> “encouraging harsh feedback” and subjecting workers to “intense and awkward” real-time 360s
... I can't help but think how much a review there sounds like a capitalist version of a Maoist "struggle session" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session).
The point of a struggle session wasn't to build people up; it was to tear them down. A culture where the way you move up is by tearing your colleagues down is generally a dysfunctional culture. Everybody involved ends up losing sight of things outside their four walls (such as, you know, what customers want), because they're spending all their time squaring off against each other internally.
I would suggest a healthier, more sustainable culture could be imagined by contemplating these words from the Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation, chapter 27: http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=27&a=Stephen+Mitchell):
What is a good man but a bad man's teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man's job?
It is always "brutaly honest when it comes to put people down, but weirdly enough, these same person never have positive feedback to give.
Even if it was the case, it would not be worth it. Even as a foreigner weirded out by the "everything is awesome" way of speaking in California, tearing down your colleagues is not how you build a healthy team.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I think the point is to aim for apolitical and tactless information transfer. The only chance it'd have of working is if there's a shared understanding that correcting mistakes is more valuable than political standing; and this applies to everyone, especially the bosses.
The saner way to try and get these benefits is to foster psychological safety.
Tangentially, struggle sessions only arose to prominence during the Cultural Revolution. The main criticism of class enemies were the Speak Bitterness sessions of the 1940s, where communist cadre would facilitate a village's peasants criticism of its landlords. Despite the notion that communist cadre were instigating violence, most of Mao's letters were to cadre who were taken aback by peasant's (sometimes fatal) violence toward long hated landlords, Japanese collaborators etc.
For example, whenever I had to do my yearly review and write in my opinions about what I did good/bad/could have done differently which afterwards were discussed with my manager and then shared among leadership, I couldn't help but think of a milder version of https://translate.google.ro/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=https://...
https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/11-11Com...
The "Communication" slide (p.11) even _starts_ with the skill of listening rather than talking well.
We're living an open, candid, two sided feedback culture in our company and it's by far the best thing that has ever happened to my personal development. The impact on my own perception and management style has been tremendous. Maybe I'm biased by being a founder, but on our most recent anonymous employee survey, structured feedback got an average 8/10 on satisfaction.
I take that just like the original ideas of Scrum or Agile, transparent Feedback culture has apparently been bastardized enough by toxic companies living the letter but not the spirit that it's apparently starting to get into a negative perception... that's a pity but won't stop us from giving and getting transparent feedback regularly.
Side note, but this strikes me as extremely wrong, based on 35 years of living among humans. Humans have unsurpassed abilities of self-deception, cognitive dissonance tolerance, and building monumental mental models to hide the truth about themselves from themselves.
As one economist put it, your 'self' isn't the CEO, it's the PR department. You produce a PR-approved spin of your own experiences and feelings for your internal, conscious consumption.
I am the sole source for what I'm feeling. Whether I admit that or not is another story, but if I think I feel sad, then I feel sad.
Now, whether that emotion is justified is another story and whether the related experience should induce sadness can be up for debate and if I'm interpreting the situation correctly and all of that.
But we can't argue that I'm not feeling sad. I would probably have said that "The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that of their own feelings and perspectives"
Our sensitivity to our own emotions doesn't seem to be that great. People talk about happiness sneaking up on you, or having a realization that they're unhappy in a relationship. Presumably the feelings were there, but they weren't conscious of it.
I suspect if I did have dials in my head that displayed the level of each emotion, I'd go insane trying to move the needles. There may be some logic to the arrangement.
Another concept is, when you have chronic pain, you may forget what it's like not to hurt. And then one day you don't and you suddenly have perspective.
What I'm saying, I guess, is that generally no other person can tell you your feelings or emotions though they may try. But that doesn't mean you are necessarily correct in what you think they are.
I don't understand this comment. How does averaging noisy signal, even systematically noisy signal, result in something that is noisier than any individual signal? I would have assumed the average would converge on (real signal + systematic error).
> When a feedback instrument surveys eight colleagues about your business acumen, your score of 3.79 is far greater a distortion than if it simply surveyed one person about you—the 3.79 number is all noise, no signal.
Which implies to me that they believe there is signal there, but that it goes away when aggregated?
Averaging the ratings of multiple people tells you nothing since it washes out the individual experiences. I.e. individual samples hold meaning about the samples themselves but aggregation of samples is just noise.
The other problem in our industry being relative inexperience of many people. When everyone in the team has had < 5yrs experience who is really qualified to objectively describe what a person is doing wrong? I know when I was a an inexperienced manager I gave "constructive feedback" that I now recognize was wrong.
The authors' biographies just below that caught my attention:
Ashley Goodall is the senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco Systems and a coauthor of Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World
Cisco Systems is the kind of giant multinational conglomerate that I would expect to be a (to put it euphemistically) corporate shithole. The kind of place where this kind of forward-thinking management gets lip-service but in the end, for the most part, it's the same kind of Gervais Principle Hunger Games hierarchy we've come to deride and deplore in these type of threads.
Is this not the case?
Steven D. Levitt noted that some of the companies selected as "great" have since gotten into serious trouble, such as Circuit City and Fannie Mae, while only Nucor had "dramatically outperformed the stock market" and "Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay". He further states that investing in the portfolio of the 11 companies covered by the book, in the year of 2001, would actually result in underperforming the S&P 500. Levitt concludes that books like this are "mostly backward-looking" and can't offer a guide for the future."
Certainly after some critical mass, you don't have to be as consistent to retain customers. We all know how first impressions matter at any job.
Is what good managers do.
Something to note is this premise is disputed by A LOT of experts in this domain. They've been challenged to a debate on this by Marc Effron (not my favorite guy but does generally have grounded thinking in his work) with proceeds benefiting charity but no uptake yet. They have also not shared their data in a way that enables replication or outside validation (or hadn't lest I checked). They is a pretty robust history of peer-reviewed research that doesn't come to the same conclusion.
I think they are on to something here but I think they are taking too far. For their "Source of Truth" section, most of what they say is true, particularly about rating and assessment of employees. Extending that to say suggestions on future behavior from others is also value-less is wrong. The former is problematic because it's treated as a source of objective truth that personnel decisions are made against, the latter is clearly a single subjective data point people can reflect on and potentially integrate into future behavior.
For "How We Learn" section, much of the words written are true but the conclusion goes beyond what I have seen data justify. Yes, we get better faster at the things we're already better at. Should that mean focusing on strengths is often a better coaching direction than weaknesses, yes. Does that mean we shouldn't do the latter or that it is value-less? No. It does mean we have to find ways to make weakness-oriented feedback happen in a repeatably non-threatening way.
On the "Excellence" section I'm again in agreement with most of it, but have fewer overall critiques. I should think more about this. I still say the conclusions are not natural endpoints for the points he makes.
Then, interestingly there is a table near the bottom. I find it interesting that many of those things you should "Try" rather than "Instead of" are indeed types of feedback and modern organizational development professionals espouse. Language really does matter, that's a great table with great suggestions, and most of those are feedback prompts.
All that said, I truly like Marcus Buckingham and find his work to typically be evidence-based (to the extent work like this can be) and on solid ground. Here is a brief video of him that is on a related topic that I think everyone should really take to heart if interested in this topic. https://www.marcusbuckingham.com/rwtb/performance-management...
The worst feeling is when I feel something is going poorly and no one will tell me they think that about my thing.
Not everyone interprets the scale the same way...
That's the exact point the author was making with this example. A doctor cannot normalize pain ratings across patients, and has to rely on each patient scoring their own pain relative to their own experiences. Your 2/10 could be 7/10 for someone else - all that matters is that you have a measurement stick to compare pain for yourself, so that medical staff know that your 3/10 is more than your 2/10.
The problem with noisy feedback is the instability of the closed-loop system, and it can quickly become erratic and ultimately counter-productive.
Thus, we should only use feedback when the signal is clear and loud, mostly at the extremes, when performance is outstanding or catastrophic.
This is something that I feel like many in engineering have to grow to appreciate (or at least I did, and I see some of the same markers in many of my peers that I had.) not just about feedback and interpersonal relationships, but about everything. There are likely many things that you have an intuitive feel for, but just as many you have to calmly, slowly, and carefully consider yourself, your actions, and their consequences, if you want to be more effective or be better.
In the past, I coached jr. high and highschool boys basketball. Some players got lots of leeway to make mistakes before getting subbed out during games, because they were capable of learning from those mistakes themselves, and coach feedback didn't help their learning process. Other players would make mistakes and immediately get subbed out, mistake pointed out, discussed, correct action proscribed, and shortly subbed back in. They needed the outside feedback to process "that was a mistake, I shouldn't do it again." Some players goofed off in practice and got to sit on the sidelines. Some players goofed off in practice and got to run laps. I had several discussions with parents about why their son got "special treatment" when really it was about me trying to give effective feedback. And I'm not saying I was awesome at this, or always adjusted my approach for every kid in every situation, but when I could, everyone's results were better.
A larger rant I have on this and any topic that circles back to effectiveness is how to respond to "What is the best thing to do in X situation?"
For example, today in a team meeting, my group was discussing way to improve performance in one of our systems. In the past, I've seen caching greatly improve performance over database optimizations, so I'm optimistic about a better caching paradigm, whereas one of my team members is looking at a longer-term code maintenance and simplicity perspective that says, do fewer things better, so optimize our database calls. Long slog to figure out which is better, but we can't just generalize from past experience. What should we do? Precisely what is needed. How do we know that? We'll have figure it out. We have some general guidelines, but we'll have to figure out how to apply them to this situation.
I have two kids. The older one would usually go to anyone when he was a baby and be happy, smile, coo, play, for 10 minutes or so before he would get worried about where mom or dad were. The younger one usually senses that mom or dad might be handing him off, and gets upset and takes 5 minutes before he calms down. But sometimes the older one would cry going from my wife to me, and sometimes the younger one will happily go with the church nursery lady. Why? I don't know. We'll figure it out.
Generalization is great, generalization is helpful, generalization is not right in every case. With people, if you really want to be effective in feedback or anything, you have to figure out how to have an approach that you are generally successful at, how to generally alter it when you need to, and then laser focus that flexibility for the people, relationships, and situations that you really care about.
