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Don't Sweep Feedback Under the Rug

• hga 16y ago
  While I agree that timely feedback is essential, the section: "How to Make Sure it is a Productive Tool?" Puts further into play the typical "annual review", which as far as I can tell is generally a destructive institution. Experience shows that at best it's neutral and that far more often it has a negative effect on employees. This essay doesn't really address it, except implicitly by encouraging high quality feedback. And, yeah, it shouldn't be swept under the rug. One of the best ways to ensure hard feelings and damage to your firm is to withhold negative feedback until you fire someone with a dump of all the frustrations that have been building up over the months or years. (In my case, these were situations where I wasn't be fired for that but for the crime of being too expensive for the firm at that time. And the feedback wasn't helpful, e.g. "A lot of people hate you and some want to punch you out" (without further details) or the lamest of all time, "Once your code had a bug, and since you weren't around when I found it (likely after midnight) I had to fix it myself." (This from a brilliant recent MIT EECS grad who turned down a job to work on IE 5 (back when it didn't suck) to work on this startup.) In the latter case they also contested unemployment; the state was unamused.)