6 ms·

You Won't Regret Positive Feedback

52 points by DanielRibeiro 14y ago

krmmalik 14y ago
I'm a big believer in the advice featured in the blog post. I think criticism is the single most important thing that needs to be addressed in order to solve dysfunctions in a team, and i recognise that addressing this can really change the management fortunes of a business. But what really puzzles me is how Steve Jobs get away with it. He built one of the best management teams in the world, had great employee retention and yet clearly used short-sight tactics for motivation. I just don't get how he pulled it off in spite of his bad behaviour.
- mmsimanga 14y ago
  For what its worth my previous boss seemed to share the same characteristics as Steve Jobs. At times I didn't like him much but he had two redeeming qualities. He was hard on everyone including the server guys who were giving me the run around. Secondly he worked bloody hard! If I asked him to review something, he really would review it. He replied all my emails in detail. When I told him what I needed he would apply his energies to getting what I needed, then it would be my turn to deliver. Now that I don't work for my former boss I do miss his ability to get things done. I guess the moral of the story is people can get away with Jobs' like attitudes as long as they deliver themselves. Being shitty without the hard work will lead to failure and very unhappy environments. Is it worth it I don't know.
  - krmmalik 14y ago
    Very interesting. I hadn't considered that possibility before. Most of the managers i come across excel in their ability to direct blame to others and criticise yet can never deliver on their own promises or lead by example in getting things done. I can see how, being a real doer would redeem them greatly. It's starting to make sense now. This was a complete eye opener. Thanks!
jarjoura 14y ago
It's true that SJ built a high pressure work environment, but I bet if you asked any Apple engineer, they would all admit they produced some of their life's best work under that culture. It may seem draining and offensive after the fact, but in the moment being pushed to your max, you really can change the world. No one is against more positive work places, but not everyone can handle hostile ones, so there is an allure to that in itself.
- aspir 14y ago
  The belief that someone will produce their "best work" in a stress-filled deadline of _one project_ is shortsighted. If by "best work" you mean "maximum extraction in a short time frame," you're probably correct. But the belief that someone can truly produce a magnum opus in the truest since within one project, especially a project that driven by a negative taskmaster, is completely ludicrous. Its a myth perpetrated by the taskmasters of this industry. These projects may culminate to their magnum opus, but it's not yours.
  - zeteo 14y ago
    > the belief that someone can truly produce a magnum opus [...] within [...] a project that driven by a negative taskmaster, is completely ludicrous There's a difference between a stressful and an honest environment. If you read some of the classics of engineering literature ("Skunk Works", "Dealers of Lightning" etc.), some of the greatest engineering projects ever created were built with managers who were not afraid to tell people they sucked and could do better. I think, in general, to produce a magnum opus most of us do need an external, unbiased mirror of our performance. It's easy to err on the negative side and discourage people; but erring on the positive side (which is far more common these days) is also a betrayal of that person's true potential.
- randall 14y ago
  I worked in an environment like this once. I'll never do it again. Did it make me a better person? Maybe. Hard to say. I know I made some really long lasting friendships there, but I'm not sure it was net positive, especially for the long-term.
reissbaker 14y ago
This is an interesting problem. I was a dual English/CompSci major in undergrad, and while CompSci didn't have the notion of critiques, my creative writing classes were almost entirely critique-based. Back then, critiques were almost entirely pleasant and useful. When critiquing product — or even doing code reviews — now, though, it often feels more confrontational. I wonder how my English professors did it: they fostered an environment where even though you may have slaved away for nights on your short story, it was alright when someone pointed out the flaws. Because critique is really important for creating good products, whether those products are apps or websites or code or short fiction. I don't regret ever giving positive feedback, but I still do sometimes regret flaws in launched products. Could an early critique have made things go another way? I think at least part of why critiques worked so well in my creative writing classes was the strong notion of authorship, and ownership — that you could give your critique, but if the author disagreed, they were the author and in control of the voice. In professional writing it can be different — your editor can certainly force changes, with more or less control depending on the industry — but even there, a lot of control is left to the writer: the editor might say a section needs work, but even if they suggest changes they'll generally allow writers control over phrasing. Part of the problem might also be power dynamics: critiques in a professional environment can come across as self-serving, or gunning for a promotion, or as being enforced from the top. Is there a way to separate the critique from the critic? I don't know how to recreate my old English classrooms yet but I want to. Positive feedback is important to create a healthy work environment, but if you can't highlight problems then how will anyone consider fixing them?
- gingerlime 14y ago
  That's very interesting. The difference I see between writing/writers and programming/programmers is that, and please correct me if I'm wrong, writers tend to work alone whereas programmers build code as a team. So if I'm reviewing a pull request, it's code that's going to enter the shared codebase, and touching code of others on the team. It's not the same as reviewing someone's independent work, completely separate from my own. I do wonder however about creative writing environments, where more than one person is involved. One example I can think of (but have very limited knowledge about) is comedy scriptwriting. I've heard it's usually a team of writers that works on a sitcom. I wonder how they work together constructively, and if there are lessons to be learned from those kinds of environments. Or perhaps the same problems exist there as there are in technology, where egos and timelines are involved...
michaelochurch 14y ago
The Steve Jobs effect is often taken to justify being an asshole. No. It's the other way around, in fact. Yes, Jobs was an asshole in many ways. By being such, he kept bikeshedding executives and bullshitters in line. That is the Steve Jobs Effect, right there. If you have a sniper on the bridge to shoot young wolves before they become a problem, you'll have a much more effective company than if you let the young wolf conflicts happen. It's not that executive assholes are good per se; it's that they're better than young wolves. Most large companies hire a pretty-faced do-nothing to be the CEO and leave the nastiness to the lieutenants at lower levels. The CEO gets to be everyone's friend. It's the VPs who play nasty games and carve out political fiefs (because, if they don't, they won't get groomed to be future CEOs, there or elsewhere). That makes the organization a lot more ineffective because they all fight each other as they assert their own career agendas. One of the Tories during the American Revolution wrote that he'd rather have 1 tyrant 3,000 miles away than 3,000 tyrants one mile away. I think there's something there. Apple was an effective company because it had one asshole far away from the people getting the work done, and he routinely made it so unpleasant to be higher-up that only genuine people would even vie for it. This kept the engineers and designers safe from the middle management and junior executives who'd otherwise make their lives a living hell. Look at Google. I know I pick on them a lot, but with a Steve Jobs that company would never have ended up with calibration scores. To lead any large group of people you have to be enough of an asshole to understand how assholes think. Google's founders are not assholes, and that's why they weren't able, when calibration scores were first proposed, to shoot that idea from a bridge. Ok, so am I pro-asshole? No, I'm not. Here's one thing to keep in mind. Steve Jobs's are very rare. Assholes are not. For every person with that kind of talent, there are 999 who think they do. Also, I don't think Steve Jobs was that much of an asshole. He had his demons, sure. On the other hand, he seemed to have a genuine interest in protecting engineers and designers from executives and managers. If you were an engineer, he was kind to you. It was only the VPs and above to whom he was known for being a jerk. I think something more like Valve (open allocation, constitutional anti-asshole employee autonomy provisions) is generally better than Apple (dictatorial control) for most people (but not all). If you want world domination like Apple, then maybe you need an asshole or two. If you just want to build a good company, I think that assholes almost always take away more than they bring. Steve Jobs really is a 4-sigma outlier. That's something that the "tech" industry is getting quite wrong right now. Most of these startups think there's something positive about hiring a few assholes while failing to realize that one can break a whole company. Also, Fake Steve Jobs's tend to be freakishly common in VC-funded startups where there isn't enough hierarchy for the Steve Jobs Effect to even make sense. In a 10,000 person company, it's better for the 1 person at the top to scare the next 99 enough that the leave the 9900 at the bottom alone so they can make the company great. In a 75-person company, assholes are just outright corrosive.
jamesaguilar 14y ago
On the one-hand, yeah, positive feedback feels good and all. On the other hand, as Gordon Ramsay says, "My team doesn't care about the positives. They listen for the negatives." Maybe the difference is in the sense of ownership the team feels over the final result. If the look, feel, and strategy has come down from on high, listening for the negatives is of limited utility, since you can't change anything anyway. But if everything is going forward on your say-so, the negatives are a powerful tool that you should seek out at any opportunity.
columbo 14y ago
> It seemed to work for Apple. One of the greatest features of our universe is that the rules break down as you reach the extreme ends of any standard distribution. The most survivable weeds in my backyard are clovers and dandelions. However, there is a huge vine growing in the corner of my fence, the thing is like an oak tree. No other vines have grown up anywhere else, and even my attempts to encourage vines to grow along the side of my porch has failed. If I were to focus on the impressive vine and ignore the clovers and dandelions I'd jump to the conclusion that vines are the most successful weeds in my backyard. While in reality I have no idea why the vine grew, but if I take it out of the equation I can better focus on what is making the clovers and dandelions grow. Steve Jobs, Apple, Bill Gates, Microsoft, The Beetles, Rolling Stones and countless other extremes do not make good case studies for how to do things simply because their extreme success cannot be compared to anything else. They are all like the vine in my backyard; a special case with an unknown history. The best thing to do isn't to look at the most successful companies or people, in fact, you would be better served taking the top 10% out of the equation and instead focus on what made the top 75-90% successful.
triplesec 14y ago
Don't be a shithead. Good advice to remember at any time. Smart people often mistake showing their smarts with being a shithead. The very smartest ones grow out of it.

52 points by DanielRibeiro 14y ago

I'm a big believer in the advice featured in the blog post. I think criticism is the single most important thing that needs to be addressed in order to solve dysfunctions in a team, and i recognise that addressing this can really change the management fortunes of a business. But what really puzzles me is how Steve Jobs get away with it. He built one of the best management teams in the world, had great employee retention and yet clearly used short-sight tactics for motivation. I just don't get how he pulled it off in spite of his bad behaviour.

mmsimanga 14y ago
For what its worth my previous boss seemed to share the same characteristics as Steve Jobs. At times I didn't like him much but he had two redeeming qualities. He was hard on everyone including the server guys who were giving me the run around. Secondly he worked bloody hard! If I asked him to review something, he really would review it. He replied all my emails in detail. When I told him what I needed he would apply his energies to getting what I needed, then it would be my turn to deliver. Now that I don't work for my former boss I do miss his ability to get things done. I guess the moral of the story is people can get away with Jobs' like attitudes as long as they deliver themselves. Being shitty without the hard work will lead to failure and very unhappy environments. Is it worth it I don't know.
- krmmalik 14y ago
  Very interesting. I hadn't considered that possibility before. Most of the managers i come across excel in their ability to direct blame to others and criticise yet can never deliver on their own promises or lead by example in getting things done. I can see how, being a real doer would redeem them greatly. It's starting to make sense now. This was a complete eye opener. Thanks!

jarjoura 14y ago

It's true that SJ built a high pressure work environment, but I bet if you asked any Apple engineer, they would all admit they produced some of their life's best work under that culture. It may seem draining and offensive after the fact, but in the moment being pushed to your max, you really can change the world. No one is against more positive work places, but not everyone can handle hostile ones, so there is an allure to that in itself.

aspir 14y ago
The belief that someone will produce their "best work" in a stress-filled deadline of _one project_ is shortsighted. If by "best work" you mean "maximum extraction in a short time frame," you're probably correct. But the belief that someone can truly produce a magnum opus in the truest since within one project, especially a project that driven by a negative taskmaster, is completely ludicrous. Its a myth perpetrated by the taskmasters of this industry. These projects may culminate to their magnum opus, but it's not yours.
- zeteo 14y ago
  > the belief that someone can truly produce a magnum opus [...] within [...] a project that driven by a negative taskmaster, is completely ludicrous There's a difference between a stressful and an honest environment. If you read some of the classics of engineering literature ("Skunk Works", "Dealers of Lightning" etc.), some of the greatest engineering projects ever created were built with managers who were not afraid to tell people they sucked and could do better. I think, in general, to produce a magnum opus most of us do need an external, unbiased mirror of our performance. It's easy to err on the negative side and discourage people; but erring on the positive side (which is far more common these days) is also a betrayal of that person's true potential.
randall 14y ago
I worked in an environment like this once. I'll never do it again. Did it make me a better person? Maybe. Hard to say. I know I made some really long lasting friendships there, but I'm not sure it was net positive, especially for the long-term.

reissbaker 14y ago

This is an interesting problem. I was a dual English/CompSci major in undergrad, and while CompSci didn't have the notion of critiques, my creative writing classes were almost entirely critique-based. Back then, critiques were almost entirely pleasant and useful. When critiquing product — or even doing code reviews — now, though, it often feels more confrontational. I wonder how my English professors did it: they fostered an environment where even though you may have slaved away for nights on your short story, it was alright when someone pointed out the flaws. Because critique is really important for creating good products, whether those products are apps or websites or code or short fiction. I don't regret ever giving positive feedback, but I still do sometimes regret flaws in launched products. Could an early critique have made things go another way? I think at least part of why critiques worked so well in my creative writing classes was the strong notion of authorship, and ownership — that you could give your critique, but if the author disagreed, they were the author and in control of the voice. In professional writing it can be different — your editor can certainly force changes, with more or less control depending on the industry — but even there, a lot of control is left to the writer: the editor might say a section needs work, but even if they suggest changes they'll generally allow writers control over phrasing. Part of the problem might also be power dynamics: critiques in a professional environment can come across as self-serving, or gunning for a promotion, or as being enforced from the top. Is there a way to separate the critique from the critic? I don't know how to recreate my old English classrooms yet but I want to. Positive feedback is important to create a healthy work environment, but if you can't highlight problems then how will anyone consider fixing them?

gingerlime 14y ago
That's very interesting. The difference I see between writing/writers and programming/programmers is that, and please correct me if I'm wrong, writers tend to work alone whereas programmers build code as a team. So if I'm reviewing a pull request, it's code that's going to enter the shared codebase, and touching code of others on the team. It's not the same as reviewing someone's independent work, completely separate from my own. I do wonder however about creative writing environments, where more than one person is involved. One example I can think of (but have very limited knowledge about) is comedy scriptwriting. I've heard it's usually a team of writers that works on a sitcom. I wonder how they work together constructively, and if there are lessons to be learned from those kinds of environments. Or perhaps the same problems exist there as there are in technology, where egos and timelines are involved...

michaelochurch 14y ago

The Steve Jobs effect is often taken to justify being an asshole. No. It's the other way around, in fact. Yes, Jobs was an asshole in many ways. By being such, he kept bikeshedding executives and bullshitters in line. That is the Steve Jobs Effect, right there. If you have a sniper on the bridge to shoot young wolves before they become a problem, you'll have a much more effective company than if you let the young wolf conflicts happen. It's not that executive assholes are good per se; it's that they're better than young wolves. Most large companies hire a pretty-faced do-nothing to be the CEO and leave the nastiness to the lieutenants at lower levels. The CEO gets to be everyone's friend. It's the VPs who play nasty games and carve out political fiefs (because, if they don't, they won't get groomed to be future CEOs, there or elsewhere). That makes the organization a lot more ineffective because they all fight each other as they assert their own career agendas. One of the Tories during the American Revolution wrote that he'd rather have 1 tyrant 3,000 miles away than 3,000 tyrants one mile away. I think there's something there. Apple was an effective company because it had one asshole far away from the people getting the work done, and he routinely made it so unpleasant to be higher-up that only genuine people would even vie for it. This kept the engineers and designers safe from the middle management and junior executives who'd otherwise make their lives a living hell. Look at Google. I know I pick on them a lot, but with a Steve Jobs that company would never have ended up with calibration scores. To lead any large group of people you have to be enough of an asshole to understand how assholes think. Google's founders are not assholes, and that's why they weren't able, when calibration scores were first proposed, to shoot that idea from a bridge. Ok, so am I pro-asshole? No, I'm not. Here's one thing to keep in mind. Steve Jobs's are very rare. Assholes are not. For every person with that kind of talent, there are 999 who think they do. Also, I don't think Steve Jobs was that much of an asshole. He had his demons, sure. On the other hand, he seemed to have a genuine interest in protecting engineers and designers from executives and managers. If you were an engineer, he was kind to you. It was only the VPs and above to whom he was known for being a jerk. I think something more like Valve (open allocation, constitutional anti-asshole employee autonomy provisions) is generally better than Apple (dictatorial control) for most people (but not all). If you want world domination like Apple, then maybe you need an asshole or two. If you just want to build a good company, I think that assholes almost always take away more than they bring. Steve Jobs really is a 4-sigma outlier. That's something that the "tech" industry is getting quite wrong right now. Most of these startups think there's something positive about hiring a few assholes while failing to realize that one can break a whole company. Also, Fake Steve Jobs's tend to be freakishly common in VC-funded startups where there isn't enough hierarchy for the Steve Jobs Effect to even make sense. In a 10,000 person company, it's better for the 1 person at the top to scare the next 99 enough that the leave the 9900 at the bottom alone so they can make the company great. In a 75-person company, assholes are just outright corrosive.

jamesaguilar 14y ago

On the one-hand, yeah, positive feedback feels good and all. On the other hand, as Gordon Ramsay says, "My team doesn't care about the positives. They listen for the negatives." Maybe the difference is in the sense of ownership the team feels over the final result. If the look, feel, and strategy has come down from on high, listening for the negatives is of limited utility, since you can't change anything anyway. But if everything is going forward on your say-so, the negatives are a powerful tool that you should seek out at any opportunity.

columbo 14y ago

> It seemed to work for Apple. One of the greatest features of our universe is that the rules break down as you reach the extreme ends of any standard distribution. The most survivable weeds in my backyard are clovers and dandelions. However, there is a huge vine growing in the corner of my fence, the thing is like an oak tree. No other vines have grown up anywhere else, and even my attempts to encourage vines to grow along the side of my porch has failed. If I were to focus on the impressive vine and ignore the clovers and dandelions I'd jump to the conclusion that vines are the most successful weeds in my backyard. While in reality I have no idea why the vine grew, but if I take it out of the equation I can better focus on what is making the clovers and dandelions grow. Steve Jobs, Apple, Bill Gates, Microsoft, The Beetles, Rolling Stones and countless other extremes do not make good case studies for how to do things simply because their extreme success cannot be compared to anything else. They are all like the vine in my backyard; a special case with an unknown history. The best thing to do isn't to look at the most successful companies or people, in fact, you would be better served taking the top 10% out of the equation and instead focus on what made the top 75-90% successful.

triplesec 14y ago

Don't be a shithead. Good advice to remember at any time. Smart people often mistake showing their smarts with being a shithead. The very smartest ones grow out of it.