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.

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?".

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

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.

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.

> John didn't let you down, you had expectations about what he was going to do

This is where we disagree. John did let you down. It's OK to blame him. It's OK to be a normal person that reacts to other people's actions and not some kind of zen robot. And recognizing that someone else's behavior causes you to feel shitty doesn't make you powerless to change.

John did let you down, but he didn't make you feel let down. You can blame John for letting you down, but you can't blame John for you feeling let down.

You are responsible for your own emotions. Recognizing that doesn't make you a zen robot. You can still feel. But don't put those feelings on other people and make them responsible for making you feel the way you want to feel.

You can recognize patterns for your emotions, like "I get sad when people make fun of me", but that doesn't mean that you have to be sad when people make fun of you. Recognizing the distinction is what gives power to change.

And sure, there are limits. The feelings that arise when tortured for example are rooted in physiology and near unavoidable. But I suspect that John didn't let you down by waterboarding you.

Even Vulcans can't quite manage this level of emotional control. Complete personal responsibility for one's own emotions is a nice ideal, but humans are not stoic robots. People are responsible for their behavior and its effects.

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.

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)

> 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.

FWIW I strongly agree with this comment. I have painful experience from not doing each of these things at various times.

You should write a book for managers, and every page should just be this comment repeated for 200 pages.

> 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.

Reminds me of the story of the pilot who is being nagged repeatedly to expedite descent by ATC. "Don't you have speed brakes?" says the ATCO with exasperation. "Yes" comes the reply "But those are for my mistakes not yours."

So you can never make mistakes in your commitments?

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?”

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.

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.

I don't disagree with you, but as you accurately infer this is a management problem not a team problem. When folks start becoming managers of managers this becomes a bigger focus of their job.

I see the whole "agile" movement as a response to this problem. In an effort to mitigate the "error bars" of an estimate a process that iterates over 2 week sprints allows for estimate corrections during development. It isn't obvious to everyone but this is just upping the sample rate on the estimation signal to get a better handle on the noise and thus the signal to noise ratio.

This comment ended up as a bit of a rant, on a topic where you have way more experience than I do. Sorry about that! At this point, I'm just using this as a chance to gather my own thoughts on the subject, and I figure I'll post it just in case I get some interesting responses.

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Yeah, that's a great observation on Agile. Smaller but more accurate estimates + cheaper small course corrections.

The dual is that the rest of the organization needs to adapt too—good short-term estimates don't necessarily give you good long-term estimates! So we need loosely coupled, self-sufficient teams that don't depend on accurate estimates from other teams.

I've always hated formal Agile processes (especially Scrum) but I have to work with teams that use them, so I did a bunch of reading about it. The goals and even a lot of the concrete ideas behind it made a lot of sense! It's just that every single concrete instance of the process fell short. I've seen several concrete failure modes in practice:

1. Scrum-flavored micromanagement. People (not necessarily formal managers) use the process to dictate exactly what everyone else needs to work on at practically a daily granularity.

2. Siloing. People are incentivized to only work on "their" tasks—ad hoc collaboration with teammates, trying out speculative design ideas and experiments, figuring out better ways to do something, all get in the way of finishing your tickets, which makes you look flaky in inevitably awkward group meetings.

3. Loss of context. People see that the process helps the team switch priorities, so they switch focus every sprint. Couple this with micromanagement, and you get individuals moved around on wholly unrelated tasks. Too much context switching adds a lot of mental overhead and makes it much harder to build anything with a coherent design and vision (either from a product or from an engineering standpoint).

4. Performance mismeasurement. The whole process is supposed to help the team with estimates. Tracking metrics the process generates and treating them as a way to measure individual performance (whether formally, or just through peer pressure) doesn't work well and is awful for morale.

I haven't seen it, but I bet it is possible to have a Scrum process—or, more likely, something lighter like Kanban—that avoids these problems. But I believe that even idealized Agile processes put too much weight on consistency for its own sake. Making consistent incremental progress helps with estimates and, I suppose, makes the team somewhat easier to manage, but none of that matters nearly as much as, say, quality of work and impact!

Even if nothing from the Agile process makes it into formal performance evaluations, the ceremonies almost seem designed to create peer pressure around it. And that affects day-to-day job satisfaction a lot more than mere performance reviews. Although maybe this is another thing that goes away if you have high-trust teams that are legitimately self-organizing the way Agile is supposed to be... But I'm not sure even that would compensate for the pressure implicitly exerted by the structure of the process.

I bring this up because over-emphasizing consistency imposes a cost on people—individuals get a lot less flexibility in how they work, and end up feeling stress when they're less productive than normal. I tend to think an ideal environment should embrace inconsistency day-to-day and even week-to-week or month-to-month but that requires massive differences in culture. If a team pulls it off, the process starts mattering a lot less!

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.

> "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...

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.

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.

> Like others have said, effect of praise would be very specific to individuals, but some have said praise hasn't helped them much.

My understanding is that they were mostly referring to "fake" / superfluous praise, which I too respond quite badly to. But I think there's a big range between that kind of praise and no praise at all. Personally for me (and my guess is that for many people), if no matter how hard I work that's never acknowledged and I always get suggestions for improvement, that would create frustration and a feeling of unreasonable expectations from the company.

I would assume all this is highly specific to environment, just as much as the individual. Have you worked in an environment where nobody cares whether you do a good job, and success and quality are not recognized? You start to define your own success, which may be very different from what the business actually needs.

Obviously, working in an environment where you are not appreciated would make you feel bad. If you think praise is going to make the difference for your employee between being appreciated and not, that is insulting.

Celebration is important. But praise is cheap. Maybe some managers think its okay to just say "great job" + more praise, and then implicitly say next piece of work please, but I don't think it is.

I find it useful to acknowledge when the team is performing beyond expectations. That has been in response to early feedback I received in management roles from team members that when they were putting in extra effort they didn't feel it was "seen" and so it demotivated them to put in extra effort.

Maybe your employees have been conditioned to expect praise when they work hard, and do not currently have the opportunity to develop their intrinsic motivation to do good work.

Just because drug addicts become needy without their supply, doesn't mean they should juice up. Analogously, just because people become demotivated due to lack praise (or other reasons), does not mean praise is necessary to boost their performance. It might just be a sign there is an unaddressed problem.

Why do you imply that Alfie Kohn's ideology is the only useful one?

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.

“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.

Overtime shouldn't be the solution. Team member shouldn't be put into overtime by social pressure.

Overtime is a sign that the team is badly managed and/or understaffed.

Indeed, but that’s already the case if the manager goes around and says that we should work harder.

Pretty sure the best answer is to do both. You need to ask your teammates to help if it's really important.

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.

Next time you get such a compliment, maybe ask for a raise or a bonus? Then you know whether the compliment was real or not.

Hey, you get free string cheese, what more do you want?

We take those

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.

>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.

There is always feedback. In general I judge my performance about how well I do compared to my coworkers in terms of output and what I know about my industry and what is "normal". I'm not the legendary 10x coder/engineer but I'm pretty good I think, in particular based on what I've done vs other people in terms of output and general reaction from peers (who i trust more on feedback than managers). I agree quite often "nice managers" will overdo it on praise, but there are other signs. You're not going to figure it out in a couple weeks, but I don't see how one can't get a general impression over a few months.

The word flattery might be useful here.

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.

> between a Patagonia shirt and a plaque

If I wanted a shirt, I'd buy a shirt. If the plaque truly reflected some effort done by the team that accomplished something big and deserved proper recognition, I get why people would prefer it. You can't buy respect.

Now, of course the cynical me will argue that the whole thing is a trick question and that no one of the alternatives are good - downright offensive actually.

I agree. It reminds me a bit of an episode of The Office, where the top salesman (Dwight) is explaining how he was Salesman of the Month 13 out of 12 months the previous year. In lieu of a pay rise, management had given him two plaques for the month of February.

I remember reading a Harvard Business Review article which was literally "How to motivate your employees to work harder without paying them more."

And it was full of this kind of nonsense - plaques, award ceremonies, teeny-tiny presents as bonuses, and so on.

Cynicism and offence are perfectly reasonable and fair reactions.

For us, the choice is time-off award or cash award. To me it's a no-brainer because in terms of hourly pay, the time-off translates to significantly more money. But others struggle to find reasons to take time-off.

Good management knows what people want. Even better management recognizes that someone is burning out and gives the time-off even when they'd prefer cash.

There's a third minor option. Gift certificates for company swag. It's almost never used, because people find it insulting.

Time off or cash is definitely the best way to show appreciation. Otherwise the old saying is still valid “Words are cheap”

I want celebratory bonuses not "attaboy" emails for sure. I like to know on a regular basis what they think but don't ever take it too much to heart. Managers/CEOs are just people too. I think I know myself best, and try to be honest with myself.

> 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.

Holy shit. This is incredible. I’d be curious what management forced you to do during this period. Longer hours?

I wish there was some “fucked company” equivalent for tracking corporate charades like this.

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 (⌐■_■)

Sorry, in lieu of individual bonuses, management has decided to reward employees with a company team building boat trip!

:-/ Nothing is worse than being stuck on a company boat trip. You can't arrive late, and you can't leave early! Also no where to hide or duck out for a bit. Literally stuck on the boat.

From past experience I would LOVE to see some managerial acknowledgement of their fuckups that lead to crunch time. Praise is temporary, but if no changes are introduced from the other end of the work pipeline people will get crushed.

I'm kind of in a weird in-between role. Usually when crunch time happens we were well aware that the deadlines were aggressive or the feature was going to be a major PITA to implement and brought that up but executives pull ranked and basically said I don't care figure it out. We're all kind of defenseless honestly, it's just some of us are lucky enough where we're not directly responsible for creating the actual product.

The executives might not care right now, but when the peons who do the actual crunch time leave, they'll end up with newcomers with no one to train them. Crunch time should be for real emergencies only.

When I learned that my all-weekender overtime was only to keep an internal deadline, I started look for a new position immediately.

What did the plaque say? This is amazing.

Redeemable for one free Patagonia shirt.

some demotivator like this 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.

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.

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.)

I don't think you said the word "gaslighting" enough times.

I can't tell if you're gaslighting me or not.

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.

A million times this. People are diverse, in basically every way. It’s the worst and best part about them.

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?

Very true. Not easy to deal with humans.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Something to watch out for is people becoming jaded if you use bombastic winning language like "crushing it" all the time, and your praise language doesn't measure up to the size of the win. If a tiny fix and a huge win are both "crushing it", a sense of meaninglessness will permeate.

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.

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.

no one wants fake praise, but rather real, genuine praise only. some folks will convince themselves the fake praise is genuine, but mostly, everyone can tell in their heart of hearts which is which. you're not really fooling most folks most of the time.

give real praise only when it's deserved. support and compassion, however, should always be readily at hand.

I think this is the main issue with generic "you guys are [something] it!" type of praise. There are no details at all, so it seems fake and superficial.

I do agree with the general sentiment of the parent post though. Having managed IT (operations not development) when good work is done, often the intention is that no one notices. Therefore the broader organisation may not have sufficient awareness that anything of value has been achieved.

In such circumstances I believe it is up to the manager to both manage up in terms of making the team's achievement known and recognised, as well as represent the organisation and acknowledge the team's work.

A few of the posts above are essentially prescribing using STAR to offer feedback, which I think is more thoughtful than just generic words of affirmation. This can be made even more authentic if you take the time to talk to affected stakeholders and gather real testimonials to pass back to the team.

Depends. Your output may feel great to someone else, but you may not feel excited about it personally. (and there may be no conflict, or fakery of praise in it) Perhaps based on how perfectionist you are, or based on what you like about the work. You might be excited/motivated by different aspects of your work than your manager.

To me it would come down to whether I think other person is praising my work just to get more of it done just for the praise (I'd have negative reaction), or whether he just likes it that much personally (neutral to mildly positive reaction).

Perhaps it would be better to express a genuine feeling instead.

Praise implies being in a position to praise at all. Having some authority or mastery with regard to what is praised.

Often enough, I am that authority. I don’t expect praise from my clients. I’m getting payed precisely because they lack the mastery I offer.

Instead I would be happy to hear about their true feelings. Stories of gratitude, or relief, or whatever else happened in their life that I might have played a role in.

Yes, I understand. But a lot of the time people express feelings indirectly, and it's pointless to try to change everyone's communication style. So people sometimes use praise if they're happy about something, or whatever, and I interpret that in a way that suits my well being.

It's just part of the communication style of someone, or even part of a culture of a country. If it bothers me, and it is the relationship I care about or looks to be long term, I may ask the person to communicate differently with me.

But most of the time I get praise from random people on the internet, and I just interpret it that they are grateful for my contributions, regardless of what they say.

Sometimes they want something from me, and are probably not comfortable with just asking for it, so they pad the communication with some praise about the software or me. Some state that they're uncomfortable asking for help more directly, some just add praise at the beginning/end of each reply. (which gets kinda strange after 3-4 interactions :))

It's nice if someone communicates more directly, but I can try to understand the other people, too, regardless of communication style.

"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept" ;)

Hehe, I approve of this protocol. :)

then it's not fake praise (in the latter case), but genuine praise, whether you value the output the same or not.

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!

> When people have confidence they're doing a good job, they're more likely to continue to do a good job.

They're just as liable to continue doing a shit job, and with the confidence that your opinion isn't worth a dram.

On behalf of the people that DO like praise for continuing to meet or works hard to meet expectations, thank you!

I'm always surprised with how many people (especially at this site?) doesn't seem to like praise and approval.

Whatever you do, never ever pretend to be somebody you are not or fake praise when it isn’t sincere. Smart developers will instantly loose respect for you and write you off as personified BS.

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

Or you know, currency.

They would just launch their own crypto, allowing them to gamify their teams for all eternity.

My work effectively does. "Points" we can redeem for physical goods or trips.

Isn't that a little patronising?

Kind of. It also creates a weird obligation to reward coworkers for things, since have a budget of points to give out as well.

Put your money where your mouth is, or something like that

Because what Schrute Bucks really need is a blockchain.

Sometimes, Sometimes not. I can imagine everybody taking out the phone to check crypto prices as soon as the words were said

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.

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.

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

Ah yeah, my bad.

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)

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.

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

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.

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

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

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!!!!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

If everything is super duper great, then nothing is.

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

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

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

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.