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…
Toxic positivity does more harm than good
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Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good
#92I'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.
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
#93Earlier 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).
Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good
#94I'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.
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
#95Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good
#96I 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…
European in America : "Jesus, everyone here is so fake and annoying."
Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good
#97I'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'm not one of Pavlov's dogs.
Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good
#98I'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.
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
#99I'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.
Re: Toxic positivity does more harm than good
#100Earlier 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).