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I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies. Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of

I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies. Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc. These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrived and artificial. They're given when we're just doing normal, expected work. I've mentioned this to colleagues and friends and there seems to be two camps of people: those who want constant positive reenforcement and those who it completely has the opposite effect, an annoyance. I guess I fall into the latter.

PointyFluff 6y ago
They should just dole out cryptocurrency every time they say that. The words would have meaning again.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  They would just launch their own crypto, allowing them to gamify their teams for all eternity.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Put your money where your mouth is, or something like that
- bavent 6y ago
  My work effectively does. "Points" we can redeem for physical goods or trips.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - alexchamberlain 6y ago
    Isn't that a little patronising?
    - bavent 6y ago
      Kind of. It also creates a weird obligation to reward coworkers for things, since have a budget of points to give out as well.
- brutal_boi 6y ago
  Sometimes, Sometimes not. I can imagine everybody taking out the phone to check crypto prices as soon as the words were said
- dnautics 6y ago
  Or you know, currency.
- cordite 6y ago
  Maybe a terrible idea, but it was inspired by the parent comment here.. Fork DogeCoin, when someone goes above and beyond, reward them more each week. When they want, they can use dogecoin to do something like 20% time. I'm just following on the satirical nature of the parent comment here, don't take this as a real suggestion.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Because what Schrute Bucks really need is a blockchain.
malingo 6y ago
Do you mean "espoused" instead of "eschewed"?
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  Ah yeah, my bad.
dawnerd 6y ago
Same people I guess that think you have to find something positive to say about every code review.
praptak 6y ago
Presenting the neutral as great is merely cringy and annoying. It's much worse when failures are presented with the mandatory positive spin. Especially the failures of the management when the employees get to bear the costs.
- lbblack 6y ago
  Failures shouldn't necessarily need a quote "mandatory positive spin". But they don't necessarily need a quote "mandatory negative spin". Meeting somewhere in the middle for a team is how generally speaking, consensus is met.
nathias 6y ago
Its a type of condescention, maybe some people fail to recognize it (thats probably the reason why its used in the first place).
- namdnay 6y ago
  Yes yes yes. That’s what I can’t stand - I don’t mind the hypocrisy, what really grates is the condescension. Who are you to congratulate me? Why would the opinion of some random corporate bullshitter mean anything to me? And of course the whole political game where people have to send congratulations just to signal that they’re part of leadership
quercusa 6y ago
I started DuoLingo recently (for Latin) and the over-the-top cheerleading there is driving me nuts.
- 1ark 6y ago
  It's a casual game. So they give you all this feedback all the time. If you got lingots for it it would be slightly better, becuase then it is no longer empty praise, but they don't want to give away those.
baxtr 6y ago
I was one one of those people doing this. Not because I liked it. I hated it. It felt false. But because I somehow thought it was expected of me. All other leaders of the company would do the same. Cheer for their team, applaud them publicly, always, constantly. I felt I had to participate in that kind of political game because otherwise the team, the people I cared about would feel bad about themselves. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this depends also a lot on company culture.
- thewebcount 6y ago
  Well depending on the type of org you're in, it could be dangerous not to. When everyone else is doing it, if you aren't, it just makes the other managers think, "Wow, that manager isn't praising their people. They must really suck. Remind me never to work with that team."
- dbish 6y ago
  I'm a senior leader and I try to go against the grain on this. I can't stand pile-on emails where every leader has to reply all with "great job" for minor things. I work to provide positive feedback for specific and great work because people see-through false positivity and in the long run you can see that the folks doing the work are very clear with thinking these "ra ra" displays show a disconnect from reality rather then a positive reinforcement. They remind me of the (pardon the language) "shit sandwich" way of providing feedback that some people feel they have to do: give a (many times false and vague) positive not then say your true feelings and end with a positive note. If they aren't specific, it just feels fake and people are just waiting for the true feedback in the middle.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    Manager 2 jobs back did sandwiching all the time. Its even fake if the positive is truthful because the middle part (criticism or substance or negative) is the meat. Its manipulative, and I prefer honesty.
  - jpetso 6y ago
    Not a manager, but I find myself thanking people a lot for all kinds of minor things. I'm among the group that hates excessive inflationary praise. Saying thank you, and being thanked, doesn't trigger my bullshit sensor though and feels right even for small routine work.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Puts 6y ago
This made me think about how different it is to motivate people to exercise. Some people seams to need a full on military boot camp to get exercise done, and some people just totally shuts down when someone tells them what to do. When it comes to management, we don't only need to understand that different people need different types of motivation, but also that something that is essential to motivate some can be directly contra productive and harmful to others motivation.
- orzig 6y ago
  A million times this. People are diverse, in basically every way. It’s the worst and best part about them.
- 5tefan 6y ago
  Very true. Not easy to deal with humans.
  - angelbar 6y ago
    Welcome Zukerberg...
- tacocataco 6y ago
  If managing/coaching could be boiled down to "be positive" you could replace the manager with a motivational poster. Isn't it the managers job to figure out what each individual on the team needs to perform?
lbblack 6y ago
I think one of the most important things for a person in a leadership role to understand, is how to understand other people by confidently understanding yourself. If you can't offer me encouraging advice and honest critique - without being afraid of hurting my personal feelings, I'd be left without a clear direction. Otherwise, you'd be easily able to recreate a positive growth cycle in your team (e.g. significant boosts in morale, productivity, communication, etc.) False positive emotions are usually the result of someone denying the acceptance of truth. What ever that truth may be. This is probably going to sound super corny but YMMV. The psychological impacts of denial are devastating. The psychological impacts of love, acceptance and forgiveness are limitlessly fruitful. I see a lot of HN posts recently on the existence of these superhuman developers with god-like abilities or productivity. Everybody on this planet is human, yet we interact with others intellect or knowledge as if it were a static state. It's not. Every human mind is quite literally, a quantum computer. Anyone can grow their intellect or wisdom or maturity, it just takes the proper push in the right direction and some guts.
qwantim1 6y ago
The story though is about toxic positivity affecting the person putting a lot of pressure on themselves. It led to success but the concern was of the excessive stress and taking a day off for mental health break “sick day” to make up for it. If you personally don’t like positivity which isn’t fake, then it might be good to dig into that. I have a hard time with fake positivity but genuine positivity is usually acceptable.
caturopath 6y ago
I was so taken back by this when I joined a huge tech company for the first time. I couldn't tell at first whether people were so miscalibrated that they couldn't tell that the work wasn't impressive or whether it was just a tradition to bullshit all the time. So many of the exaggerated positive statements are about things so minor that they actually come of a bit condescending to me.
- josephorjoe 6y ago
  This has been my experience as well. I'm still not sure who is fake and who is sincere about this stuff. We have a weekly status meeting with the first section dedicated to "how are we winning" -- which is like awesome if you are a baseball team but when you are rolling out incremental features to a modest app and dealing w routine operational concerns it's hard to get that excited about "nothing caught on fire this week" or "we did the thing we said we'd do". And we have these horrible self and peer appraisals that we have to do where you are expected to describe routine competence in terms that should normally be reserved for a someone who rescued all the kittens and puppies from a pet store fire.
  - caturopath 6y ago
    I was almost relieved the first time I listened to someone say, "Wow! This is huge. What a launch," to someone and then admit when they were gone that they couldn't even see the difference.
- kovac 6y ago
  Same here. In fact, I've more or less stopped reading emails, listening to speeches from higher ups because there's literally no useful information in those other than empty, abstract phrases. One of those experiences was a series of bullshit praises over many months followed by a company wide retrenchment (not because of covid).
Jochim 6y ago
Is it annoying because it seems disingenuous? If so what makes it so? I used to be much more cynical about unwarranted praise/positivity. My mind has pretty much been changed by my current job, our team lead doesn't communicate how he's feeling to our team at all and this has had negatively affects on not just my morale/happiness but my teammates' as well.
- BlargMcLarg 6y ago
  Words lose their meaning when overused. That's the one reason that to me, it feels disingenuous. When even the smallest thing is "really amazing", everything is "really amazing". Result being, whatever that person says has very little worth except when something is clearly detrimental. That alone would be manageable. Yet, this behavior is often expected from others too, which creates an environment that, at least to me, is incredibly suffocating. What's worse, such an environment caused two problems for me: First, by upping the average of "relatively perceived as positive", objectively neutral people are perceived as negative. I've actually had colleagues go into emotional distress and vent to me over this. Second, it at least seems like overly positive environments are afraid of criticism and critical people. As a critical person myself, it has been incredibly difficult to navigate such an environment and it lead to me essentially becoming an assembly line worker who "just shuts up and does their job". Also anecdotal, without critical people, going into the wrong direction either ends up being corrected very slowly, or not at all (and given how multi-dimensional work tends to be, going into the wrong or nowhere-near-optimal direction is very likely). As a result, to me, no feedback at all is only slightly worse than overly frequent, overly positive feedback.
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  Yes and I don't think it's because it seems disingenuous, it's because it is disingenuous. Not out of malice but because if you're not being super positive and supportive, you're causing discord and not being a "team player". Most weeks at work are completely benign where we're not doing "amazing" work, we're doing "work". We're doing our salaried jobs as expected. It's frustrating when every Jira ticket that gets closed is some moral victory that needs to be held high. It's not, it's our jobs and it's frustrating to deal with the faux positivity when I just want to do my job.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
A lot of insight in the parent comment here. Most importantly this: "...there seems to be two camps of people: those who want constant positive reinforcement and those who it completely has the opposite effect ..." If you are leading and or managing a team, one of the most important things you need to know are how do people want their feedback. My experience is that it varies from person to person (I suspect that there are many more than two camps :-)) and as such it is unlikely that you can meet that need in group feedback. Because of that, my choice these days is to split feedback into two fora, the group status meeting and 1:1s. In the group, feedback is modulated by progress against plan. So "we need to work harder" for behind plan, "neutral" for on plan, and "this team is killing it" for ahead of plan. In 1:1s the feedback is based on the expectations that have been set for that team member, do they know what is expected of them? Do they know how it is being measured? And where are they with respect to measurement vs expectation. 1:1 feedback often times (for me) takes on more of a mentor/mentee tone rather than a how are we doing on the schedule tone. Doing that well also requires a certain amount of trust which, as a manager, you have to earn by being honest with your team members.
- tchalla 6y ago
  In the end, HOW you deliver feedback matters. Personally, I have three important characteristics for a feedback. Point 1 : "Be Specific". I can not stress this enough. Please point out specific observable behaviour. Point 2 : Frame feedback in terms of team/organisational goals. Every team has a purpose within the organisation. It's a team game and every team member should know the feedback in context of the team game. Individual feedback, team context. Point 3 : Cite the past but look for future changes in behaviour. You can not change the past but you can influence the future. For example, "Hey John! When you do X, it helps the team achieve Y. Please continue doing so!" or "Hey John! When you do Z, it lets the team down. What can you do differently?".
  - UpsilonAlpha 6y ago
    To add on to this. Following these steps will often avoid the problem described by GP. If you can't find specific actions to praise, then there is a good chance the recipient will feel the praise is hollow.
SkyPuncher 6y ago
"You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it" I say this to my team a lot, even though they're operating as "expected" levels for my company. The reality is there are a lot of teams and a lot of companies that simply do not expect much from their teams. We do. I want to remind the team that they are doing good work. When people have confidence they're doing a good job, they're more likely to continue to do a good job.
- smrq 6y ago
  You might want to internalize the parent comment, because it's entirely possible that some of your team members are not taking it that way. I'm on the receiving end of such feedback often. I know that it's coming from a genuine place. But that doesn't stop it from being irritating!
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  There's a class of people though, myself included, that do not like external validation. I thrive on internal validation on my perceived work product strength. I feel like I'm a better judge of whether my work is good or bad than a non-technical project manager. It's different when it comes from a technical peer or a technical manager. There it definitely means more. Closer to my point though, it was the continued repetition of the positive reinforcement. I'm talking a weekly occurrence where the situation did not call for the reinforcement. It felt fake and, to me, had the opposite effect as intended.
  - clairity 6y ago
    everyone responds to intrinsic motivation (which in part is what you're describing). very few people can last very long on extrinsic motivation only (like fake praise). there's not two classes of people who divide neatly into one camp or the other.
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  I must be one of those who feel slighted when I recieve undue praise. It's kind of patronizing hyperbole and I see it as being treated like a toddler than a grown, paid professional. I'm not one of Pavlov's dogs.
akudha 6y ago
I too fall in the latter category. Nothing is more annoying than fake appreciation, fake love etc. It is better to keep my mouth shut if I can't mean what I say
spaetzleesser 6y ago
Same for me. I hate the celebratory management emails after crunch time. They feel insulting to me. I expect management to help during the project and not celebrating once everything is done. That while not having fixed obvious problems during the project. My partner is the other way. She loves and needs praise. The more the better. Another interesting thing was at the end of one of the last projects. There was a survey where we could choose between a Patagonia shirt and a plaque. Guess what? The majority voted for the plaque. That was astonishing to me but a good reminder that I seem to be different.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  What did the plaque say? This is amazing.
  - trhway 6y ago
    some demotivator like this https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/dedicationCAL.jpg https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/dedicat... ? In general you can't trust/take seriously whatever the management says, except for 1. specific information reflected in the HR systems and 2. the specific tasks/deadlines/etc. assigned to you and the related progress/delivery/etc. discussions. Specifically, when it comes to public praise, the manager publicly praising his team/dept/org is actually praising themselves while supposedly being publicly modest/coy by not explicitly praising themselves, and this is why management loves making those praises.
  - mr_woozy 6y ago
    Redeemable for one free Patagonia shirt.
- didibus 6y ago
  Haha, I feel I fall on both groups. Like, tell me how awesome I did and also better give me a bonus or I'll take my awesome self somewhere else (⌐■_■)
  - randycupertino 6y ago
alexchamberlain 6y ago
Our 2 groups seem to be split down the Atlantic: the US folks love the clapping and positive reinforcement, the europeans seem to roll their eyes. (Generalisation ofc)
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  Yep agree I have noticed this as well. Not just in this post. Americans in general seems to spend a lot of time telling everybody how great they and/or their team and/or their country is and how hard working they are etc. independently of reality. Trump is a perfect example of this. You could almost call Trump the personification of American culture pushed to the extreme.
matwood 6y ago
I wonder if we all have just become too cynical. I don't need praise, and simply prefer more money. But, if someone in charge is trying to keep the team attitude right with some positive thoughts, letting it get to me is really my problem and not theirs.
im_down_w_otp 6y ago
I tend to see "toxic positivity" as an attempt to gaslight people, but with the presumption of good intentions, and that presumption of good intentions somehow washing away the deleterious effects of gaslighting people. Somewhat unsurprisingly it turns out it's the gaslighting that's the problem, not entirely the motivation for engaging in it. My experience has been that high-performing people gravitate toward being motivated by engagement with reality, not by suspending disbelief to engage in contrivance or farce. This is true on the other side of it as well. They won't tolerate "toxic negativity" either, which is just another form of gaslighting in an attempt to motivate by way manufactured crisis or exigency.
- sneak 6y ago
  I generally refrain from comments that don't contribute to the discussion, but having already done the thing that indicates "good comment", I still wanted to cosign and further express how spot-on this comment is, in my experience. (I also recognize the inherent irony of doing this in a thread about empty praise, heh.)
- butwhywhyoh 6y ago
  I don't think you said the word "gaslighting" enough times.
  - im_down_w_otp 6y ago
    I can't tell if you're gaslighting me or not.
shrimpx 6y ago
This may sound a bit cynical but it's honest: When everyone else is gratuitously praising engineering, it sort of creates an atmosphere that feels like engineering is being taken advantage of by these other people: managers, sales people, execs. It feels like these people think you're their cash cow, and also that they think you're kind of stupid, and gratuitous compliments are enough to keep the cash cow going. That may not be what goes on, but that's what it feels like.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  That sounds like a personal issue though. I generally know if I'm doing a good job or being a load, and I don't look to external support or denial of that. I prefer regular work reviews but I don't need to hear it all the time. People are people and quite varied, some will think you're doing a great job and never say a thing, others prefer to be "positive" and lay it on a bit thick. When I want an honest evaluation I just ask to please point out both the good and bad from my manager/peer.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    >I generally know if I'm doing a good job Could you elaborate? I would agree that random praise from a manager is not an especially good way to evaluate how well one is doing. But to me, "doing a good job" inherently depends on things that aren't purely determined by introspection. Here's a scenario for example: I do things for people, that are well received, my manager talks to other people, and it leads to people outside my department asking for special projects. I create something, of which I'm reasonably proud, and it gets copious praise from the requestor. But it turns out, I learn through the grapevine, there are several people who I never came in contact with, who are the actual intended end users, who ultimately refuse to use it at all, because it doesn't fit into their workflow, because the manager who asked me to do it doesn't understand it. Without external feedback, there's no way to tell what effect I'm having on the organization and the world. And I would think that every employee at any level has to deal with this.
ryanSrich 6y ago
Project and Product managers have to give this praise because they contribute much less to the project, but take the majority of the credit. Designers and Engineers do the actual work. This is the sad reality of most tech companies with more than 20 employees. Not having PMs and PdMs is a massive benefit of smaller orgs. Do everything you can to avoid hiring these people.
sneak 6y ago
If everything is super duper great, then nothing is.
topkai22 6y ago
From the perspective of someone who leads an engineering team- I’m genuinely happy and proud of my team when things are going well. I’m not blowing smoke when I say something like that- it’s all true. Now I will call out a bad sprint, and I’ll praise even more after a great sprint, but it seems to be me that just making our deadlines week after week is something to be genuinely happy for.
chadcmulligan 6y ago
I like my feedback in cash, if you like my work give me more money, I seem to be in the minority though.
blastro 6y ago
those examples you gave turn my stomach - because i find them so manipulative. they focus only on your productive output as an employee and completely ignore the inherent value you have as an intelligent being. i find it fascinating that the same "positivity" turned in another, more humane direction (ie. "you guys showed up today, that's fantastic!!", or "we failed but who cares, we rock anyways") can transform into something that i think actually serves a purpose - forging a robust spirit. i actually appreciate that attitude in my peers. it's funny how razor thin the difference between what we are each describing. it's the same thing - unflappable, stupid belief - but applied for different ends. thanks for the thought prompt!!!!
muzani 6y ago
Funny enough, it was playing Football Manager that taught me this lesson that too much praise is counterproductive and can actually harm morale.

PointyFluff 6y ago

They should just dole out cryptocurrency every time they say that. The words would have meaning again.

arkitaip 6y ago
They would just launch their own crypto, allowing them to gamify their teams for all eternity.
pietrovismara 6y ago
Put your money where your mouth is, or something like that
bavent 6y ago
My work effectively does. "Points" we can redeem for physical goods or trips.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- alexchamberlain 6y ago
  Isn't that a little patronising?
  - bavent 6y ago
    Kind of. It also creates a weird obligation to reward coworkers for things, since have a budget of points to give out as well.
brutal_boi 6y ago
Sometimes, Sometimes not. I can imagine everybody taking out the phone to check crypto prices as soon as the words were said
dnautics 6y ago
Or you know, currency.
cordite 6y ago
Maybe a terrible idea, but it was inspired by the parent comment here.. Fork DogeCoin, when someone goes above and beyond, reward them more each week. When they want, they can use dogecoin to do something like 20% time. I'm just following on the satirical nature of the parent comment here, don't take this as a real suggestion.
dehrmann 6y ago
Because what Schrute Bucks really need is a blockchain.

malingo 6y ago

Do you mean "espoused" instead of "eschewed"?

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
Ah yeah, my bad.

dawnerd 6y ago

Same people I guess that think you have to find something positive to say about every code review.

praptak 6y ago

Presenting the neutral as great is merely cringy and annoying. It's much worse when failures are presented with the mandatory positive spin. Especially the failures of the management when the employees get to bear the costs.

lbblack 6y ago
Failures shouldn't necessarily need a quote "mandatory positive spin". But they don't necessarily need a quote "mandatory negative spin". Meeting somewhere in the middle for a team is how generally speaking, consensus is met.

nathias 6y ago

Its a type of condescention, maybe some people fail to recognize it (thats probably the reason why its used in the first place).

namdnay 6y ago
Yes yes yes. That’s what I can’t stand - I don’t mind the hypocrisy, what really grates is the condescension. Who are you to congratulate me? Why would the opinion of some random corporate bullshitter mean anything to me? And of course the whole political game where people have to send congratulations just to signal that they’re part of leadership

quercusa 6y ago

I started DuoLingo recently (for Latin) and the over-the-top cheerleading there is driving me nuts.

1ark 6y ago
It's a casual game. So they give you all this feedback all the time. If you got lingots for it it would be slightly better, becuase then it is no longer empty praise, but they don't want to give away those.

baxtr 6y ago

I was one one of those people doing this. Not because I liked it. I hated it. It felt false. But because I somehow thought it was expected of me. All other leaders of the company would do the same. Cheer for their team, applaud them publicly, always, constantly. I felt I had to participate in that kind of political game because otherwise the team, the people I cared about would feel bad about themselves. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this depends also a lot on company culture.

thewebcount 6y ago
Well depending on the type of org you're in, it could be dangerous not to. When everyone else is doing it, if you aren't, it just makes the other managers think, "Wow, that manager isn't praising their people. They must really suck. Remind me never to work with that team."
dbish 6y ago
I'm a senior leader and I try to go against the grain on this. I can't stand pile-on emails where every leader has to reply all with "great job" for minor things. I work to provide positive feedback for specific and great work because people see-through false positivity and in the long run you can see that the folks doing the work are very clear with thinking these "ra ra" displays show a disconnect from reality rather then a positive reinforcement. They remind me of the (pardon the language) "shit sandwich" way of providing feedback that some people feel they have to do: give a (many times false and vague) positive not then say your true feelings and end with a positive note. If they aren't specific, it just feels fake and people are just waiting for the true feedback in the middle.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  Manager 2 jobs back did sandwiching all the time. Its even fake if the positive is truthful because the middle part (criticism or substance or negative) is the meat. Its manipulative, and I prefer honesty.
- jpetso 6y ago
  Not a manager, but I find myself thanking people a lot for all kinds of minor things. I'm among the group that hates excessive inflationary praise. Saying thank you, and being thanked, doesn't trigger my bullshit sensor though and feels right even for small routine work.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Puts 6y ago

This made me think about how different it is to motivate people to exercise. Some people seams to need a full on military boot camp to get exercise done, and some people just totally shuts down when someone tells them what to do. When it comes to management, we don't only need to understand that different people need different types of motivation, but also that something that is essential to motivate some can be directly contra productive and harmful to others motivation.

orzig 6y ago
A million times this. People are diverse, in basically every way. It’s the worst and best part about them.
5tefan 6y ago
Very true. Not easy to deal with humans.
- angelbar 6y ago
  Welcome Zukerberg...
tacocataco 6y ago
If managing/coaching could be boiled down to "be positive" you could replace the manager with a motivational poster. Isn't it the managers job to figure out what each individual on the team needs to perform?

lbblack 6y ago

I think one of the most important things for a person in a leadership role to understand, is how to understand other people by confidently understanding yourself. If you can't offer me encouraging advice and honest critique - without being afraid of hurting my personal feelings, I'd be left without a clear direction. Otherwise, you'd be easily able to recreate a positive growth cycle in your team (e.g. significant boosts in morale, productivity, communication, etc.) False positive emotions are usually the result of someone denying the acceptance of truth. What ever that truth may be. This is probably going to sound super corny but YMMV. The psychological impacts of denial are devastating. The psychological impacts of love, acceptance and forgiveness are limitlessly fruitful. I see a lot of HN posts recently on the existence of these superhuman developers with god-like abilities or productivity. Everybody on this planet is human, yet we interact with others intellect or knowledge as if it were a static state. It's not. Every human mind is quite literally, a quantum computer. Anyone can grow their intellect or wisdom or maturity, it just takes the proper push in the right direction and some guts.

qwantim1 6y ago

The story though is about toxic positivity affecting the person putting a lot of pressure on themselves. It led to success but the concern was of the excessive stress and taking a day off for mental health break “sick day” to make up for it. If you personally don’t like positivity which isn’t fake, then it might be good to dig into that. I have a hard time with fake positivity but genuine positivity is usually acceptable.

caturopath 6y ago

I was so taken back by this when I joined a huge tech company for the first time. I couldn't tell at first whether people were so miscalibrated that they couldn't tell that the work wasn't impressive or whether it was just a tradition to bullshit all the time. So many of the exaggerated positive statements are about things so minor that they actually come of a bit condescending to me.

josephorjoe 6y ago
This has been my experience as well. I'm still not sure who is fake and who is sincere about this stuff. We have a weekly status meeting with the first section dedicated to "how are we winning" -- which is like awesome if you are a baseball team but when you are rolling out incremental features to a modest app and dealing w routine operational concerns it's hard to get that excited about "nothing caught on fire this week" or "we did the thing we said we'd do". And we have these horrible self and peer appraisals that we have to do where you are expected to describe routine competence in terms that should normally be reserved for a someone who rescued all the kittens and puppies from a pet store fire.
- caturopath 6y ago
  I was almost relieved the first time I listened to someone say, "Wow! This is huge. What a launch," to someone and then admit when they were gone that they couldn't even see the difference.
kovac 6y ago
Same here. In fact, I've more or less stopped reading emails, listening to speeches from higher ups because there's literally no useful information in those other than empty, abstract phrases. One of those experiences was a series of bullshit praises over many months followed by a company wide retrenchment (not because of covid).

Jochim 6y ago

Is it annoying because it seems disingenuous? If so what makes it so? I used to be much more cynical about unwarranted praise/positivity. My mind has pretty much been changed by my current job, our team lead doesn't communicate how he's feeling to our team at all and this has had negatively affects on not just my morale/happiness but my teammates' as well.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago
Words lose their meaning when overused. That's the one reason that to me, it feels disingenuous. When even the smallest thing is "really amazing", everything is "really amazing". Result being, whatever that person says has very little worth except when something is clearly detrimental. That alone would be manageable. Yet, this behavior is often expected from others too, which creates an environment that, at least to me, is incredibly suffocating. What's worse, such an environment caused two problems for me: First, by upping the average of "relatively perceived as positive", objectively neutral people are perceived as negative. I've actually had colleagues go into emotional distress and vent to me over this. Second, it at least seems like overly positive environments are afraid of criticism and critical people. As a critical person myself, it has been incredibly difficult to navigate such an environment and it lead to me essentially becoming an assembly line worker who "just shuts up and does their job". Also anecdotal, without critical people, going into the wrong direction either ends up being corrected very slowly, or not at all (and given how multi-dimensional work tends to be, going into the wrong or nowhere-near-optimal direction is very likely). As a result, to me, no feedback at all is only slightly worse than overly frequent, overly positive feedback.
halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
Yes and I don't think it's because it seems disingenuous, it's because it is disingenuous. Not out of malice but because if you're not being super positive and supportive, you're causing discord and not being a "team player". Most weeks at work are completely benign where we're not doing "amazing" work, we're doing "work". We're doing our salaried jobs as expected. It's frustrating when every Jira ticket that gets closed is some moral victory that needs to be held high. It's not, it's our jobs and it's frustrating to deal with the faux positivity when I just want to do my job.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

A lot of insight in the parent comment here. Most importantly this: "...there seems to be two camps of people: those who want constant positive reinforcement and those who it completely has the opposite effect ..." If you are leading and or managing a team, one of the most important things you need to know are how do people want their feedback. My experience is that it varies from person to person (I suspect that there are many more than two camps :-)) and as such it is unlikely that you can meet that need in group feedback. Because of that, my choice these days is to split feedback into two fora, the group status meeting and 1:1s. In the group, feedback is modulated by progress against plan. So "we need to work harder" for behind plan, "neutral" for on plan, and "this team is killing it" for ahead of plan. In 1:1s the feedback is based on the expectations that have been set for that team member, do they know what is expected of them? Do they know how it is being measured? And where are they with respect to measurement vs expectation. 1:1 feedback often times (for me) takes on more of a mentor/mentee tone rather than a how are we doing on the schedule tone. Doing that well also requires a certain amount of trust which, as a manager, you have to earn by being honest with your team members.

tchalla 6y ago
In the end, HOW you deliver feedback matters. Personally, I have three important characteristics for a feedback. Point 1 : "Be Specific". I can not stress this enough. Please point out specific observable behaviour. Point 2 : Frame feedback in terms of team/organisational goals. Every team has a purpose within the organisation. It's a team game and every team member should know the feedback in context of the team game. Individual feedback, team context. Point 3 : Cite the past but look for future changes in behaviour. You can not change the past but you can influence the future. For example, "Hey John! When you do X, it helps the team achieve Y. Please continue doing so!" or "Hey John! When you do Z, it lets the team down. What can you do differently?".
- UpsilonAlpha 6y ago
  To add on to this. Following these steps will often avoid the problem described by GP. If you can't find specific actions to praise, then there is a good chance the recipient will feel the praise is hollow.

SkyPuncher 6y ago

"You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it" I say this to my team a lot, even though they're operating as "expected" levels for my company. The reality is there are a lot of teams and a lot of companies that simply do not expect much from their teams. We do. I want to remind the team that they are doing good work. When people have confidence they're doing a good job, they're more likely to continue to do a good job.

smrq 6y ago
You might want to internalize the parent comment, because it's entirely possible that some of your team members are not taking it that way. I'm on the receiving end of such feedback often. I know that it's coming from a genuine place. But that doesn't stop it from being irritating!
halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
There's a class of people though, myself included, that do not like external validation. I thrive on internal validation on my perceived work product strength. I feel like I'm a better judge of whether my work is good or bad than a non-technical project manager. It's different when it comes from a technical peer or a technical manager. There it definitely means more. Closer to my point though, it was the continued repetition of the positive reinforcement. I'm talking a weekly occurrence where the situation did not call for the reinforcement. It felt fake and, to me, had the opposite effect as intended.
- clairity 6y ago
  everyone responds to intrinsic motivation (which in part is what you're describing). very few people can last very long on extrinsic motivation only (like fake praise). there's not two classes of people who divide neatly into one camp or the other.
vagrantJin 6y ago
I must be one of those who feel slighted when I recieve undue praise. It's kind of patronizing hyperbole and I see it as being treated like a toddler than a grown, paid professional. I'm not one of Pavlov's dogs.

akudha 6y ago

I too fall in the latter category. Nothing is more annoying than fake appreciation, fake love etc. It is better to keep my mouth shut if I can't mean what I say

spaetzleesser 6y ago

Same for me. I hate the celebratory management emails after crunch time. They feel insulting to me. I expect management to help during the project and not celebrating once everything is done. That while not having fixed obvious problems during the project. My partner is the other way. She loves and needs praise. The more the better. Another interesting thing was at the end of one of the last projects. There was a survey where we could choose between a Patagonia shirt and a plaque. Guess what? The majority voted for the plaque. That was astonishing to me but a good reminder that I seem to be different.

lostlogin 6y ago
What did the plaque say? This is amazing.
- trhway 6y ago
  some demotivator like this https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/dedicationCAL.jpg https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/dedicat... ? In general you can't trust/take seriously whatever the management says, except for 1. specific information reflected in the HR systems and 2. the specific tasks/deadlines/etc. assigned to you and the related progress/delivery/etc. discussions. Specifically, when it comes to public praise, the manager publicly praising his team/dept/org is actually praising themselves while supposedly being publicly modest/coy by not explicitly praising themselves, and this is why management loves making those praises.
- mr_woozy 6y ago
  Redeemable for one free Patagonia shirt.
didibus 6y ago
Haha, I feel I fall on both groups. Like, tell me how awesome I did and also better give me a bonus or I'll take my awesome self somewhere else (⌐■_■)
- randycupertino 6y ago

alexchamberlain 6y ago

Our 2 groups seem to be split down the Atlantic: the US folks love the clapping and positive reinforcement, the europeans seem to roll their eyes. (Generalisation ofc)

mbrodersen 6y ago
Yep agree I have noticed this as well. Not just in this post. Americans in general seems to spend a lot of time telling everybody how great they and/or their team and/or their country is and how hard working they are etc. independently of reality. Trump is a perfect example of this. You could almost call Trump the personification of American culture pushed to the extreme.

matwood 6y ago

I wonder if we all have just become too cynical. I don't need praise, and simply prefer more money. But, if someone in charge is trying to keep the team attitude right with some positive thoughts, letting it get to me is really my problem and not theirs.

im_down_w_otp 6y ago

I tend to see "toxic positivity" as an attempt to gaslight people, but with the presumption of good intentions, and that presumption of good intentions somehow washing away the deleterious effects of gaslighting people. Somewhat unsurprisingly it turns out it's the gaslighting that's the problem, not entirely the motivation for engaging in it. My experience has been that high-performing people gravitate toward being motivated by engagement with reality, not by suspending disbelief to engage in contrivance or farce. This is true on the other side of it as well. They won't tolerate "toxic negativity" either, which is just another form of gaslighting in an attempt to motivate by way manufactured crisis or exigency.

sneak 6y ago
I generally refrain from comments that don't contribute to the discussion, but having already done the thing that indicates "good comment", I still wanted to cosign and further express how spot-on this comment is, in my experience. (I also recognize the inherent irony of doing this in a thread about empty praise, heh.)
butwhywhyoh 6y ago
I don't think you said the word "gaslighting" enough times.
- im_down_w_otp 6y ago
  I can't tell if you're gaslighting me or not.

shrimpx 6y ago

This may sound a bit cynical but it's honest: When everyone else is gratuitously praising engineering, it sort of creates an atmosphere that feels like engineering is being taken advantage of by these other people: managers, sales people, execs. It feels like these people think you're their cash cow, and also that they think you're kind of stupid, and gratuitous compliments are enough to keep the cash cow going. That may not be what goes on, but that's what it feels like.

deleted 6y ago
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stjohnswarts 6y ago
That sounds like a personal issue though. I generally know if I'm doing a good job or being a load, and I don't look to external support or denial of that. I prefer regular work reviews but I don't need to hear it all the time. People are people and quite varied, some will think you're doing a great job and never say a thing, others prefer to be "positive" and lay it on a bit thick. When I want an honest evaluation I just ask to please point out both the good and bad from my manager/peer.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  >I generally know if I'm doing a good job Could you elaborate? I would agree that random praise from a manager is not an especially good way to evaluate how well one is doing. But to me, "doing a good job" inherently depends on things that aren't purely determined by introspection. Here's a scenario for example: I do things for people, that are well received, my manager talks to other people, and it leads to people outside my department asking for special projects. I create something, of which I'm reasonably proud, and it gets copious praise from the requestor. But it turns out, I learn through the grapevine, there are several people who I never came in contact with, who are the actual intended end users, who ultimately refuse to use it at all, because it doesn't fit into their workflow, because the manager who asked me to do it doesn't understand it. Without external feedback, there's no way to tell what effect I'm having on the organization and the world. And I would think that every employee at any level has to deal with this.

ryanSrich 6y ago

Project and Product managers have to give this praise because they contribute much less to the project, but take the majority of the credit. Designers and Engineers do the actual work. This is the sad reality of most tech companies with more than 20 employees. Not having PMs and PdMs is a massive benefit of smaller orgs. Do everything you can to avoid hiring these people.

sneak 6y ago

If everything is super duper great, then nothing is.

topkai22 6y ago

From the perspective of someone who leads an engineering team- I’m genuinely happy and proud of my team when things are going well. I’m not blowing smoke when I say something like that- it’s all true. Now I will call out a bad sprint, and I’ll praise even more after a great sprint, but it seems to be me that just making our deadlines week after week is something to be genuinely happy for.

chadcmulligan 6y ago

I like my feedback in cash, if you like my work give me more money, I seem to be in the minority though.

blastro 6y ago

those examples you gave turn my stomach - because i find them so manipulative. they focus only on your productive output as an employee and completely ignore the inherent value you have as an intelligent being. i find it fascinating that the same "positivity" turned in another, more humane direction (ie. "you guys showed up today, that's fantastic!!", or "we failed but who cares, we rock anyways") can transform into something that i think actually serves a purpose - forging a robust spirit. i actually appreciate that attitude in my peers. it's funny how razor thin the difference between what we are each describing. it's the same thing - unflappable, stupid belief - but applied for different ends. thanks for the thought prompt!!!!

muzani 6y ago

Funny enough, it was playing Football Manager that taught me this lesson that too much praise is counterproductive and can actually harm morale.