When your coworker does great work, tell their manager • Hacker News Board

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#171

Post by bombledmonk » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #127

yreg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planet Money had an episode on such metrics[0] The host shares a personal story from time when he was a cashier. The grocery chain measured performance as items scanned per minute and shared internal leaderboard. Some items are hard to scan so the cashiers ended up skipping scanning them – so the store gave them away for free. But the managers were happy about their KPIs. (Look how many items are we suddenly selling…

I heard about a call center that rewarded customer service agents for short calls, so workers started immediately hanging up on some calls to bring their average call duration down.

I can verify this does happen in some call centers.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#172

Post by giantg2 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #159

humanlion87 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I am also stupid in another way - I can't boast of my "incredible" accomplishments by sending out huge and beautiful emails to prove my "impact". With that kind of combination, I am looking forward to stagnation at my current level.

"stagnation" mens "avoiding the rat race" and it has mental health benefits that masy be worth more than the raise.

I'm stressed because they will find a way to get rid of me if I stagnate too long. They begin to think there is something wrong with you if you haven't moved up. I'm 8 years into my career and this company, I'm a midlevel developer, and have an MSIS.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#173

Post by gowld » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #20

While I really like the sentiment, I think there's a reason why people naturally don't provide much positive feedback about individuals at workplaces. What do you really get by pointing out the good work of a coworker? A warm fuzzy feeling, to be sure. Maybe greater comradeship. But wait, who's the next person to get a promotion? Maybe it'll be the person you keep praising to management. So you'll probably have to wo…

Why does a receiver on the football team let the other receiver catch a pass, when he could look better by blocking it?

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#174

Post by jedberg » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #155

jedberg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I loved about working at Netflix. We didn't have performance reviews. It was assumed that your performance was good to excellent, otherwise you wouldn't be working there anymore. You had a constant feedback loop with your manager on performance, but nothing was ever formal. Raises were completely divorced from any performance assessment. You were paid whatever they thought the max was for your skillset,…

Sounds like you are no longer there - what was the dark side?

Honestly there was no real dark side. I supposed you could say some mangers were a little trigger happy on firing, but in a sibling comment I addressed that.

I left to start a startup. I would work there again in second if I ever go back to working for someone else (and they had a role for me).

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#175

Post by giantg2 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

sjtindell wrote: post #158

giantg2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm stupid. I give people the praise they deserve, even when it hurts me.

How can giving praise hurt you?

If the company's unofficial policy is that if someone gets a high rating on the team, then someone else must be given a low rating to balance that out, even if they don't deserve it.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#176

Post by invalidOrTaken » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #153

jlokier wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think high productivity people by definition cause everyone* else to benefit from their excellence. So high productivity people who don't want everyone else to benefit are a bit of an oxymoron. (* or at least most others)

LeBron James wants his whole team to succeed, but he still expects to be paid the most.

If you can afford LeBron, great!

If you can find a dev who can do for your company what LeBron can do for the Cavs/Heat/Lakers, great!

The reality is that you should be shooting for Shane Battier.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#177

Post by mementomori » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

I am torn between the zero-sum and "abundance" concepts. It seems like some people like to promote the "abundance" concept (where one person's gain adds to everyone else) as an ideal but in reality I have only ever seen zero-sum results in terms of job acquisition and career advancement. There is a fixed number of slots and you need to eliminate others in order to obtain it.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#178

Post by jlokier » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

parliament32 wrote: post #91

GEBBL wrote: post #72

I hate the fact that in my current role, I am expected to give my colleagues ‘constructive feedback’. It seems like a minefield , when I am trying to focus on my own role, that I have to negotiate the feelings of a colleague as I leave feedback on them. I’d prefer to leave only positive feedback, but what my boss wants is that I need to find an improvement that my colleague has to make. I don’t like it.

I've found PRP to be a godsend when you're expected to give "feedback". PRP is praise-reprimand-praise: so construct your comment where your negative feedback is sandwiched between two positive feedback items. People respond well to it.

Ah, wordplay. You're saying it works? I'm not convinced.

My experience is that it sows distrust in praise.

"You just said something unpleasant to me, so I don't trust the praise you added after is genuine, and now I don't trust the praise you said before is genuine either. I think you added them just to fit the form of a PRP. Maybe that's what you do all the time. So I think you're basically lying to me about the praise, insulting my intelligence and trying to manipulate me by crude emotional bullshit. This makes me angry".

Which is not very useful if you have constructive critical feedback to give, as it is no longer constructive.

In my view, dressing up a shit filling in a sandwich is a form of shallow manipulative wordplay, and for at least some people, it makes them upset and angry, even if they don't show it immediately. Because if it's done often it will make them distrustful. In some sense, they are right to become distrustful.

Most people need to feel some amount of socially rewarding praise and recognition in their working lives.

But if you're often using PRP... you lose the ability to convey praise to them in ways they will experience as actual for real praise.

So I advocate for separating these things out more, and making it known that is intentional.

When there is shit filling to deliver compassionately, work on the meaning itself, not dissonantly trying to simultaneously convey it and hide it, which puts people who notice on permanent alert that your words do not mean what they initially sound like.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#179

Post by tehlike » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #166

The flip side of this is, if you want to sink someone's career, badmouth them to their manager. Having worked at many companies, I've observed how shockingly easy it is for a manager's assessment of their reports to be colored by "hearsay" whether good or bad. I once had several members of another team who deeply disgreed with a product decision I'd made complain to my manager that I was being uncooperative, not a te…

This does not always work. Not necessarily "hearsay", but there was a coworker of mine who would happily take credit for everyone elses work by sending emails in a timely manner (people tell them stuff they work on, then you'd see an email from them pretending they lead the effort and it was their idea). Many times this got escalated, the manager didn't care. Everytime someone talked to that problematic person, it was "the first time he heard about it".

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#180

Post by tehlike » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

I have made a good habit of sending a person's manager "xyz did a great job, in such such such way, and this had the impact of abc". I try not to do it often, mostly if i think someone has gone above and beyond. Also mention it to my manager if it's appropriate as people should be recognized - they also make good allys for future work.