31 ms·

When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

1074 points by asicsp 6y ago

awillen 6y ago
I've always been a big believer that during review time, people should be able to choose others they've worked with to review. It need not be a full on performance review, but at least provide the opportunity to provide documented feedback to their boss. I've worked with people from other departments who were both awful and wonderful, and if their bosses didn't include me in their set of peer reviewers, I couldn't highlight that. I think my cross-departmental peer review would've been much more valuable than some of my reviews of some of my teammates, since my boss already had a pretty good idea of how we work together.
- qntty 6y ago
  This is one of the advantages and disadvantages of democratically-run workplaces (worker cooperatives etc). On the one hand, sometimes the people who are best positioned to make decisions about a person aren't their managers but their coworkers. On the other hand, it would really change the work dynamic if everyone potentially had the power to be your manager.
- eythian 6y ago
  That is how it works at my workplace, you choose who you get feedback from that is presented to your manager. Usually you choose your team and a couple of people you've worked closely with outside the team.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    We have that choice too. It might make an impact, but I see the politics and the manager's opinion to be way more important.
lkrubner 6y ago
This should be a monthly census: it needs to be automatic. If you're the manager of a company and you are relying on people to say something about their co-workers, then you will miss most of the information that you could be capturing, and you will get highly biased impression of your workforce, because only a certain type of person will come forward to praise their co-worker. There are various voting systems that work well, but the easiest is something like "Every month, list 3 of your co-workers who did something impressive." This avoids the many problems with something like the stack-rank system that Microsoft was committed to, for too many years. In that system, workers were forced to list their co-workers, not just as "good", but also a certain percentage had to belong to the "bad" group, the lowest 30%. Most workers do not want to attack their fellow workers this way. You can get all the information you need by simply letting your workers upvote each other. You should ration the upvotes so that they are meaningful. On a small team, perhaps people get 1 or 2 votes, in a big company, perhaps they got 5 or 6 votes. If you make the votes a scarce resource, you get better accuracy: people think carefully about who they should upvote. There will be some workers who never get upvoted by anyone. These are bad workers. There will also be some workers who get very few votes, or who only get votes from "rings" they've formed with other workers, where they vote for each other. These are suspect workers. In all cases you'll want to apply something like the Google PageRank algorithm to the upvotes. That is, an upvote from someone who is themself highly upvoted should matter more than an upvote from someone who rarely gets upvoted. I would not ban people from the article's main idea "When your coworker does great work, tell their manager" however, keep in mind, if you are the manager or CTO or CEO, you need to ensure there is also a system in place that is more automatic than simply waiting for people to talk about their co-workers.
- loopz 6y ago
  Who are you to know who is doing good work or not? If managers are not involved, they should have no say.
  - lkrubner 6y ago
    People do reliably know which of their co-workers are good and which of their co-workers suck badly. But also, the rule of 150 applies here. At a startup with less than 100 people, each worker often has an idea of everyone's strength, throughout the company. However, if you are at a big company, with thousands of employees in multiple locations, then it is often best to restrict upvoting to some subset of the company. For instance, a company with 1,000 workers might have 10 teams of 100 people each. At such a company, it might make sense to have the rule that you can only upvote people who are on your team. The assumption is that these would be the people you interact with and have a good idea about who is good and who is bad. Having said all this, I'm not suggesting that this should be the only way that managers evaluate their workers, but having a formal, structured, regular process is important. There are other techniques that a good manager should also follow. If you have time, you can listen to the interview I gave here: http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wasters-with-lawrence-krubner/ http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wa... Too many managers waste too much time in big meetings, more time should be spent in one to one meetings. About this: "Who are you to know who is doing good work or not?" I can't tell if you mean that as a criticism of my suggestion or whether you are attacking the original article for the idea "When your coworker does great work, tell their manager." Because, if you believe people can not evaluate their co-workers, then you must disagree with the above article.
AceyMan 6y ago
I worked for the airlines (first career) and for public-facing employees it was a big deal if you got a 'good letter' from a customer. (It was equally suck if you happened to get a bad one...). We also could file 'thank you / attaboy' paperwork for our colleagues, both in our own department or ones we interacted with. Those were just as valuable (if not more) than ones from the customers. Over the years (11) during my employment there I received a couple of good letters, and they were recognized by the management in a very sincere way. To this day of & when I have an extraordinary collaboration with someone in the corporation I'll take the time to write a thank you letter to their manager. It's just a great practice that harkens back to the old adage, "there's nothing better than a nice handwritten thank you card." Since I'm in management, it serves as a nice means to to move the needle for a colleague in the eyes of the company.
- ponker 6y ago
  I saw a flight attendant being yelled at by a horrid passenger and knew that she might get a “bad letter” from them so I sent in a good letter for her about how she handled the abuse with aplomb. Glad to hear it was worth the effort
- duxup 6y ago
  Ages ago when I did basic PC support we had a "attaboy" system. The thing about it was nobody liked it because attaboys were random. They had nothing to do with doing a good job or anything, they showed up randomly. Most of the time "attaboys" showed up for doing the absolute most basic thing that is part of the job. You do it every day... but randomly an "attaboy" shows up, because by the roll of the dice you helped a nice person, that's it. In the meantime if you went the extra mile for someone, never would any sort of attaboy would show up. In fact you might even get complaints from those folks. For the support team watching some manager trot out an "attaboy" for no apparent reason as if it was a merit type thing was kinda demoralizing.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given to someone who they feel don't deserve it. Personally I think it's risky to acknowledge these kind of things in front of a team for that reason unless it's better quantified. I've personally as well been in situations where I've been outright resentful because the recognition of someone I knew was doing a bad job made it clear we could not expect recognition based on merits, and so what was the point of putting in the effort?
jkubrynski 6y ago
From my experience, especially in big companies (but not only) most of the feedback is negative. People are not sharing positive feedback, and when they contact your manager it's usually an escalation process. That's why it's so important to reach to people who support you or simply create a content you like (blog posts, webinars, etc) and say: "thanks, I found a lot of value here".
- gavinray 6y ago
  I made a habit out of emailing complete strangers from the internet who wrote content or technology I really appreciated with a short "thank you" or "this is really cool". To my surprise when I first started doing this, the majority of them reply back with a genuine thanks.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  > That's why it's so important to reach to people who support you or simply create a content you like (blog posts, webinars, etc) and say: "thanks, I found a lot of value here". I've been trying to start up a blog this year (three posts in 7 months, woo!) and someone recently contacted me to tell me that my RSS feed was down and they didn't want to miss the next post. It carried me into the next week it meant so much.
  - teachrdan 6y ago
    I had a radio show in college (low power station, small college town) and a friend of a friend told me that, when he listened to the show while delivering pizza, he'd sprint to and from the customer's door so he could get as much of the show as possible. This was about the highest praise I could think of.
benlumen 6y ago
While we're at it - when someone you manage does great work - tell your manager. I do this out of professional decency, not social justice (angle of the article).
- mkagenius 6y ago
  And they should tell their manager, word should reach the ceo.
  - jarvelov 6y ago
    Depends on the size of the organization. It is important for management to be aware of the achievements, and sometimes a CEO also has that role. Knowing who knows what and who did what is important regardless of your position, but especially in a management position.
- KitDuncan 6y ago
  Just in general say thank you more often. It helps a lot with team morale.
  - freehunter 6y ago
    This is something I’ve struggled with over the years, ever since I started as an engineer. I want the problem solved and when it’s solved we move on to the next one. No chit chat, no feelings, just get the work done. It really helped that at the beginning of my career I was on a brand new team and we were defining how to solve these problems. There was no one more senior or more knowledgeable to ask. As I became more senior and had junior employees working alongside me, I could see how quickly they would get frustrated when they couldn’t perform at my level. They’d be stuck for days until they ask me for help, and I’d solve the problem in 5 minutes and for a couple of our new guys, that crushed them. Absolutely destroyed their morale. So I read a few books on emotional intelligence and social interactions and started explicitly saying when someone was doing something right, or calling out where they did their job well while fixing the place where they made a mistake. When someone helps me, I now say “thank you, I appreciate your help”. It’s night and day. Junior employees wanted to work with me before I did that because they want to learn from me, but now they actually like working with me. I don’t heap on praise and I don’t give praise when it’s not deserved, but when someone legitimately does something right or helps me (no matter how small), I actively tell them with words that I appreciate their help and that they did good work. It’s the absolute least I can do but it makes a world of difference for people just starting out when a senior staff member compliments their work.
ping_pong 6y ago
This is the biggest problem with stack ranking software engineers, the practice I had to endure while at a well known software company. All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I have no incentive to compliment anyone else. I needed to make sure that my rank was as high as I could make it, which really sucked during performance time. It was very stressful, even though I was a high performer, because it didn't foster the type of environment I wanted to work at, which is collaborative. I heard from my friends at Facebook that the environment there is equally crazy. Everyone knows that the performance reviews are based on lazy stats, so they game the stats. Every time someone requests a meeting, they are expected to give a "thank you" which is one of the measures for performance. Also, things like the number of reviews commented on could be easily gamed by adding a "+1!" as a comment which sounds like another undesirable place to work at. Maybe current Facebook employees can comment, however.
- giantg2 6y ago
  I'm stupid. I give people the praise they deserve, even when it hurts me.
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    I'm stupid in this way, too.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      How's your career? Did this have an impact? Mine is ruined and this might have contributed a little. I'll never be more than an intermediate developer and I'm worried about being fired/laid off.
      - castlecrasher2 6y ago
        >I'll never be more than an intermediate developer Do you mean this at your specific company? I felt the same way in my last company because there was definitely nowhere to go up, but I've since moved on and am in a more senior role.
yomly 6y ago
I think showing awareness of your peers is a positive signal to a good manager in any case so it positively impacts you beyond just good karma Anyone who really buys into "team" will value someone who is actually looking out for their team.
ravenstine 6y ago
While I really like the sentiment, I think there's a reason why people naturally don't provide much positive feedback about individuals at workplaces. What do you really get by pointing out the good work of a coworker? A warm fuzzy feeling, to be sure. Maybe greater comradeship. But wait, who's the next person to get a promotion? Maybe it'll be the person you keep praising to management. So you'll probably have to work smarter/harder to get that same praise, hence the same chances at promotion. But you don't want to work that much harder; you're already working hard enough as it is. But that 5% raise and that "senior" title look pretty shiny. <one year later> Hey, how come nobody has been recognizing you for your good work? Meanwhile that coworker you've been praising is now your boss!
- giantg2 6y ago
  Yep, why do I want a 7% raise when I'm expected to work 15% more hours.
- booleandilemma 6y ago
  This is why I believe the best path to promotion is simply to quit and find a company that will give you the title you want. I'm not the kind of person that gets promoted, for whatever reasons, so I've been moving up by moving sideways. It sucks, but it is what it is.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- twiddlydo 6y ago
  You have to be so good that they can't ignore you. Or, so good, it doesn't matter that that group of folks who remain silent are around. There will always be another group of folks who are genuine and will praise you for doing great work. Now, the most difficult part, is when someone in position of power decides to keep silent — like your manager or another high profile individual. In that case, it's better to bounce, you don't want to work in an org that promotes those kind of people. Peter Thiel said it best in Zero to One. I'm paraphrasing here, if a start up is not rewarding individuals based off of merit, but PR, then it's time to go.
vernie 6y ago
Julia Evans is a font of good vibes.
- ape4 6y ago
  Tell her manager (after checking first)
paulie_a 6y ago
This sort of thing when genuine don't makes you a good person. A person with character. The type of person you want and should be around.
booleandilemma 6y ago
I can relate. I've received many slack DMs from my peers telling me how great I'm doing on such-and-such project, and I'm grateful for their compliments, but at the end of the day, it does nothing for me, they're just empty words. My manager is left in the dark about what I'm doing.
- cosmie 6y ago
  > My manager is left in the dark about what I'm doing. Then loop your manager in. I work for a marketing agency primarily doing consulting work, and operate semi-autonomously from my manager. For the clients and accounts I support, I am the face of my group. A client may not even know my manager's name, unless there's been cause for someone with a fancier title than mine to make an appearance. And account teams may have found their way to me directly rather than routing through my boss, so have no working relationship with him. If I get a kudos via email, I either BCC him on my reply, or forward it to him as an fyi. If it's given verbally, I thank the person giving it, and let them know how much I'd appreciate if they could jot that down in writing and send it over. If it came through something like a Slack DM, I'd either screenshot it for something minor and pass that along or again express my appreciation and call out how much it'd mean if they could throw that into an email. I've never had anyone balk at or refuse to do the above. If someone has taken the time to give you kudos for your work, they're usually appreciative enough with what you're doing that they are perfectly happy to put it in an email for you if prompted. And more often than not, the writeup that comes through talks you up far more than the informal shout out they originally made, as they're well aware of why you're asking for it.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Google has a culture of internal peer bonuses and kudos, which in some ways is great and meant to help with this kind of thing... except that it also leads to an internal culture of "congrats!" and "thank you for your amazing work!" centi-threads which often overlook other contributors on a project, or are used strategically by overly political managers to boost their own reports and projects and gain corporate visibility for them. Lost in this is just the work ethic of doing incremental non-glamorous work and managers and people around you _doing their job_ by recognizing it. Many corporate perf processes, peer bonuses, and so on simply smudge this over, and they indirectly or directly encourage _fame seeking behaviour_ which is in my opinion the most corrosive thing to a company's long term performance and bottom line.
- moab 6y ago
  Not my experience of Google, at least having worked there as an intern multiple times. All of the peer bonuses on our teams and affiliated teams have been for people going out of their way to help out with some project even if it was not part of their day-to-day work. I can only speak for the research-y side of Google, which in my experience seems to avoid most of these problems probably due to having managers that also do research and write papers. Having a separate academic status system other than your internal work position probably helps in this regard.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    It's true peer bonuses in particular seem to be mainly reponsibly used. Probably because there's $$ and an accounting chain attached to them. But just last week I watched the hard work of a coworker get completely bowled over by another manager's "congrats on amazing work" email chain to someone else who used the work of my coworker without recognition.
    - moab 6y ago
      That's really unfortunate. I agree that the $$$ and accounting help make sure the system is not abused in the usual case. Unfortunately jerks are unavoidable, and even if the manager knew the true story they could ignore it to emphasize the contributions of their own reports. It's hard to imagine a promo system that rewards hard work, where feedback comes from ones peers, and only promotes a fixed number of people where these kind of zero-sum issues don't appear.
grogenaut 6y ago
Whenever I help someone out and they say "how can I thank you" I just say "let my manager know I was helpful".
chris_wot 6y ago
Bugger. I think I messed up at least once by not asking. This is good advise!
fblp 6y ago
I feel like the main point should be "if your coworker does great work, tell them". Be curious, see if they have feedback through you, see how they'd like to be recognized. That step is often missed. People are often resistant to providing direct feedback - yet that is also how the strongest bonds are made. The more a manager acts as an intermediary, the less direct emotional (and consequently professional) relationships are.
- price 6y ago
  You may not have read the article. It says to tell the coworker first. There is no question of a manager acting as an intermediary. The point of telling the manager is to help the coworker get their next raise or promotion, not for the manager to be the one to tell them.
  - fblp 6y ago
    Hey thank you I could have been more clear, intermediary is the wrong word and thank you for showing me that. I did read the article, and I can't see where it says "tell them". I do see the bold heading "ask if it’s ok first". "Hey is it ok if I tell your manager you're doing a great job?" Is a lot more indirect than "Hey, I think you're doing a great job" and pausing for a response and having a conversation about it.
wittyreference 6y ago
In my medical training, I had precisely one patient reach out to hospital leadership to commend my care of them. It was really appreciated - I like to think that patients appreciate when they're treated kindly and well taken care of, but it seems that's taken for granted. I didn't so much care for the official recognition as just knowing that the patient was actually touched by the trouble and feeling I put into looking after them.
- tomca32 6y ago
  Makes sense it's taken for granted since health care is expensive as hell so people expect the service to be good if they pay for it.
  - wittyreference 6y ago
    Thing is, two points: 1) You can pay for plenty of shit, but you can't pay for human feeling. 2) A tiny fraction of that money ends up in the pockets of people actually providing care - most of it ends up with pharma, device manufacturers, PBMs, and other middle-men. You can expect whatever great service you want for your money, but it doesn't work when that money isn't going to the people providing the service.
deleted 6y ago
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GEBBL 6y ago
I hate the fact that in my current role, I am expected to give my colleagues ‘constructive feedback’. It seems like a minefield , when I am trying to focus on my own role, that I have to negotiate the feelings of a colleague as I leave feedback on them. I’d prefer to leave only positive feedback, but what my boss wants is that I need to find an improvement that my colleague has to make. I don’t like it.
- parliament32 6y ago
  I've found PRP to be a godsend when you're expected to give "feedback". PRP is praise-reprimand-praise: so construct your comment where your negative feedback is sandwiched between two positive feedback items. People respond well to it.
  - codazoda 6y ago
    It's not exactly PRP but I also like to give negative and then positive feedback. I asked some of my employee's about this, however, and some of them mentioned that receiving positive feedback after negative makes the positive feedback seem superficial. Different people prefer to receive feedback in different ways. It's more difficult but we should try to understand how people like to receive feedback (positive or negative) and provide that feedback in the way they prefer to receive it.
  - gfody 6y ago
    ah the shit sandwich, I trust you're joking ;)
    - parliament32 6y ago
      If you're having a bad time with PRP you're just trash at implementing it. PRP doesn't mean you should literally "Good job on X. You fucked up on Y. Also good job on Z." -- you still need to have some human interaction skills. But in general, your feedback (whether it's a conversation or an email or a comment on a PR) should follow the general guidelines for what order to present things in.
luckydata 6y ago
Whenever someone says something nice about my work I ask them “can I have that in writing?”. Then I go onto explaining that if they liked what I’ve done, by supporting me they can get more. It’s annoying that we have to do that in the workplace but it works.
splatcollision 6y ago
You should do this in general public situations where possible too: Got great service at a restaurant or store? Ask to talk to their manager. When their manager comes over, complement the person who was awesome! My wife does this regularly and it's always amazing to see people's faces drop at the first manager request, then shine when they realize what's going on :)
Apofis 6y ago
Don't let them get the best of you!
OliverJones 6y ago
This article's top line is really good advice. But, with respect, the author is overthinking it just a little. When somebody helps me out, I say to their manager, "when you get a chance please tell them I'm grateful for their good work." Was it their distinguished expertise that made it possible for them to help me? Was it a spirit of collegiality? From my perspective, I don't care when I thank them. They did me a favor, I'm happy, I'm grateful. Give and Take is a book by Adam Grant on this part of the workplace. https://www.worldcat.org/title/give-and-take-the-revolutionary-worldview-that-drives-success/oclc/859568885 https://www.worldcat.org/title/give-and-take-the-revolutiona...
6510 6y ago
Also, don't do this unless you have some idea how others compare to him. There is nothing as silly as an uninformed person praising the least productive member of a group.
xivzgrev 6y ago
This is the biggest benefit of 15five. You can give a high five to anyone for exactly this - work that usually would go unrecognized but furthers the company’s goals
crazygringo 6y ago
The flip side of this is, if you want to sink someone's career, badmouth them to their manager. Having worked at many companies, I've observed how shockingly easy it is for a manager's assessment of their reports to be colored by "hearsay" whether good or bad. I once had several members of another team who deeply disgreed with a product decision I'd made complain to my manager that I was being uncooperative, not a team player, etc. To avoid getting fired, I had to ask a bunch of members of various other teams to (honestly) tell my manager what a good job I was doing. Which worked -- according to him I'd really "turned things around" in the space of just a couple weeks (!). In the end it was 100% political, a bad manager who had no idea how to actually assess my work for what it was and so relied entirely on what he was "hearing", and I quit as soon as I could for a better job. So yes, tell someone's manager when they're doing a great job. But it sucks that we have to rely on this stuff at all, rather than managers who can actually assess your work directly.
- tehlike 6y ago
  This does not always work. Not necessarily "hearsay", but there was a coworker of mine who would happily take credit for everyone elses work by sending emails in a timely manner (people tell them stuff they work on, then you'd see an email from them pretending they lead the effort and it was their idea). Many times this got escalated, the manager didn't care. Everytime someone talked to that problematic person, it was "the first time he heard about it".
- jmchuster 6y ago
  I would also add that it's important to always be communicating with your manager and building that trust. You need to make sure that their initial reaction to any negative hearsay should be that the other party is then in fact bad and uninformed. Maybe it helps people to think of their manager/work as being analogous to a startup product? You build an awesome product, but then spend zero budget on sales and marketing, and are then super-sad that you're not magically growing up and to the right.
  - rocqua 6y ago
    Many people choose jobs over a startup to not have to do marketing
mementomori 6y ago
I am torn between the zero-sum and "abundance" concepts. It seems like some people like to promote the "abundance" concept (where one person's gain adds to everyone else) as an ideal but in reality I have only ever seen zero-sum results in terms of job acquisition and career advancement. There is a fixed number of slots and you need to eliminate others in order to obtain it.
tehlike 6y ago
I have made a good habit of sending a person's manager "xyz did a great job, in such such such way, and this had the impact of abc". I try not to do it often, mostly if i think someone has gone above and beyond. Also mention it to my manager if it's appropriate as people should be recognized - they also make good allys for future work.
tannerbrockwell 6y ago
I have refused to perform 360's in the past. They are usually semi-anonymous though and no one really noticed. I think that we should be careful of inculcating such a culture. It can support and enforce clique's at work. It also as a deliverable, leans fairly hard on your co-workers. Why should we build a system that essentially delivers pre-digested content for management? tl;dr: "Overall: a lot of people (for very good reasons!) want to have control over the kind of feedback their manager hears about them." exactly! It also could become a Vanity Metric, and this doesn't help anyone. [1] [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/vanity-metrics/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/vanity-metrics/
skapadia 6y ago
There should be a systematic way to collect and periodically highlight accomplishments and those who contributed to those (quarterly, monthly). A lead should be able to produce that information (with input from the team, all in one room face to face), and it should be published in a common place (where everyone else has read-only rights, or changes can be tracked) for managers and higher-ups to see.
- twodave 6y ago
  I think I'm going to disagree with this. I've seen lots of these systems foisted upon employees and the general result is people either try to game the system or else people feel forced into participating when they don't wish to. Praise ought to be both spontaneous and merited or else it loses a bit of its appeal in my opinion. Thanks to this article (which I didn't even read), I was inspired to write something heartfelt to my own manager about another person on my team. No system would have pried that from me. I just needed a subtle reminder.
modernerd 6y ago
The company I work at uses https://www.15five.com/ https://www.15five.com/ for reviews and 1-on-1s. It has a “High Five” feature to recognise big or small things anyone in the company has done to help. It's low friction and it works well. They hook it up to a Slack channel for a steady stream of positivity, and its read by senior execs and mentioned during reviews. More companies should make this part of their company culture via tools that make it easy and common.
mwfunk 6y ago
Since this is like an inverse Karen move, perhaps anti-Karens should formally be known as Julies.
barnyfried 6y ago
most coworkers will never do great work.
pgnas 6y ago
I completely agree with the idea of paying a compliment to someones supervisor or manager, I find it rare when people recognize great work. While I agree also with why you may want to ask the manager and the issues makes some sense , I think it goes a long way! Just to call them out on the great work! I genuinely believe that this attitude promotes positive environments. Great work always deserves to be recognized. Good article
m0zg 6y ago
And as a (former) manager: when your reports are doing great work, make sure to publicly praise them, as well as give people opportunity to beat their own chest and roar. Shipped a cool feature? Present a few slides at the weekly team meeting, explain why it's cool. This won't happen unless you encourage it and set aside the time. I don't see nearly enough of this, and I think it's a shame - it makes people feel good about what they do, feel that their work not a waste of time. It also engenders pride in good work and implicitly shines a light on poor performers. As far as telling people's managers about good work, that is helpful of course. But I feel like there's this misconception among non-managers that managers don't already know who's great and who's not. As a manager who pays any attention at all this is clear as a day most of the time.
welcome_dragon 6y ago
We use TINYPulse (https://www.tinypulse.com/ https://www.tinypulse.com/) for this very reason at my work; it takes about 10 seconds to send someone a shout out, and not only does their manager see it, but everyone in the company does (we're a small startup). If I notice that someone has really killed it in something but has no recognition at all for it, I will also/instead point out to that person's manager, especially if it is a junior engineer
holidayacct 6y ago
I would be careful abour this one, some managers do everything they can to get rid of exemplary employees. If you're going to this make it as public as possible and make sure you have sound reasoning for why you are singing the praises of your co-worker. Include managers as close to the top of the organization as possible as well.
da39a3ee 6y ago
It's a good thing to do. I don't agree with the first point about asking first. Ask if you like; if not don't ask. It's up to you. I'm afraid that yet again I put this down to the modern cultural schism among people who would describe themselves as liberals, with those on the progressive left adopting extremes of sensitivity that I find over the top. Specifically, I disagree with her points as follows: 1. Giving someone a compliment that’s not in line with their current goals. Try to judge that yourself. But your coworker has no control over what others say; one of the risks in life, somewhere fairly low down in a list with many elements, is the risk that a coworker will compliment you for something that's not in line with your goals. Deal with it. 2. Giving someone the wrong “level” of compliment. For example, if they’re a very senior engineer and you say something like “PERSON did SIMPLE_ROUTINE_TASK really well!” That will make you look silly, not them. 3. If your coworker was supposed to be focusing on a specific project, and you’re complimenting them for helping with something totally unrelated, their manager might think that they’re not focusing on their “real” work. Make it one of your aims to have the sense to get that right. 4.Some people have terrible managers (for example, maybe the manager will feel threatened by your coworker excelling) Make it one of your aims to have the sense to get that right. 5. Some people just don’t like being called out in that way, and are happy with the level of recognition they’re getting! Bad luck; they don't control what others do.
kjgkjhfkjf 6y ago
You may think you're communicating friendly appreciation when you send a complementary message about someone to their manager with them cc-ed, but the message that you're also sending is that you're the sort of person who thinks it's okay to talk to people's managers about them, and you run a very real risk of losing your peers' trust.
sabujp 6y ago
geeethanks
kentbrew 6y ago
Pay special attention to the reasons the author gives under "ask if it's okay first."
ranman 6y ago
What about when they don’t do great work?
known 6y ago
And protect yourself from Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others)
bpyne 6y ago
She brought up an interesting point: asking your colleague if (s)he wants recognition. Sending recognition is usually a decision made in the moment. Asking permission makes a process out of it. Having a process reduces your motivation to send recognition. Her five reasons are spot on. But I'd like to add that people should understand their work environments and the politics involved. It's easier with small to small-medium sized organizations where you know all or most of the managers and their quirks and know the politics at work. My environment is small-medium. Part of what we're judged on is helping colleagues. The managers are all onboard with it. When a colleague from the Unix admin team went out of his way to help my team I didn't hesitate to send his manager a message in praise of the effort. Getting a colleague in trouble for taking time out of assigned work is not an issue.
akavel 6y ago
At a company I joined recently (WPEngine), there's an app called 15five deployed internally, where every 2 weeks we're encouraged to single out some coworkers with "high fives", thanking them for whatever we want. Those are then visible to us and our managers (and by default are also shared publicly in a special purpose chatroom). I am really impressed that this is systematically implemented and encouraged throughout the whole company!
artur_makly 6y ago
speaking of employee analytics i just came across this: https://www.myleon.co/ https://www.myleon.co/ is it just me.. or once we start adding "Ai" to human relations/performance.. i get nervous
tylergetsay 6y ago
I worked at a retail store when I was a tiny 16 year old, I got a ton of NPS surveys by telling people I got a pizza party if I got enough of them. It worked crazy well, I quickly became top in the company for NPS. It was hilarious watching my older coworkers attempt to pull it off and fail.

1074 points by asicsp 6y ago

I've always been a big believer that during review time, people should be able to choose others they've worked with to review. It need not be a full on performance review, but at least provide the opportunity to provide documented feedback to their boss. I've worked with people from other departments who were both awful and wonderful, and if their bosses didn't include me in their set of peer reviewers, I couldn't highlight that. I think my cross-departmental peer review would've been much more valuable than some of my reviews of some of my teammates, since my boss already had a pretty good idea of how we work together.

qntty 6y ago
This is one of the advantages and disadvantages of democratically-run workplaces (worker cooperatives etc). On the one hand, sometimes the people who are best positioned to make decisions about a person aren't their managers but their coworkers. On the other hand, it would really change the work dynamic if everyone potentially had the power to be your manager.
eythian 6y ago
That is how it works at my workplace, you choose who you get feedback from that is presented to your manager. Usually you choose your team and a couple of people you've worked closely with outside the team.
- giantg2 6y ago
  We have that choice too. It might make an impact, but I see the politics and the manager's opinion to be way more important.

lkrubner 6y ago

This should be a monthly census: it needs to be automatic. If you're the manager of a company and you are relying on people to say something about their co-workers, then you will miss most of the information that you could be capturing, and you will get highly biased impression of your workforce, because only a certain type of person will come forward to praise their co-worker. There are various voting systems that work well, but the easiest is something like "Every month, list 3 of your co-workers who did something impressive." This avoids the many problems with something like the stack-rank system that Microsoft was committed to, for too many years. In that system, workers were forced to list their co-workers, not just as "good", but also a certain percentage had to belong to the "bad" group, the lowest 30%. Most workers do not want to attack their fellow workers this way. You can get all the information you need by simply letting your workers upvote each other. You should ration the upvotes so that they are meaningful. On a small team, perhaps people get 1 or 2 votes, in a big company, perhaps they got 5 or 6 votes. If you make the votes a scarce resource, you get better accuracy: people think carefully about who they should upvote. There will be some workers who never get upvoted by anyone. These are bad workers. There will also be some workers who get very few votes, or who only get votes from "rings" they've formed with other workers, where they vote for each other. These are suspect workers. In all cases you'll want to apply something like the Google PageRank algorithm to the upvotes. That is, an upvote from someone who is themself highly upvoted should matter more than an upvote from someone who rarely gets upvoted. I would not ban people from the article's main idea "When your coworker does great work, tell their manager" however, keep in mind, if you are the manager or CTO or CEO, you need to ensure there is also a system in place that is more automatic than simply waiting for people to talk about their co-workers.

loopz 6y ago
Who are you to know who is doing good work or not? If managers are not involved, they should have no say.
- lkrubner 6y ago
  People do reliably know which of their co-workers are good and which of their co-workers suck badly. But also, the rule of 150 applies here. At a startup with less than 100 people, each worker often has an idea of everyone's strength, throughout the company. However, if you are at a big company, with thousands of employees in multiple locations, then it is often best to restrict upvoting to some subset of the company. For instance, a company with 1,000 workers might have 10 teams of 100 people each. At such a company, it might make sense to have the rule that you can only upvote people who are on your team. The assumption is that these would be the people you interact with and have a good idea about who is good and who is bad. Having said all this, I'm not suggesting that this should be the only way that managers evaluate their workers, but having a formal, structured, regular process is important. There are other techniques that a good manager should also follow. If you have time, you can listen to the interview I gave here: http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wasters-with-lawrence-krubner/ http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wa... Too many managers waste too much time in big meetings, more time should be spent in one to one meetings. About this: "Who are you to know who is doing good work or not?" I can't tell if you mean that as a criticism of my suggestion or whether you are attacking the original article for the idea "When your coworker does great work, tell their manager." Because, if you believe people can not evaluate their co-workers, then you must disagree with the above article.

AceyMan 6y ago

I worked for the airlines (first career) and for public-facing employees it was a big deal if you got a 'good letter' from a customer. (It was equally suck if you happened to get a bad one...). We also could file 'thank you / attaboy' paperwork for our colleagues, both in our own department or ones we interacted with. Those were just as valuable (if not more) than ones from the customers. Over the years (11) during my employment there I received a couple of good letters, and they were recognized by the management in a very sincere way. To this day of & when I have an extraordinary collaboration with someone in the corporation I'll take the time to write a thank you letter to their manager. It's just a great practice that harkens back to the old adage, "there's nothing better than a nice handwritten thank you card." Since I'm in management, it serves as a nice means to to move the needle for a colleague in the eyes of the company.

ponker 6y ago
I saw a flight attendant being yelled at by a horrid passenger and knew that she might get a “bad letter” from them so I sent in a good letter for her about how she handled the abuse with aplomb. Glad to hear it was worth the effort
duxup 6y ago
Ages ago when I did basic PC support we had a "attaboy" system. The thing about it was nobody liked it because attaboys were random. They had nothing to do with doing a good job or anything, they showed up randomly. Most of the time "attaboys" showed up for doing the absolute most basic thing that is part of the job. You do it every day... but randomly an "attaboy" shows up, because by the roll of the dice you helped a nice person, that's it. In the meantime if you went the extra mile for someone, never would any sort of attaboy would show up. In fact you might even get complaints from those folks. For the support team watching some manager trot out an "attaboy" for no apparent reason as if it was a merit type thing was kinda demoralizing.
- vidarh 6y ago
  It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given to someone who they feel don't deserve it. Personally I think it's risky to acknowledge these kind of things in front of a team for that reason unless it's better quantified. I've personally as well been in situations where I've been outright resentful because the recognition of someone I knew was doing a bad job made it clear we could not expect recognition based on merits, and so what was the point of putting in the effort?

jkubrynski 6y ago

From my experience, especially in big companies (but not only) most of the feedback is negative. People are not sharing positive feedback, and when they contact your manager it's usually an escalation process. That's why it's so important to reach to people who support you or simply create a content you like (blog posts, webinars, etc) and say: "thanks, I found a lot of value here".

gavinray 6y ago
I made a habit out of emailing complete strangers from the internet who wrote content or technology I really appreciated with a short "thank you" or "this is really cool". To my surprise when I first started doing this, the majority of them reply back with a genuine thanks.
jedimastert 6y ago
> That's why it's so important to reach to people who support you or simply create a content you like (blog posts, webinars, etc) and say: "thanks, I found a lot of value here". I've been trying to start up a blog this year (three posts in 7 months, woo!) and someone recently contacted me to tell me that my RSS feed was down and they didn't want to miss the next post. It carried me into the next week it meant so much.
- teachrdan 6y ago
  I had a radio show in college (low power station, small college town) and a friend of a friend told me that, when he listened to the show while delivering pizza, he'd sprint to and from the customer's door so he could get as much of the show as possible. This was about the highest praise I could think of.

benlumen 6y ago

While we're at it - when someone you manage does great work - tell your manager. I do this out of professional decency, not social justice (angle of the article).

mkagenius 6y ago
And they should tell their manager, word should reach the ceo.
- jarvelov 6y ago
  Depends on the size of the organization. It is important for management to be aware of the achievements, and sometimes a CEO also has that role. Knowing who knows what and who did what is important regardless of your position, but especially in a management position.
KitDuncan 6y ago
Just in general say thank you more often. It helps a lot with team morale.
- freehunter 6y ago
  This is something I’ve struggled with over the years, ever since I started as an engineer. I want the problem solved and when it’s solved we move on to the next one. No chit chat, no feelings, just get the work done. It really helped that at the beginning of my career I was on a brand new team and we were defining how to solve these problems. There was no one more senior or more knowledgeable to ask. As I became more senior and had junior employees working alongside me, I could see how quickly they would get frustrated when they couldn’t perform at my level. They’d be stuck for days until they ask me for help, and I’d solve the problem in 5 minutes and for a couple of our new guys, that crushed them. Absolutely destroyed their morale. So I read a few books on emotional intelligence and social interactions and started explicitly saying when someone was doing something right, or calling out where they did their job well while fixing the place where they made a mistake. When someone helps me, I now say “thank you, I appreciate your help”. It’s night and day. Junior employees wanted to work with me before I did that because they want to learn from me, but now they actually like working with me. I don’t heap on praise and I don’t give praise when it’s not deserved, but when someone legitimately does something right or helps me (no matter how small), I actively tell them with words that I appreciate their help and that they did good work. It’s the absolute least I can do but it makes a world of difference for people just starting out when a senior staff member compliments their work.

ping_pong 6y ago

This is the biggest problem with stack ranking software engineers, the practice I had to endure while at a well known software company. All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I have no incentive to compliment anyone else. I needed to make sure that my rank was as high as I could make it, which really sucked during performance time. It was very stressful, even though I was a high performer, because it didn't foster the type of environment I wanted to work at, which is collaborative. I heard from my friends at Facebook that the environment there is equally crazy. Everyone knows that the performance reviews are based on lazy stats, so they game the stats. Every time someone requests a meeting, they are expected to give a "thank you" which is one of the measures for performance. Also, things like the number of reviews commented on could be easily gamed by adding a "+1!" as a comment which sounds like another undesirable place to work at. Maybe current Facebook employees can comment, however.

giantg2 6y ago
I'm stupid. I give people the praise they deserve, even when it hurts me.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  I'm stupid in this way, too.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    How's your career? Did this have an impact? Mine is ruined and this might have contributed a little. I'll never be more than an intermediate developer and I'm worried about being fired/laid off.
    - castlecrasher2 6y ago
      >I'll never be more than an intermediate developer Do you mean this at your specific company? I felt the same way in my last company because there was definitely nowhere to go up, but I've since moved on and am in a more senior role.

yomly 6y ago

I think showing awareness of your peers is a positive signal to a good manager in any case so it positively impacts you beyond just good karma Anyone who really buys into "team" will value someone who is actually looking out for their team.

ravenstine 6y ago

While I really like the sentiment, I think there's a reason why people naturally don't provide much positive feedback about individuals at workplaces. What do you really get by pointing out the good work of a coworker? A warm fuzzy feeling, to be sure. Maybe greater comradeship. But wait, who's the next person to get a promotion? Maybe it'll be the person you keep praising to management. So you'll probably have to work smarter/harder to get that same praise, hence the same chances at promotion. But you don't want to work that much harder; you're already working hard enough as it is. But that 5% raise and that "senior" title look pretty shiny. <one year later> Hey, how come nobody has been recognizing you for your good work? Meanwhile that coworker you've been praising is now your boss!

giantg2 6y ago
Yep, why do I want a 7% raise when I'm expected to work 15% more hours.
booleandilemma 6y ago
This is why I believe the best path to promotion is simply to quit and find a company that will give you the title you want. I'm not the kind of person that gets promoted, for whatever reasons, so I've been moving up by moving sideways. It sucks, but it is what it is.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
twiddlydo 6y ago
You have to be so good that they can't ignore you. Or, so good, it doesn't matter that that group of folks who remain silent are around. There will always be another group of folks who are genuine and will praise you for doing great work. Now, the most difficult part, is when someone in position of power decides to keep silent — like your manager or another high profile individual. In that case, it's better to bounce, you don't want to work in an org that promotes those kind of people. Peter Thiel said it best in Zero to One. I'm paraphrasing here, if a start up is not rewarding individuals based off of merit, but PR, then it's time to go.

vernie 6y ago

Julia Evans is a font of good vibes.

ape4 6y ago
Tell her manager (after checking first)

paulie_a 6y ago

This sort of thing when genuine don't makes you a good person. A person with character. The type of person you want and should be around.

booleandilemma 6y ago

I can relate. I've received many slack DMs from my peers telling me how great I'm doing on such-and-such project, and I'm grateful for their compliments, but at the end of the day, it does nothing for me, they're just empty words. My manager is left in the dark about what I'm doing.

cosmie 6y ago
> My manager is left in the dark about what I'm doing. Then loop your manager in. I work for a marketing agency primarily doing consulting work, and operate semi-autonomously from my manager. For the clients and accounts I support, I am the face of my group. A client may not even know my manager's name, unless there's been cause for someone with a fancier title than mine to make an appearance. And account teams may have found their way to me directly rather than routing through my boss, so have no working relationship with him. If I get a kudos via email, I either BCC him on my reply, or forward it to him as an fyi. If it's given verbally, I thank the person giving it, and let them know how much I'd appreciate if they could jot that down in writing and send it over. If it came through something like a Slack DM, I'd either screenshot it for something minor and pass that along or again express my appreciation and call out how much it'd mean if they could throw that into an email. I've never had anyone balk at or refuse to do the above. If someone has taken the time to give you kudos for your work, they're usually appreciative enough with what you're doing that they are perfectly happy to put it in an email for you if prompted. And more often than not, the writeup that comes through talks you up far more than the informal shout out they originally made, as they're well aware of why you're asking for it.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

Google has a culture of internal peer bonuses and kudos, which in some ways is great and meant to help with this kind of thing... except that it also leads to an internal culture of "congrats!" and "thank you for your amazing work!" centi-threads which often overlook other contributors on a project, or are used strategically by overly political managers to boost their own reports and projects and gain corporate visibility for them. Lost in this is just the work ethic of doing incremental non-glamorous work and managers and people around you _doing their job_ by recognizing it. Many corporate perf processes, peer bonuses, and so on simply smudge this over, and they indirectly or directly encourage _fame seeking behaviour_ which is in my opinion the most corrosive thing to a company's long term performance and bottom line.

moab 6y ago
Not my experience of Google, at least having worked there as an intern multiple times. All of the peer bonuses on our teams and affiliated teams have been for people going out of their way to help out with some project even if it was not part of their day-to-day work. I can only speak for the research-y side of Google, which in my experience seems to avoid most of these problems probably due to having managers that also do research and write papers. Having a separate academic status system other than your internal work position probably helps in this regard.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  It's true peer bonuses in particular seem to be mainly reponsibly used. Probably because there's $$ and an accounting chain attached to them. But just last week I watched the hard work of a coworker get completely bowled over by another manager's "congrats on amazing work" email chain to someone else who used the work of my coworker without recognition.
  - moab 6y ago
    That's really unfortunate. I agree that the $$$ and accounting help make sure the system is not abused in the usual case. Unfortunately jerks are unavoidable, and even if the manager knew the true story they could ignore it to emphasize the contributions of their own reports. It's hard to imagine a promo system that rewards hard work, where feedback comes from ones peers, and only promotes a fixed number of people where these kind of zero-sum issues don't appear.

grogenaut 6y ago

Whenever I help someone out and they say "how can I thank you" I just say "let my manager know I was helpful".

chris_wot 6y ago

Bugger. I think I messed up at least once by not asking. This is good advise!

fblp 6y ago

I feel like the main point should be "if your coworker does great work, tell them". Be curious, see if they have feedback through you, see how they'd like to be recognized. That step is often missed. People are often resistant to providing direct feedback - yet that is also how the strongest bonds are made. The more a manager acts as an intermediary, the less direct emotional (and consequently professional) relationships are.

price 6y ago
You may not have read the article. It says to tell the coworker first. There is no question of a manager acting as an intermediary. The point of telling the manager is to help the coworker get their next raise or promotion, not for the manager to be the one to tell them.
- fblp 6y ago
  Hey thank you I could have been more clear, intermediary is the wrong word and thank you for showing me that. I did read the article, and I can't see where it says "tell them". I do see the bold heading "ask if it’s ok first". "Hey is it ok if I tell your manager you're doing a great job?" Is a lot more indirect than "Hey, I think you're doing a great job" and pausing for a response and having a conversation about it.

wittyreference 6y ago

In my medical training, I had precisely one patient reach out to hospital leadership to commend my care of them. It was really appreciated - I like to think that patients appreciate when they're treated kindly and well taken care of, but it seems that's taken for granted. I didn't so much care for the official recognition as just knowing that the patient was actually touched by the trouble and feeling I put into looking after them.

tomca32 6y ago
Makes sense it's taken for granted since health care is expensive as hell so people expect the service to be good if they pay for it.
- wittyreference 6y ago
  Thing is, two points: 1) You can pay for plenty of shit, but you can't pay for human feeling. 2) A tiny fraction of that money ends up in the pockets of people actually providing care - most of it ends up with pharma, device manufacturers, PBMs, and other middle-men. You can expect whatever great service you want for your money, but it doesn't work when that money isn't going to the people providing the service.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

GEBBL 6y ago

I hate the fact that in my current role, I am expected to give my colleagues ‘constructive feedback’. It seems like a minefield , when I am trying to focus on my own role, that I have to negotiate the feelings of a colleague as I leave feedback on them. I’d prefer to leave only positive feedback, but what my boss wants is that I need to find an improvement that my colleague has to make. I don’t like it.

parliament32 6y ago
I've found PRP to be a godsend when you're expected to give "feedback". PRP is praise-reprimand-praise: so construct your comment where your negative feedback is sandwiched between two positive feedback items. People respond well to it.
- codazoda 6y ago
  It's not exactly PRP but I also like to give negative and then positive feedback. I asked some of my employee's about this, however, and some of them mentioned that receiving positive feedback after negative makes the positive feedback seem superficial. Different people prefer to receive feedback in different ways. It's more difficult but we should try to understand how people like to receive feedback (positive or negative) and provide that feedback in the way they prefer to receive it.
- gfody 6y ago
  ah the shit sandwich, I trust you're joking ;)
  - parliament32 6y ago
    If you're having a bad time with PRP you're just trash at implementing it. PRP doesn't mean you should literally "Good job on X. You fucked up on Y. Also good job on Z." -- you still need to have some human interaction skills. But in general, your feedback (whether it's a conversation or an email or a comment on a PR) should follow the general guidelines for what order to present things in.

luckydata 6y ago

Whenever someone says something nice about my work I ask them “can I have that in writing?”. Then I go onto explaining that if they liked what I’ve done, by supporting me they can get more. It’s annoying that we have to do that in the workplace but it works.

splatcollision 6y ago

You should do this in general public situations where possible too: Got great service at a restaurant or store? Ask to talk to their manager. When their manager comes over, complement the person who was awesome! My wife does this regularly and it's always amazing to see people's faces drop at the first manager request, then shine when they realize what's going on :)

Apofis 6y ago

Don't let them get the best of you!

OliverJones 6y ago

This article's top line is really good advice. But, with respect, the author is overthinking it just a little. When somebody helps me out, I say to their manager, "when you get a chance please tell them I'm grateful for their good work." Was it their distinguished expertise that made it possible for them to help me? Was it a spirit of collegiality? From my perspective, I don't care when I thank them. They did me a favor, I'm happy, I'm grateful. Give and Take is a book by Adam Grant on this part of the workplace. https://www.worldcat.org/title/give-and-take-the-revolutionary-worldview-that-drives-success/oclc/859568885 https://www.worldcat.org/title/give-and-take-the-revolutiona...

6510 6y ago

Also, don't do this unless you have some idea how others compare to him. There is nothing as silly as an uninformed person praising the least productive member of a group.

xivzgrev 6y ago

This is the biggest benefit of 15five. You can give a high five to anyone for exactly this - work that usually would go unrecognized but furthers the company’s goals

crazygringo 6y ago

The flip side of this is, if you want to sink someone's career, badmouth them to their manager. Having worked at many companies, I've observed how shockingly easy it is for a manager's assessment of their reports to be colored by "hearsay" whether good or bad. I once had several members of another team who deeply disgreed with a product decision I'd made complain to my manager that I was being uncooperative, not a team player, etc. To avoid getting fired, I had to ask a bunch of members of various other teams to (honestly) tell my manager what a good job I was doing. Which worked -- according to him I'd really "turned things around" in the space of just a couple weeks (!). In the end it was 100% political, a bad manager who had no idea how to actually assess my work for what it was and so relied entirely on what he was "hearing", and I quit as soon as I could for a better job. So yes, tell someone's manager when they're doing a great job. But it sucks that we have to rely on this stuff at all, rather than managers who can actually assess your work directly.

tehlike 6y ago
This does not always work. Not necessarily "hearsay", but there was a coworker of mine who would happily take credit for everyone elses work by sending emails in a timely manner (people tell them stuff they work on, then you'd see an email from them pretending they lead the effort and it was their idea). Many times this got escalated, the manager didn't care. Everytime someone talked to that problematic person, it was "the first time he heard about it".
jmchuster 6y ago
I would also add that it's important to always be communicating with your manager and building that trust. You need to make sure that their initial reaction to any negative hearsay should be that the other party is then in fact bad and uninformed. Maybe it helps people to think of their manager/work as being analogous to a startup product? You build an awesome product, but then spend zero budget on sales and marketing, and are then super-sad that you're not magically growing up and to the right.
- rocqua 6y ago
  Many people choose jobs over a startup to not have to do marketing

mementomori 6y ago

I am torn between the zero-sum and "abundance" concepts. It seems like some people like to promote the "abundance" concept (where one person's gain adds to everyone else) as an ideal but in reality I have only ever seen zero-sum results in terms of job acquisition and career advancement. There is a fixed number of slots and you need to eliminate others in order to obtain it.

tehlike 6y ago

I have made a good habit of sending a person's manager "xyz did a great job, in such such such way, and this had the impact of abc". I try not to do it often, mostly if i think someone has gone above and beyond. Also mention it to my manager if it's appropriate as people should be recognized - they also make good allys for future work.

tannerbrockwell 6y ago

I have refused to perform 360's in the past. They are usually semi-anonymous though and no one really noticed. I think that we should be careful of inculcating such a culture. It can support and enforce clique's at work. It also as a deliverable, leans fairly hard on your co-workers. Why should we build a system that essentially delivers pre-digested content for management? tl;dr: "Overall: a lot of people (for very good reasons!) want to have control over the kind of feedback their manager hears about them." exactly! It also could become a Vanity Metric, and this doesn't help anyone. [1] [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/vanity-metrics/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/vanity-metrics/

skapadia 6y ago

There should be a systematic way to collect and periodically highlight accomplishments and those who contributed to those (quarterly, monthly). A lead should be able to produce that information (with input from the team, all in one room face to face), and it should be published in a common place (where everyone else has read-only rights, or changes can be tracked) for managers and higher-ups to see.

twodave 6y ago
I think I'm going to disagree with this. I've seen lots of these systems foisted upon employees and the general result is people either try to game the system or else people feel forced into participating when they don't wish to. Praise ought to be both spontaneous and merited or else it loses a bit of its appeal in my opinion. Thanks to this article (which I didn't even read), I was inspired to write something heartfelt to my own manager about another person on my team. No system would have pried that from me. I just needed a subtle reminder.

modernerd 6y ago

The company I work at uses https://www.15five.com/ https://www.15five.com/ for reviews and 1-on-1s. It has a “High Five” feature to recognise big or small things anyone in the company has done to help. It's low friction and it works well. They hook it up to a Slack channel for a steady stream of positivity, and its read by senior execs and mentioned during reviews. More companies should make this part of their company culture via tools that make it easy and common.

mwfunk 6y ago

Since this is like an inverse Karen move, perhaps anti-Karens should formally be known as Julies.

barnyfried 6y ago

most coworkers will never do great work.

pgnas 6y ago

I completely agree with the idea of paying a compliment to someones supervisor or manager, I find it rare when people recognize great work. While I agree also with why you may want to ask the manager and the issues makes some sense , I think it goes a long way! Just to call them out on the great work! I genuinely believe that this attitude promotes positive environments. Great work always deserves to be recognized. Good article

m0zg 6y ago

And as a (former) manager: when your reports are doing great work, make sure to publicly praise them, as well as give people opportunity to beat their own chest and roar. Shipped a cool feature? Present a few slides at the weekly team meeting, explain why it's cool. This won't happen unless you encourage it and set aside the time. I don't see nearly enough of this, and I think it's a shame - it makes people feel good about what they do, feel that their work not a waste of time. It also engenders pride in good work and implicitly shines a light on poor performers. As far as telling people's managers about good work, that is helpful of course. But I feel like there's this misconception among non-managers that managers don't already know who's great and who's not. As a manager who pays any attention at all this is clear as a day most of the time.

welcome_dragon 6y ago

We use TINYPulse (https://www.tinypulse.com/ https://www.tinypulse.com/) for this very reason at my work; it takes about 10 seconds to send someone a shout out, and not only does their manager see it, but everyone in the company does (we're a small startup). If I notice that someone has really killed it in something but has no recognition at all for it, I will also/instead point out to that person's manager, especially if it is a junior engineer

holidayacct 6y ago

I would be careful abour this one, some managers do everything they can to get rid of exemplary employees. If you're going to this make it as public as possible and make sure you have sound reasoning for why you are singing the praises of your co-worker. Include managers as close to the top of the organization as possible as well.

da39a3ee 6y ago

It's a good thing to do. I don't agree with the first point about asking first. Ask if you like; if not don't ask. It's up to you. I'm afraid that yet again I put this down to the modern cultural schism among people who would describe themselves as liberals, with those on the progressive left adopting extremes of sensitivity that I find over the top. Specifically, I disagree with her points as follows: 1. Giving someone a compliment that’s not in line with their current goals. Try to judge that yourself. But your coworker has no control over what others say; one of the risks in life, somewhere fairly low down in a list with many elements, is the risk that a coworker will compliment you for something that's not in line with your goals. Deal with it. 2. Giving someone the wrong “level” of compliment. For example, if they’re a very senior engineer and you say something like “PERSON did SIMPLE_ROUTINE_TASK really well!” That will make you look silly, not them. 3. If your coworker was supposed to be focusing on a specific project, and you’re complimenting them for helping with something totally unrelated, their manager might think that they’re not focusing on their “real” work. Make it one of your aims to have the sense to get that right. 4.Some people have terrible managers (for example, maybe the manager will feel threatened by your coworker excelling) Make it one of your aims to have the sense to get that right. 5. Some people just don’t like being called out in that way, and are happy with the level of recognition they’re getting! Bad luck; they don't control what others do.

kjgkjhfkjf 6y ago

You may think you're communicating friendly appreciation when you send a complementary message about someone to their manager with them cc-ed, but the message that you're also sending is that you're the sort of person who thinks it's okay to talk to people's managers about them, and you run a very real risk of losing your peers' trust.

sabujp 6y ago

geeethanks

kentbrew 6y ago

Pay special attention to the reasons the author gives under "ask if it's okay first."

ranman 6y ago

What about when they don’t do great work?

known 6y ago

And protect yourself from Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others)

bpyne 6y ago

She brought up an interesting point: asking your colleague if (s)he wants recognition. Sending recognition is usually a decision made in the moment. Asking permission makes a process out of it. Having a process reduces your motivation to send recognition. Her five reasons are spot on. But I'd like to add that people should understand their work environments and the politics involved. It's easier with small to small-medium sized organizations where you know all or most of the managers and their quirks and know the politics at work. My environment is small-medium. Part of what we're judged on is helping colleagues. The managers are all onboard with it. When a colleague from the Unix admin team went out of his way to help my team I didn't hesitate to send his manager a message in praise of the effort. Getting a colleague in trouble for taking time out of assigned work is not an issue.

akavel 6y ago

At a company I joined recently (WPEngine), there's an app called 15five deployed internally, where every 2 weeks we're encouraged to single out some coworkers with "high fives", thanking them for whatever we want. Those are then visible to us and our managers (and by default are also shared publicly in a special purpose chatroom). I am really impressed that this is systematically implemented and encouraged throughout the whole company!

artur_makly 6y ago

speaking of employee analytics i just came across this: https://www.myleon.co/ https://www.myleon.co/ is it just me.. or once we start adding "Ai" to human relations/performance.. i get nervous

tylergetsay 6y ago

I worked at a retail store when I was a tiny 16 year old, I got a ton of NPS surveys by telling people I got a pizza party if I got enough of them. It worked crazy well, I quickly became top in the company for NPS. It was hilarious watching my older coworkers attempt to pull it off and fail.