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Toxic positivity does more harm than good

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Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good

#91

I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies. Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc. These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrive…

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

Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good

#92
post #75

I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies. Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc. These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrive…

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.

Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good

#93
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author's point seems to be that it is toxic to a person to (try to) exist in permanent state of positivity. I can get behind that notion. I've had friends who were chronically positive. It gelded our friendship because they hoarded all the negative stuff in their life.

Is gelded a typo or is this an expression I wasn't aware of? I kind of like it, without sincere emotions something was missing (like when a horse is gelded).

You read it like I meant it. eg:neutered, typical interactions aren't happening here

Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good

#94

I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies. Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc. These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrive…

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.

Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good

#96
post #80

I vastly prefer honest negativity over dishonest positivity. An example of this is the behavior of service personnel in the US compared to my native country, every time I go there I almost want to tell them to tone down the niceness, but of course there's no point because I realize I'm the odd one out. Of course I appreciate the effort of being "nice" but when you're not doing it out of genuine care for someone I'd m…

American in Europe : "Jesus, everyone here is so rude and cold."

European in America : "Jesus, everyone here is so fake and annoying."

Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good

#97

I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies. Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc. These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrive…

"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.

Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good

#98
post #75

I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies. Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc. These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrive…

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.

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.

Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good

#99

I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies. Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc. These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrive…

"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.

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.

Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good

#100
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author's point seems to be that it is toxic to a person to (try to) exist in permanent state of positivity. I can get behind that notion. I've had friends who were chronically positive. It gelded our friendship because they hoarded all the negative stuff in their life.

Is gelded a typo or is this an expression I wasn't aware of? I kind of like it, without sincere emotions something was missing (like when a horse is gelded).

You got it right: https://wor.do/geld
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