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I'll definitely give this a read. I think I'm going to disagree with it. But I will give it a chance. Frankly, I think that honesty/transparency are buzzwords

I'll definitely give this a read. I think I'm going to disagree with it. But I will give it a chance. Frankly, I think that honesty/transparency are buzzwords that have little to no meaning. So the authors will have to convince me. But the whole approach seems cynically disingenuous in most of the places where it's applied. I also think that criticism doesn't deserve a place in the honesty/transparency group. Criticism is an inevitable fact of life that will happen to you at some point, and you will have to deliver it at some point, if you are a functional adult. Honesty and transparency are entirely optional. They are not in the same category at all, in my opinion. I encountered different types of criticism and management when I was around 10 years old at one of these things people call music festivals. They are practice gulags. You practice for 10 hours a day, and you work with a bunch of different teachers. It's every 11-year-old's definition of "festival." But one of the nice things is that you get to work with a lot of different teachers. I remember working very hard on a particular bow stroke called Martele. The hammer stroke. I was really bad at it. And one of my teachers was quite honest with me about how much I sucked at it. And to be fair, I did suck at it. It didn't work. At all. So he told me that it sucked, and that I wasn't trying hard enough and I should practice more, and he was going to spend his lesson smoking a cigarette while I tried to perform 100 martele strokes in a row on the same pitch. You can call that honesty. But you can also call that a number of other things. I had a different teacher a few weeks later who listened to me trying to do this, and his response was, "Well, this really isn't working out very well for us, now is it? What should we do when things aren't working out well no matter how hard we try? Well, we need to try something different, don't we? Let's try something different." The reason I'm bringing that up as an example is because this is actually not uncommon in the tech world. The first guy was being honest. Totally honest. I sounded like garbage. No doubt about that. The second guy was slightly dishonest, but he was more to the point of solving the problem. And, in fact, I got a lot better at that particular stroke of the bow rather quickly. I'll have to read the book, and I definitely will. And I don't like to leave unread books around. Especially ones backed by research. I hope I was clear to qualify my statements by being based on my own personal experience, rather than pretending that I've done any scientific studies. I would also argue that there's no such thing as constructive "honesty". Construction inside a team setting is always assumed to be honest. No one goes around telling people they did a great job when they sucked at it. Unless that person is a really bad manager. But teammates don't do this in reality. So I can't see how this really makes sense. Like I said, I'll read it. But I think it's questionable on the face of it. Maybe we are living in some sort of crazy place where honesty/transparency/criticism and just a healthy trusting relationship with your boss are all the same thing. But I don't think so, and pushing things in that direction is bad for all of us. On the other hand, I'm willing to be wrong.

lgas 9y ago
How was the second guy dishonest in any way? I don't see it.
- ianamartin 9y ago
  You can make the case that the second guy was dishonest because he wasn't telling me how bad I was at playing that one note in that one way. The he was doing me a disservice by shielding me from the harsh reality of how rough the music world can be on young performers. That if you suck that badly at that one note in that one way, there are probably tons of other things that you don't even know about that you also suck at. There is a lot of truth in what the first guy was saying in the sense that this is how a lot of the music world works. And there was honesty in treating me that way because that's how people get treated. Even little kids. Some people will argue that this is important for people to understand right from the beginning. And that shielding people from that is dishonest. All of these things are true, to a certain extent. And all of them are things that need to be talked about. I've struggled with this as a teacher with my own students. People in teacher roles do need to talk about hard truths. Pretending that every student is going to be amazing and going to have a great career is a lie. For better or worse, I've decided that context matters, and I don't bring big picture truth into lessons that are focused on execution. I set up regular sessions with my students that are totally separate from an actual lesson about the violin or even music. We just sit down and talk for a while about what the student wants and expects, what it's like to work in the field professionally, and what the expectations are going to be from other people. I don't know for a fact that this is superior to the hard-ass jerk approach, but it's the approach that I think is the right mix of honesty and kindness and productivity. You can't only take the second approach and focus on what is or isn't working with someone and completely shield them from the reality of the world. That's being dishonest about the world. But what you can do is separate the issues and deal with them straightforwardly. You don't want to hammer a kid with, "HOW THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO COMPETE IN THIS WORLD WHEN YOU PLAY LIKE THAT!" while they are actually trying to play something. That's unproductive garbage. But not having a serious conversation about their expectations vs. the reality of the business and the life is also dishonest. I operate the same way when I'm managing/mentoring people in technology. There is absolutely a time, place, and sometimes a need for tough criticism and hard talks about the way the world works re: their current capabilities. But that time isn't when we are trying to get a release out the door and their code doesn't work. Because, frankly, if someone is so bad that it's affecting release deadlines, that's on me as a manager. I'm the person who should be getting yelled at. And if I'm communicating effectively with my team and having the right kinds of 1:1s, these conversations happen naturally as a part of the progression plan for each person on the team. The 1:1 is actually one thing I've taken from my technology experience back into my music world. It's a great idea if it's done well. Anyway, long story short, it's possible to lie by omitting information. And people can and do argue that not being a complete dickhead is a lie of omission. Like almost all of this conversation, I think it's mostly a grey area. But also like almost all of this conversation, reasonable people can disagree. The radically honest school of thought has produced some amazing technology, technologists, and musicians. I'm just not convinced it's worth the price, and that there might be a better way. But my argument is humanist, anecdotal, and weak. All the data we have suggests that the "Be a total prick" method of teaching and management produces the best results. I just happen to think that life is long enough to try something different and see if it works.

lgas 9y ago

How was the second guy dishonest in any way? I don't see it.

ianamartin 9y ago
You can make the case that the second guy was dishonest because he wasn't telling me how bad I was at playing that one note in that one way. The he was doing me a disservice by shielding me from the harsh reality of how rough the music world can be on young performers. That if you suck that badly at that one note in that one way, there are probably tons of other things that you don't even know about that you also suck at. There is a lot of truth in what the first guy was saying in the sense that this is how a lot of the music world works. And there was honesty in treating me that way because that's how people get treated. Even little kids. Some people will argue that this is important for people to understand right from the beginning. And that shielding people from that is dishonest. All of these things are true, to a certain extent. And all of them are things that need to be talked about. I've struggled with this as a teacher with my own students. People in teacher roles do need to talk about hard truths. Pretending that every student is going to be amazing and going to have a great career is a lie. For better or worse, I've decided that context matters, and I don't bring big picture truth into lessons that are focused on execution. I set up regular sessions with my students that are totally separate from an actual lesson about the violin or even music. We just sit down and talk for a while about what the student wants and expects, what it's like to work in the field professionally, and what the expectations are going to be from other people. I don't know for a fact that this is superior to the hard-ass jerk approach, but it's the approach that I think is the right mix of honesty and kindness and productivity. You can't only take the second approach and focus on what is or isn't working with someone and completely shield them from the reality of the world. That's being dishonest about the world. But what you can do is separate the issues and deal with them straightforwardly. You don't want to hammer a kid with, "HOW THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO COMPETE IN THIS WORLD WHEN YOU PLAY LIKE THAT!" while they are actually trying to play something. That's unproductive garbage. But not having a serious conversation about their expectations vs. the reality of the business and the life is also dishonest. I operate the same way when I'm managing/mentoring people in technology. There is absolutely a time, place, and sometimes a need for tough criticism and hard talks about the way the world works re: their current capabilities. But that time isn't when we are trying to get a release out the door and their code doesn't work. Because, frankly, if someone is so bad that it's affecting release deadlines, that's on me as a manager. I'm the person who should be getting yelled at. And if I'm communicating effectively with my team and having the right kinds of 1:1s, these conversations happen naturally as a part of the progression plan for each person on the team. The 1:1 is actually one thing I've taken from my technology experience back into my music world. It's a great idea if it's done well. Anyway, long story short, it's possible to lie by omitting information. And people can and do argue that not being a complete dickhead is a lie of omission. Like almost all of this conversation, I think it's mostly a grey area. But also like almost all of this conversation, reasonable people can disagree. The radically honest school of thought has produced some amazing technology, technologists, and musicians. I'm just not convinced it's worth the price, and that there might be a better way. But my argument is humanist, anecdotal, and weak. All the data we have suggests that the "Be a total prick" method of teaching and management produces the best results. I just happen to think that life is long enough to try something different and see if it works.