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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 an

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.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    What are good things to say, if one is to give feedback but cannot think of anything to praise? But indeed can think of things the other person could do better / improve upon. (However, maybe only "criticizing" isn't so nice)
- didibus 6y ago
  You should write a book for managers, and every page should just be this comment repeated for 200 pages.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  FWIW I strongly agree with this comment. I have painful experience from not doing each of these things at various times.
- palimpsests 6y ago
  Completely agree that HOW matters so much! To me and probably many others (albeit often subconsciously), point 3 comes across as blaming, overly-generalized, and lacking in personal (and group) accountability for your experiences. What about something like, "Hey John, the last time you did X, Y happened, which had Z consequences. I felt { disappointed / let down / concerned / irritated / worried / angry / $whatever_emotions_came_up_for_YOU }. Other team members reported feeling $emotions. What was going on there for you? How can I / we help you to avoid X in the future? Do you have any ideas about what you could focus or work on in order for Y not to happen again? Here are some specific requests I have for you in order to avoid this kind of thing in the future: $requests " The edgy part about this for many people is taking ownership for their experience, we live in a society with a lot of deconditioning around this . Nobody else but you is responsible for how you feel. John didn't let you down, you had expectations about what he was going to do, and to your assessment, he didn't meet those expectations (that's also a reasonable thing to say, I think -- I would give more detail and context about specifically how those expectations weren't met). That you felt one way or another about this has nothing to do with John, and there's a lot of subtle and overt problems that can arise in a relationship when we attribute our experience to another person with our language. I also mention that it sounds overly-generalized because saying "when you do X" has an implicit assumption that he will continue doing X in the future, and isn't really all that specific about why X has certain consequences - I think it's better to use specific situations in the past when X happened and to talk about what came up when that occurred. This is basically what I'm hearing you say in Point 2 :) edit: fixed variables, wording
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    I used to see a therapist who told me to do that, and eventually I realized it was a bullshit idea and I should not be working on reframing my expectations of colleagues so I was OK with them actively lying about work, so I quit and it was fantastic. You can try and change yourself to make things work, but it's not always the right or even healthy way to approach a problem.
    - karpierz 6y ago
      The point isn't to lower your expectations, the point is acknowledge that the way you feel is under your control and it's up to you to do something about it. So if your coworkers let you down, they don't make you feel let down, your own expectations make you feel let down. How you fix that is your responsibility. You can try and help your colleagues, you can rely on them less, or you can quit your job. Blaming your colleagues and making them responsible for your feelings means feeling shitty and feeling powerless to feel better.
- tomnipotent 6y ago
  > Cite the past but look for future changes in behaviour. I've heard this referred to as "feedforward" before (as opposed to feedback). Instead of saying "last time you did X, you made a mistake and should instead do Y" you phrase it "next time you do X, make sure to do Y". It's subtle, with the goal of avoiding defensiveness.
throw14082020 6y ago
> "this team is killing it" for ahead of plan Why do you think telling your team this is useful? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/about-fathers/201202/why-its-bad-idea-praise-children https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/about-fathers/201202...
- andersource 6y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the linked article. There are a few important distinctions, most notably (from the article itself): > "We praise drawings ... because we want our kids to continue to work hard, and to do good work... But what we really want to teach our children... is that they should do good work because of the satisfactions it provides." While I understand how this could apply to children (if not necessarily agree), we don't manage teams to have fun, we do want to encourage them to do good work. As for the wider question, if a team is doing really good work, why not give credit where it's due? I feel like not acknowledging when people are putting in extra effort is a great way to discourage them from doing that.
  - throw14082020 6y ago
    I think the case with children is the same as with adults. We don't raise children "to have fun". Some would say we raise children to have a meaningful life for the parent, and I would hope for the children as well, i.e. "to do good work" as you say. Like others have said, effect of praise would be very specific to individuals, but some have said praise hasn't helped them much. It definitely has not helped me, so here is my reasoning as to why you should not praise a good team. For me, stop the praise, tell me how to be better, and show me you care about me improving, and care about me on a personal level. Yes, I know that when I work hard and give you good output, it helps company, I don't need people to tell me that I worked hard. I can see it (If your company prevents your employees from seeing the effect of their output, thats the problem, don't say praise is necessary. The boss should not try to be the feedback loop). The reverse pavlovian effect can kick in otherwise: If it doesn't come when I am working hard, I feel bad. Also, the boss does not control reality, so becoming my feedback loops is bad, because he can warp reality based on his perspective. It looks like this is highly specific to individuals though, the above works for me.
CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
> So "we need to work harder" for behind plan That will just get me angry. If you screw up your commitments that’s on you. Own up to it and talk to your stakeholders. Don’t make me work harder for your mistakes.
- ptr 6y ago
  So you can never make mistakes in your commitments?
  - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
    I do. Sometimes I work harder to compensate, some times I apologize. But then it’s my mistake so I can negotiate with myself. Sometimes working harder is warranted. Some salesperson screwed up, and it’s not really possible to reneg the multi million dollar contract. “I’m sorry guys, what can we do?”
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      FWIW, as the manager I don't feel I own the commitment date, the team does. That process has a 'content' aspect to it as well in the form, "by this date, this content, by this later date this additional content". But I understand the angst against managers who "manage up" promising impossible dates and "blaming down" when the dates aren't met. I learned early on as an individual contributor that "getting it in writing" was essential to protect myself and personally vowed never to inflict that pain on anyone that works for me.
      - tikhonj 6y ago
        I think this works, but only in cases where two things are true: - the team is actually responsible for the date—often, there's massive asymmetric pressure to aim for less time - if it's an actual deadline, the team has the autonomy to adjust scope to hit it In my experience, the worst situations happen when estimates are treated like deadlines. An estimate has to have uncertainty. Without some way to manage uncertainty, you'd have to pad estimates out to like the 99th percentile to hit them consistently, but people read estimates as averages and push back against that. If teams are consistently going over estimates, it's a problem in how you do estimates, not how you're working. (Which is also why evaluating people's performance based on how well they hit estimates—which seems common on a lot of teams—is completely misguided. Estimating is a nice skill to have, but it matters far, far less than the quality of the work people actually do!) On the other hand, a deadline is only a deadline if you're willing to adjust scope to hit it. If there is a real deadline and it looks like we might not hit it, the answer isn't "try to be more productive" (which is all that "work harder" actually means!). Instead, we should figure out how we can change what we're focusing on and what we're concretely building in order to still hit the underlying goal as well as possible with the time remaining. If we're working towards an estimate rather than a deadline, we might still adjust scope and focus, but the first step would be adjusting and sharing a new estimate. But if the culture is that estimates are hard commitments and you can't adjust the scope or the timeline, the work environment is going to be absolutely miserable, people will get stressed out for no real reason and the quality of the work is going to suffer. People will do whatever it takes to technically achieve estimates, even if that means cutting corners everywhere, sweeping bugs under the carpet, not spending any time to iterate or improve on the system and indefinitely putting off engineering work that has a small cost now but gives a massive medium- to long-term benefit in productivity. A month or two into this process and you move towards a death march that burns everyone out and, on the time scale of months, accomplishes substantially less than a less aggressive approach would have. I'm currently working with a team that has this problem to some extent—of course, the managers think of it as "accountability" and "a focus on delivery"—and in a bit over a year, they've built a codebase that already feels like a legacy mess, while accomplishing what would have been like eight months' worth of work with a better engineering approach. It's pretty frustrating to see and I'm trying to change things, but not sure whether I'm going about it effectively.
danielscrubs 6y ago
“We need to work harder” is not the kind of manager I like. The best ones just set a great example and work harder and put in overtime themselves and the rest of the team are usually are sympathetic enough to follow.
- temp8964 6y ago
  Overtime shouldn't be the solution. Team member shouldn't be put into overtime by social pressure.
- darkerside 6y ago
  Pretty sure the best answer is to do both. You need to ask your teammates to help if it's really important.
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  Overtime is a sign that the team is badly managed and/or understaffed.
  - danielscrubs 6y ago
    Indeed, but that’s already the case if the manager goes around and says that we should work harder.
grayfaced 6y ago
Yea, different personalities have different motivations. I find that if I receive positive feedback, it doesn't motivate me it only encourages me to take it easier. If I receive negative feedback, I will double down to fix the issue, but my morale will suffer. What's most important is that the feedback is IMMEDIATE. Tell me after a presentation what I flubbed. Don't tell me after a quarter that my presentation skills are lacking.
tren 6y ago
Along these lines, it's worth reading The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It gives some interesting insight into how different cultures approach management and decision making. I think it also applies when thinking about people from within the same culture to some extent.

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.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  What are good things to say, if one is to give feedback but cannot think of anything to praise? But indeed can think of things the other person could do better / improve upon. (However, maybe only "criticizing" isn't so nice)
didibus 6y ago
You should write a book for managers, and every page should just be this comment repeated for 200 pages.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
FWIW I strongly agree with this comment. I have painful experience from not doing each of these things at various times.
palimpsests 6y ago
Completely agree that HOW matters so much! To me and probably many others (albeit often subconsciously), point 3 comes across as blaming, overly-generalized, and lacking in personal (and group) accountability for your experiences. What about something like, "Hey John, the last time you did X, Y happened, which had Z consequences. I felt { disappointed / let down / concerned / irritated / worried / angry / $whatever_emotions_came_up_for_YOU }. Other team members reported feeling $emotions. What was going on there for you? How can I / we help you to avoid X in the future? Do you have any ideas about what you could focus or work on in order for Y not to happen again? Here are some specific requests I have for you in order to avoid this kind of thing in the future: $requests " The edgy part about this for many people is taking ownership for their experience, we live in a society with a lot of deconditioning around this . Nobody else but you is responsible for how you feel. John didn't let you down, you had expectations about what he was going to do, and to your assessment, he didn't meet those expectations (that's also a reasonable thing to say, I think -- I would give more detail and context about specifically how those expectations weren't met). That you felt one way or another about this has nothing to do with John, and there's a lot of subtle and overt problems that can arise in a relationship when we attribute our experience to another person with our language. I also mention that it sounds overly-generalized because saying "when you do X" has an implicit assumption that he will continue doing X in the future, and isn't really all that specific about why X has certain consequences - I think it's better to use specific situations in the past when X happened and to talk about what came up when that occurred. This is basically what I'm hearing you say in Point 2 :) edit: fixed variables, wording
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  I used to see a therapist who told me to do that, and eventually I realized it was a bullshit idea and I should not be working on reframing my expectations of colleagues so I was OK with them actively lying about work, so I quit and it was fantastic. You can try and change yourself to make things work, but it's not always the right or even healthy way to approach a problem.
  - karpierz 6y ago
    The point isn't to lower your expectations, the point is acknowledge that the way you feel is under your control and it's up to you to do something about it. So if your coworkers let you down, they don't make you feel let down, your own expectations make you feel let down. How you fix that is your responsibility. You can try and help your colleagues, you can rely on them less, or you can quit your job. Blaming your colleagues and making them responsible for your feelings means feeling shitty and feeling powerless to feel better.
tomnipotent 6y ago
> Cite the past but look for future changes in behaviour. I've heard this referred to as "feedforward" before (as opposed to feedback). Instead of saying "last time you did X, you made a mistake and should instead do Y" you phrase it "next time you do X, make sure to do Y". It's subtle, with the goal of avoiding defensiveness.

throw14082020 6y ago

> "this team is killing it" for ahead of plan Why do you think telling your team this is useful? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/about-fathers/201202/why-its-bad-idea-praise-children https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/about-fathers/201202...

andersource 6y ago
I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the linked article. There are a few important distinctions, most notably (from the article itself): > "We praise drawings ... because we want our kids to continue to work hard, and to do good work... But what we really want to teach our children... is that they should do good work because of the satisfactions it provides." While I understand how this could apply to children (if not necessarily agree), we don't manage teams to have fun, we do want to encourage them to do good work. As for the wider question, if a team is doing really good work, why not give credit where it's due? I feel like not acknowledging when people are putting in extra effort is a great way to discourage them from doing that.
- throw14082020 6y ago
  I think the case with children is the same as with adults. We don't raise children "to have fun". Some would say we raise children to have a meaningful life for the parent, and I would hope for the children as well, i.e. "to do good work" as you say. Like others have said, effect of praise would be very specific to individuals, but some have said praise hasn't helped them much. It definitely has not helped me, so here is my reasoning as to why you should not praise a good team. For me, stop the praise, tell me how to be better, and show me you care about me improving, and care about me on a personal level. Yes, I know that when I work hard and give you good output, it helps company, I don't need people to tell me that I worked hard. I can see it (If your company prevents your employees from seeing the effect of their output, thats the problem, don't say praise is necessary. The boss should not try to be the feedback loop). The reverse pavlovian effect can kick in otherwise: If it doesn't come when I am working hard, I feel bad. Also, the boss does not control reality, so becoming my feedback loops is bad, because he can warp reality based on his perspective. It looks like this is highly specific to individuals though, the above works for me.

CuriousSkeptic 6y ago

> So "we need to work harder" for behind plan That will just get me angry. If you screw up your commitments that’s on you. Own up to it and talk to your stakeholders. Don’t make me work harder for your mistakes.

ptr 6y ago
So you can never make mistakes in your commitments?
- CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  I do. Sometimes I work harder to compensate, some times I apologize. But then it’s my mistake so I can negotiate with myself. Sometimes working harder is warranted. Some salesperson screwed up, and it’s not really possible to reneg the multi million dollar contract. “I’m sorry guys, what can we do?”
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    FWIW, as the manager I don't feel I own the commitment date, the team does. That process has a 'content' aspect to it as well in the form, "by this date, this content, by this later date this additional content". But I understand the angst against managers who "manage up" promising impossible dates and "blaming down" when the dates aren't met. I learned early on as an individual contributor that "getting it in writing" was essential to protect myself and personally vowed never to inflict that pain on anyone that works for me.
    - tikhonj 6y ago
      I think this works, but only in cases where two things are true: - the team is actually responsible for the date—often, there's massive asymmetric pressure to aim for less time - if it's an actual deadline, the team has the autonomy to adjust scope to hit it In my experience, the worst situations happen when estimates are treated like deadlines. An estimate has to have uncertainty. Without some way to manage uncertainty, you'd have to pad estimates out to like the 99th percentile to hit them consistently, but people read estimates as averages and push back against that. If teams are consistently going over estimates, it's a problem in how you do estimates, not how you're working. (Which is also why evaluating people's performance based on how well they hit estimates—which seems common on a lot of teams—is completely misguided. Estimating is a nice skill to have, but it matters far, far less than the quality of the work people actually do!) On the other hand, a deadline is only a deadline if you're willing to adjust scope to hit it. If there is a real deadline and it looks like we might not hit it, the answer isn't "try to be more productive" (which is all that "work harder" actually means!). Instead, we should figure out how we can change what we're focusing on and what we're concretely building in order to still hit the underlying goal as well as possible with the time remaining. If we're working towards an estimate rather than a deadline, we might still adjust scope and focus, but the first step would be adjusting and sharing a new estimate. But if the culture is that estimates are hard commitments and you can't adjust the scope or the timeline, the work environment is going to be absolutely miserable, people will get stressed out for no real reason and the quality of the work is going to suffer. People will do whatever it takes to technically achieve estimates, even if that means cutting corners everywhere, sweeping bugs under the carpet, not spending any time to iterate or improve on the system and indefinitely putting off engineering work that has a small cost now but gives a massive medium- to long-term benefit in productivity. A month or two into this process and you move towards a death march that burns everyone out and, on the time scale of months, accomplishes substantially less than a less aggressive approach would have. I'm currently working with a team that has this problem to some extent—of course, the managers think of it as "accountability" and "a focus on delivery"—and in a bit over a year, they've built a codebase that already feels like a legacy mess, while accomplishing what would have been like eight months' worth of work with a better engineering approach. It's pretty frustrating to see and I'm trying to change things, but not sure whether I'm going about it effectively.

danielscrubs 6y ago

“We need to work harder” is not the kind of manager I like. The best ones just set a great example and work harder and put in overtime themselves and the rest of the team are usually are sympathetic enough to follow.

temp8964 6y ago
Overtime shouldn't be the solution. Team member shouldn't be put into overtime by social pressure.
darkerside 6y ago
Pretty sure the best answer is to do both. You need to ask your teammates to help if it's really important.
mbrodersen 6y ago
Overtime is a sign that the team is badly managed and/or understaffed.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  Indeed, but that’s already the case if the manager goes around and says that we should work harder.

grayfaced 6y ago

Yea, different personalities have different motivations. I find that if I receive positive feedback, it doesn't motivate me it only encourages me to take it easier. If I receive negative feedback, I will double down to fix the issue, but my morale will suffer. What's most important is that the feedback is IMMEDIATE. Tell me after a presentation what I flubbed. Don't tell me after a quarter that my presentation skills are lacking.

tren 6y ago

Along these lines, it's worth reading The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It gives some interesting insight into how different cultures approach management and decision making. I think it also applies when thinking about people from within the same culture to some extent.