risks come as a result of controlling the original risk (https://teamsuccess.io/risk). For example, firing a liked employee might lead to others leaving too.
Lots of companies and teams don't establish a risk tolerance / risk threshold, which leads to managing the situation poorly.
This is a great explanation as to why small companies can be so much more efficient than large companies. If at a large company you as a low level employee notice that a 15 person department that could be outsourced to a SaaS product and let management know, it probably will not end well for you. The 15 people in that group will hate you, the manger of the group will hate you and you will be told that you are incompetent for not understanding how important the 15 person department is to the company.
In contrast at a small company, if you notice that the CEO is spending 20% of their time on a task that could be outsourced for $100/month you are likely to be praised for helping make the company more efficient.
I stand corrected. My frame was that submitted articles should be held to a completely different standard than comments.
I see that is not constructive and not the ethos of the site.
My apologies, original comment remains for the sake of accuracy, but I no longer endorse the intent.
=== original comment ===
When I read an article and it has an clearly misused word or grammatical error in the first paragraph, I become concerned the poster isn’t taking my time as a reader seriously.
It isn’t “cuddling” it is “coddling”.
I don’t really want to read an article about communication written by someone who doesn’t understand that distinction.
Thanks for letting me know. Not a native English speaker so these show up every now and then even though I use tools like Grammarly. Will fix when next to a computer!
Please don't frame comments like this in the form of an attack. HN has many, many users and authors who aren't native speakers of English. Frequently an odd and isolated error like that is evidence of how amazingly good their English is. The fact that it's not a mistake a native speaker would make should clue you in to that possibility.
I was guilty of this in 2019 and got burned on my review (appropriately). Part of my challenge is figuring out when I need to voice a problem vs. when I need to work through it. I tried the latter and it kept failing because a vendor we had involved turned out to be a turd. In retrospect I should have said this project smells like shit back in April and threw away a quarter of a million vs. doubling down. We ultimately delivered something at the end of the year, but it's not ideal and I exhausted my team in the process.
Part of my issue is that I spent most of my formative years working in a very small company or for myself, and I never really developed an understanding of how all this comes together. Past few years have been a crash course and I'm hoping to have corrected things a good bit for next year.
I had a review like that, and I didn't fight. I quit. Why was I such a wimp? Well I figure what is the point of that battle? Some people have deranged thinking and it's not my job to turn around that juggernaut. I'd rather focus on finding and working for a better boss.
Not sure I'm tracking your question. My lack of decisiveness in shutting down and/or drawing laser focus to the water filling the bilge of the aforementioned project was the issue. I've been in industry for 25 years, I think there's a fair expectation that I should have this shit sorted out by now and accepted my lumps. Pointing the fingers at shitty vendors or internal processes now is too late.
I'm not much of a planner to be honest. Strategy will be to communicate delivery risks to a level outside of my comfort zone and see what happens. If someone has a good way of measuring this I'm all ears.
It's crazy that there's hardly any training (outside a professional MBA, perhaps?) about how to handle these things, it's really sink or swim while playing with millions of $ and many peoples' careers.
Hmm. There's something to this, but I think he gets a couple of things wrong.
* Firstly, it's totally possible to tank morale by over-criticising. Making sure your feedback is heard is only half the problem
* Second, the exact wording you need to use depends on culture. Some of the phrases he doesn't like would be clearly understood as a reprimand in other cultures. The famous 'British translation table' is a good example (although it's an exaggeration): https://samalenglishlanguageservices.wordpress.com/translati...
(I'd paste that latter, but tables don't work that well in HN)
This Monktoberfest 2019 talk about "Management Mistakes I've Made (So You Don't Have To)" has some similar advice for managers managing their team members and managing up:
I think it's good to keep in mind the concept of signal and corrective[1] when reading this blog post. This blog is a corrective assuming an environment where people don't speak up enough about things that are going wrong.
If you're in an environment where harsh criticism is regularly thrown out, to the point where everyone is constantly on guard and major CYA is the norm rather than the exception, this advice is not for you (you need another nice blog about when to shut up, and how to deliver criticism without being hostile, etc)
The problem with "feedback" is that it's usually one-directional and doesn't foster discourse. And this article basically says the opposite - just tell someone their weakness flat out. That's very callous.
Feedback generally works best when it also provides a solution and preferably is outcome-orientated and not a judgement about personal character or performance.
If you really feel an urgent need to tell someone what you think of them, don't think of it as "giving feedback" but as "a teaching moment" and show them a different way.
My problem with feedback having been the giver and receiver is that both sides are supposed to pretend the giver had this omniscient viewpoint to judge all employees’ work and the employee has to politely take into consideration these judgements. In reality its a charade at best or demoralizing at worst.
Everything a manager does should be based on discourse. If something needs to be adressed, start off by politely asking.
Bad managers are all those who start off providing ready-made solutions and prescriptions. Basically orders from above shuts down critical free-thinking.
These ignorants are terrible leaders that should not have the positions they now enjoy as privilege, not as responsibility.
This is also working advice for everybody else as well, wether you are leader or not:
How else would you trick out minutia or get people to think for themselves how the solution should evolve?
Ugh dealing with this from the employee side right now. Just had my perf review and was told I was not meeting expectations and then promptly let go. I had never previously been told that I wasn't meeting expectations, and the things I was apparently missing over the last ~8 months would have been easy to fix or explain at the time if I'd had any feedback. This from a company where execs have multiple times in the three years I've been here stood up in front of the company and said "if no one has told you you're not performing well then you're doing fine, you'll know if you're underperforming." Also a company that had layoffs just a month ago, no idea why they kept me just to let me go now. Is what it is and just time to move on but still frustrating.
Every time I read something like this it blows my mind that there are still places in the world where you can be "let go" so easily. I'm really sorry to hear that this happened to you. I hope your next employer can be more communicative.
US and especially some states, provides right of employers to fire employees at almost no notice and no cause.
However, lawyers and leader roles exist in Europe to provide all the necessary red tape, should this be necessary there too. All they have to do it explain/document it is for the economic health of company and that they've researched alternative solutions.
Asia, Russia, Latin America: Expectations of significant protections aren't even reasonable. Everywhere you may sue or win something if due process not followed, but that's about it and could be costly.
And then they wonder why nobody has time and energy to win their engineered climate crisis.
Haha, I'm having a very similar conversation with my manager, it's hilarious, and fascinating, as I've only really heard about this before and never seen it first-hand. Very unlikely to be let go, which gives me some distance, and now a political battle will ensue as I don't take kindly to shenanigans.
I will share this with you, kindred spirit: there's two things you can do better than anyone else. Work harder, and care less.
The person who cares least in any given situation has the upper hand.
If there's one thing that I know is true about bad management, whether it's directly above or a couple levels - they never play by their own rules.
At the first display of this, either with big or small examples, every employee should watch their back, take extra efforts to support their colleagues, and prepare an exit strategy - immediately.
You may be the perfect employee and think you'll never be let go, but chaos is ruthlessly unbiased.
Graham's manager may also be incompetent inside a larger org that is competent. We had a similar issue in my company, and it is a thing that happens with new managers. They're not yet comfortable giving direct negative feedback so stuff festers and isn't communicated.
Nothing to say but that sucks.
This could also be a really underhanded way to avoid paying severance or unemployment. In that case, you can claim unemployment even if your company says you were terminated for cause. You'll (my experience, anyway) have to fill out a form with the state saying you were never given negative feedback. The state adjudicator will ask your former employer for copies of your performance reviews and the paper trail of negative feedback. When none is forthcoming, I'd bet you'll get unemployment. It's not much, but it's better than nothing!
My old employer was a pretty extreme version of cowardly management. They never wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings, or talk bad about anyone. To the point where there would be people who have been coasting around for years, and everyone in the company knows they don’t have any valuable contribution to the company, and yet they’d rather duplicate their roles than to let them go.
38 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 93.3 ms ] threadI would add that it's important to remember TO WHOM the feedback should be valuable. Something you need to get off your chest? Worthless to the receiver. It should have undeniable value to the person receiving the feedback. Like "I care about you so you need to know that this is being done wrong and it will make your life better if it's correct"
The trouble is that those who are less practiced at giving feedback are usually the worst at giving it, which leads to a downward spiral of not giving feedback.
As a manager but not an owner, what actually happens is that I keep the same salary but the expectations are lower. I'm comfortable with that.
The only way to get a meaningful raise is to change jobs every few years anyway. That's pretty common knowledge.
If people are fired or bullied out of an organization by others, but I'm friends with them, then I have a bigger network that can help me get employment at another organization. I look at every friendly coworker that leaves as a probe sent out into the world to see what might be better elsewhere.
It's far more valuable for me to maintain a positive relationship with my coworkers than it is to provide negative feedback. Pick your battles. Who cares if one of your workers isn't very efficient?
There's so much incentive to expand my network of people that would love to work with me or for me, and so little incentive to crack down on employees to try and get them to perform better.
That was what I observed when working as developer of a factory control system, while testing I was sitting in place where you basically should not sit ... but I was in control of system so I knew what I was doing. No one confronted me about that, next day there was fence preventing access to that place. First thing I thought was "someone could just tell me", but yeah if you can fix thing without confronting and you have loads of other things to do in a day I totally understand someone rather put a fence than confront some guy he does not really know because he is a contractor.
I can see it is easier to move people to other projects if they don't get well instead of having discussion to make things clear. But such discussion can take too much time and energy from everyone involved.
In your example, putting a fence was apparently an efficient way to mitigate the risk. Just like in risk management, you need to establish your risk tolerance and know in advance what type of behavior you are willing to accept.
Once you have identified the risk, discover the root cause, and then you can choose whether to avoid, accept, transfer or mitigate the risk.
Some risk often remains, and often new risks come as a result of controlling the original risk (https://teamsuccess.io/risk). For example, firing a liked employee might lead to others leaving too.
Lots of companies and teams don't establish a risk tolerance / risk threshold, which leads to managing the situation poorly.
In contrast at a small company, if you notice that the CEO is spending 20% of their time on a task that could be outsourced for $100/month you are likely to be praised for helping make the company more efficient.
I stand corrected. My frame was that submitted articles should be held to a completely different standard than comments.
I see that is not constructive and not the ethos of the site.
My apologies, original comment remains for the sake of accuracy, but I no longer endorse the intent.
=== original comment ===
When I read an article and it has an clearly misused word or grammatical error in the first paragraph, I become concerned the poster isn’t taking my time as a reader seriously.
It isn’t “cuddling” it is “coddling”.
I don’t really want to read an article about communication written by someone who doesn’t understand that distinction.
There’s too much to read each day.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Part of my issue is that I spent most of my formative years working in a very small company or for myself, and I never really developed an understanding of how all this comes together. Past few years have been a crash course and I'm hoping to have corrected things a good bit for next year.
??? So you basically didn't fight during your review. And now : "hoping to have corrected things". What's your plan ?
I hope you did find the previous sentence offending. It's exactly what my toxic boss is doing with me every day.
That's not feedback, that's throwing one in the water to see if he swims and finding that if he drowns then, bah, he was not cut for the job.
In my case, I have no complaints with the way my boss handled things, so I'm still here chugging away.
I'm not much of a planner to be honest. Strategy will be to communicate delivery risks to a level outside of my comfort zone and see what happens. If someone has a good way of measuring this I'm all ears.
Therefore its no surprise negative feedback is not a popular concept among the plebs.
* Firstly, it's totally possible to tank morale by over-criticising. Making sure your feedback is heard is only half the problem
* Second, the exact wording you need to use depends on culture. Some of the phrases he doesn't like would be clearly understood as a reprimand in other cultures. The famous 'British translation table' is a good example (although it's an exaggeration): https://samalenglishlanguageservices.wordpress.com/translati...
(I'd paste that latter, but tables don't work that well in HN)
https://youtu.be/jYXX3QFgtYg
If you're in an environment where harsh criticism is regularly thrown out, to the point where everyone is constantly on guard and major CYA is the norm rather than the exception, this advice is not for you (you need another nice blog about when to shut up, and how to deliver criticism without being hostile, etc)
[1]: https://everythingstudies.com/2017/12/19/the-signal-and-the-...
Feedback generally works best when it also provides a solution and preferably is outcome-orientated and not a judgement about personal character or performance.
If you really feel an urgent need to tell someone what you think of them, don't think of it as "giving feedback" but as "a teaching moment" and show them a different way.
Bad managers are all those who start off providing ready-made solutions and prescriptions. Basically orders from above shuts down critical free-thinking.
These ignorants are terrible leaders that should not have the positions they now enjoy as privilege, not as responsibility.
This is also working advice for everybody else as well, wether you are leader or not:
How else would you trick out minutia or get people to think for themselves how the solution should evolve?
However, lawyers and leader roles exist in Europe to provide all the necessary red tape, should this be necessary there too. All they have to do it explain/document it is for the economic health of company and that they've researched alternative solutions.
Asia, Russia, Latin America: Expectations of significant protections aren't even reasonable. Everywhere you may sue or win something if due process not followed, but that's about it and could be costly.
And then they wonder why nobody has time and energy to win their engineered climate crisis.
I will share this with you, kindred spirit: there's two things you can do better than anyone else. Work harder, and care less.
The person who cares least in any given situation has the upper hand.
At the first display of this, either with big or small examples, every employee should watch their back, take extra efforts to support their colleagues, and prepare an exit strategy - immediately.
You may be the perfect employee and think you'll never be let go, but chaos is ruthlessly unbiased.
Nothing to say but that sucks.
This could also be a really underhanded way to avoid paying severance or unemployment. In that case, you can claim unemployment even if your company says you were terminated for cause. You'll (my experience, anyway) have to fill out a form with the state saying you were never given negative feedback. The state adjudicator will ask your former employer for copies of your performance reviews and the paper trail of negative feedback. When none is forthcoming, I'd bet you'll get unemployment. It's not much, but it's better than nothing!