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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 mu

by 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.
username90 6y ago
There is just as much signal in constant praise as there is in no praise, ie none. The only difference is that in the constant praise scenario you are expected to be happy and thank your manager for the "praise".

by Jochim 6y ago

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.

username90 6y ago

There is just as much signal in constant praise as there is in no praise, ie none. The only difference is that in the constant praise scenario you are expected to be happy and thank your manager for the "praise".