Toxic positivity does more harm than good
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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 contrived and artificial. They're given when we're just doing normal, expected work.
I've mentioned this to colleagues and friends and there seems to be two camps of people: those who want constant positive reenforcement and those who it completely has the opposite effect, an annoyance. I guess I fall into the latter.
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.
And of course the whole political game where people have to send congratulations just to signal that they’re part of leadership
Isn't it the managers job to figure out what each individual on the team needs to perform?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?".
But indeed can think of things the other person could do better / improve upon. (However, maybe only "criticizing" isn't so nice)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why do you think telling your team this is useful? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/about-fathers/201202...
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
- 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 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.
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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!
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.
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.
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.
I'm not one of Pavlov's dogs.
give real praise only when it's deserved. support and compassion, however, should always be readily at hand.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I'm always surprised with how many people (especially at this site?) doesn't seem to like praise and approval.
They're just as liable to continue doing a shit job, and with the confidence that your opinion isn't worth a dram.
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.
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.
:-/ 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.
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.
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.
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.
When I learned that my all-weekender overtime was only to keep an internal deadline, I started look for a new position immediately.
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.
(I also recognize the inherent irony of doing this in a thread about empty praise, heh.)
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.
Not having PMs and PdMs is a massive benefit of smaller orgs. Do everything you can to avoid hiring these people.
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.
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!!!!
Of course I appreciate the effort of being "nice" but when you're not doing it out of genuine care for someone I'd much rather just be treated in a neutral way, like you'd treat any human being you encountered that you knew nothing about. I don't much enjoy being treated as an old friend by someone who wouldn't lend me five bucks, and I don't enjoy being asked polite questions that require elaborate answers when you really don't want to listen to the answer and your eyes glaze over within the first seconds.
Adults have left their insecurities behind them and should understand they're not, at least initially, the friend of every human being and shouldn't have a problem with being treated in a professionally reserved way.
European in America : "Jesus, everyone here is so fake and annoying."
The dynamic range is higher, versus having to figure out the difference between smiling and mega-ultra-smiling (as in the USA).
The sort of always smiling, always laughing stereotypical American waiter or something would be perceived as juvenile, fake or not very bright over here.
This thread is pretty irritating for being kind of clueless to the reality that every culture on earth is going to have trappings like this and the alleged stoicism of Russia and Germany are no exception. (Thinking someone is simple or mentally ill because they smile too much is already such a trapping.)
Don’t ask a question and completely ignore the answer.
Don’t give platitudes when they could spend some effort and saying what a team member did well. It’s the same in dating, don’t tell someone they are beautiful, go the extra mile.
At least I think this is what people mean by “fake” but I’m not sure.
Classroom teaching is not highly dependent on technology and low-tech solutions are often better.
Your suggested solution asks teachers to give up a day of their time (unpaid?) for what you think is important, without listening to what teachers actually find difficult about their jobs.
Even if what you are saying is right and genuinely helpful, it won't immediately look like a good solution to the teachers or to the administration.
Or something like that anyway; I never really figured out this whole thing in the time I lived there.
Here's a chart to help you get started: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DL8gbEoX0AAcwAq?format=jpg&name=...
Personally I love cutting through bullshit but it it can often land wrong.
Our culture tends to pick and choose from the best of either the American or the European approach. We don't always get it right, and the combination/middle ground isn't necessarily better than either of the alternatives, but I do feel like we have some general insight and sympathy to both the European and the American philosophies.
I've also lived as an ex-pat in Europe for 4 years working closely with both Europeans and AMericans.
In this regard, I think the American approach is superior.
1) Europeans are overly sensitive about "micro-friendliness". I've heard people complain that the cashier at the grocery store asks "How are you doing?". "They don't really care, why do they ask!"
I've had to explain that no, they don't care, but that moment of friendliness is still a pleasant one, and over the course of the day, all those moments add up to a generally positive contribution to one's existence.
Americans do take faux-friendliness over the top (especially if it's only reserved for the local in-group, see: southern "hospitality"), but I think the Europeans need to lighten up a bit.
2) While I don't need my waitresses to be so friendly to the point that they seem like they're flirting with you, the European waitstaff at restaurants are far from neutral, and are actively disinterested in your hospitality experience. This doesn't apply to fancy high-end restaurants, of course. But just a general casual lunch or dinner you're just not going to get the same quality of service as you do in North America.
While I abhor tipping, I can't help but think that it does create some positive incentives in staff here.
That's just circling back to North America and Continental Europe having diametrically opposed notions of what good service means and what social interactions are desirable.
At the risk of sounding like a prick, a good staff member here is someone who makes themselves completely invisible from customers while keeping the shop running smoothly. Having a waiter trying to build a rapport with me because ultimately I have to be the one paying them instead of their boss is infuriating, and the intrusion of a third party into my table-size privacy bubble is extremely unwelcome.
You went out into public to have a meal, why are you expecting privacy? If you wanted privacy, get takeout and eat at home.
Seeking eye contact with the waiter isn’t that inconvenient either...
But for me I have very happy memories of talking with waiters in mom and pop restaurants, at the same time I do feel tipping increases the incentive to talk with customers so... it comes back to honesty, do you really want to talk or does it JUST increase the probability of tipping?
Uggghhhh, I loath being asked that. Firstly, the staff are forced to say it as part of their job and they are checked. It’s inhuman to make someone do that. Also it fucks with my head - now I feel forced to do some interaction to lessen the evil of their work day (it is always shitty jobs) and I find it draining by sympathy. It breaks the humanness of just being polite and thankful to anyone you interact with that is working hard (even if they are tired, emotionally drained, or don’t want to be there).
> especially if it's only reserved for the local in-group, see: southern "hospitality"
Can you explain that?
> tipping, I can't help but think that it does create some positive incentives in staff here.
Tipping is outright disgusting: paying people to be nice just creates inhuman fakeness. The image of some fat leering arsehole, or ugly souled woman, getting their ego stroked by a young wage slave is abhorrent. The worst I ever saw was young American tourists on the coast of Mexico (a small town called San Francisco I think) - the way the tourists treated the staff was wretchedly vile (maybe due to the staff being mostly poor and Mexican?)
Edit: that sounded a bit US bashing, so I will add that I have met many wonderful, kind, interesting and friendly Americans. I have even been treated to Southern Hospitality and it seemed genuine enough to me (even though me and my partner essentially just gate-crashed their party on short notice!). Being white and kiwi might help my impressions though...?!
Edit: in my experience Canadians and New Zealanders have similar outlooks.
> can you explain that?
I think you touched upon it in your last paragraph acknowledging being white and kiwi.
It is such an overwhelming force of human friendliness and welcomeness, that you assume it must be genuine human connection.
Except try being gay, black, or an atheist, and see how quickly all that turns...
As far as the rest of your points, I think you're exaggerating a bit. Most people (at least in north america) don't mind being micro-friendly as part of a service job. Sure, yes, it's "required", but the ratio of monstrous leering arseholes is not high, and while it's tiring to be friendly by the end of a long workday at a grocery store, people don't feel it to be a fundamentally dehumanizing act.
I think the bigger problem with tipping is situations where it allows employers to pay less than minimum wage - that is abhorent. Getting a tip shouldn't be a requirement to get to a living wage. But as an incentive to being a little more engaged with your job? I think it's good.
> Edit: in my experience Canadians and New Zealanders have similar outlooks.
We are alike in many ways. We both live in the shadow of a larger, brasher arrogant power who dismisses us, and people on the other side of the world lump us in together with them.
But no, when it comes to restaurants, service culture, tipping, and micro-friendliness in public Canadians are much closer to Americans than to New Zealanders.
Some of them hate asking you too. Sometimes it's a policy forced on them by management, and they are to be fined if they skipped a customer. Overheard this in the bus, a cashier was complaining to her friend. There were cameras installed at every register specifically for that.
To be honest, the cashiers and waitresses I've talked to in the US delivered a pretty good act, totally believable. When the big chain stores in my country decided to copy the US, the lack of acting skills in our culture was very noticeable.
This is more of an expectations thing; certainly in Dutch, asking "how are you doing" is something you do when you ask when you really want to start a conversation, and you expect a somewhat serious reply in return, whereas in some other cultures it essentially just means "hi" with no expectation of a real answer beyond "good" or some such.
When I worked for an Irish company I had some coworkers say "how are ya" when meeting in the hallway or some such; I started replying serious ("yeah, I'm good, last night I [..]") but they didn't really expect an answer so continued walking leaving us both confused; me as they didn't stop, and them as I started a conversation. It led to some awkward-y situations before I figured this out haha
At any rate, I don't think it's "sensitivity", it's just that these words are taken to have a different meaning. These are the kind of subtle things about learning a language; you can know all the words and grammar, but you also need to learn what's meant with them, and that can actually be pretty hard. Translating a simple sentence such as this is easy, but really understanding what's intended (which may differ on the tone of voice, location, context, etc.) is really hard, and even Europeans who speak good English but haven't spent a lot of time in English-speaking countries tend to fail at this (I certainly did) as it's not really something you can learn from communicating in English over text either.
I've also heard Italians, French, and Swiss complain about it.
The issue wasn't the language, it was the faux cheeriness that came with it.
As a Brit I feel this way, I personally don't ask someone how they're doing unless I'm interested in the answer, but the rhetorical How are you doing? is used plenty in Britain.
How do you do? has fallen out of common usage but traditionally the proper response was How do you do?
As a Latin American, I studied aboard in the US for a year, and I felt Americans were way colder than us.
I wouldn’t say we’re fake about our warmness. But maybe Europeans could associate that with being fake?
As scripture says, 'Faithful are the wounds of a friend'. Sometimes the best thing we need is a little vinegar that is in our actual/tangible/observable best interest.
Not bashing, let's be clear on that. But this keeps catching me off-guard, every time. Have to work on finally overcoming it. It seems it's an American tradition to say "hi, how are you?" and not just "hello" (namely, it's not a question but a greeting).
I found that it can be useful to consider "Hi, how are you?" as a friendly game of catch. At the basic level you can reply "'Sall right, how _you_ doin'?" You've caught the ball and tossed it back. Even if you are walking in different directions down the hall this will work... or even looking up and saying "hey" is acknowledging the ball in the air. In an "office" this probably would work fine, but I have always been either self-employed or worked in small businesses. So I don't know if this would work on the 24th floor.
In day to day life... I imagine the person at the check out counter has a repetitive job that can be quite dreary if all they are doing is punching buttons all day without any engagement... asking the same questions: "Did you find everything?" "Do you have any coupons?" "How are you doing today?" So when I can I try to catch the ball, paint it a different color and toss it back. It's a two part process How are you doing? #1 catch the ball: "I made it this far, I'm gonna keep going." #2 toss it back: "How are you keeping up?"
You can have dozens of responses for for each part... mix & match... Silliness can get you bonus points. It's just a game. You will discover ways in which a few words can make it so that you're having a bit more fun, the checkout person (or server, or phone support person, or...) can also get a few giggles while grinding through their, perhaps miserable, job... hey, everybody wins.
My brain has these days taught itself to translate that “how are you” == “hello”, so these days I just answer “hey”, which feels weird but a lot of things do in English. Or if I’m not feeling great, I won’t respond at all, because apparently that’s fine too and the person asking isn’t really asking. (This is why this Fake niceness, in itself, can be depressing)
This is usually mandated somewhere up the chain. They don't have a choice if they want to keep their jobs.
It's not some subset of real positivity that is toxic, it's just... not actual positivity. It's an act.
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.
I kind of like it, without sincere emotions something was missing (like when a horse is gelded).
Yes. The article started out with the psychologist explaining how the client was looking for fake doctor's notes just to avoid going to work because the client didn't feel "totally positive" that day. That's toxic positivity, the feeling that you can't outwardly display anything less than complete cheerfulness, that you have to bottle up any problem inside and not let it out.
“Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.” - Wendell Johnson
Nice, albeit terribly useless, soundbite.
> And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem
Hegel and his merry-band of psuedo-intellectuals like this clown (Johnson) are the reason philosophy isn't taken seriously as it used to.
"Don't worry, it'll get better."
People genuinely believe that and for many things, it's true. For someone with a chronic and severe mental illness with no known cure? We're sick of hearing it.
There is no better for me. I'll never be completely free of suicidal thoughts or medication side-effects. I will never be free from degree of pain and suffering many people don't understand.
Does that make me unhappy? Frequently but I'm used to hurting all the time and I try to make the best of it.
For more: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-509395...
But being lead in circles of doom talk and complaining by someone who is inconsolable naturally leads to vacuous sayings like it is what it is, it's not as bad as it seems, or count your blessings, only because I have to say something in reply despite not having any answers.
I completely understand and my reply comes out of very hard experiences from decades of helping people.
Humans are emotional beings. We want to help. We hurt when we can’t. We feel guilty. The natural response is to say or do anything to make that guilt go away. This is a deep, hardwired response. It is a natural response and a good one. I consider this to be one of humanity’s best traits.
But it is not a good response in this situation. My goal is to help people. If I am to do that, nothing I say should said out of my own feelings of guilt or helplessness.
I’ve learned to embrace guilt and acknowledge it’s there but also tell it it is not helpful in that moment. I need to do what I know is right, not what I feel is right.
Hand and hand with this is letting go of the belief we have control. We can not save people who don’t want to be saved. There is only so much we can do. And we will fail. I’ve lost friends I’ve wished I could have saved but I know there were no words. Therefore, I have no responsibility for their actions.
As a very wise person once said,
It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.
I think people might say this so as to make themselves feel better. Or perhaps it's a (bad) shortcut for "oh that sucks, I hope it will get better".
> I'll never be completely free of suicidal thoughts or medication side-effects. I will never be free from degree of pain and suffering many people don't understand.
I'm one of the people who don't understand, but I think there is at least some distant theoretical possibility it will get better?
> I try to make the best of it.
"Sometimes we don't get to choose the role we play, but we always get to choose how well we play the role."
Not likely. Our understanding of mental health is still extremely primitive.
Bipolar gets worse over time, not better. Medication can stop it from getting worse, but it is far from a cure.
I like my job, and I will gladly take it over a workplace with toxic negativity, but it's still been somewhat exhausting. There's that underlying anxiety that if you're somehow not seen as exuding the correct level of positivity, that you might get let go.
Everyone at the company is constantly patting themselves on the back about how it's "the greatest place to work in the world" and that they have "the most incredible co-workers". This makes it hard to disagree with things or point out things that aren't working, because everyone is so afraid to hurt somebody's feelings.
I don't know if it's because I'm french but that kind of thing makes me throw up in my mouth and is a super big turn-off. Some things sucks, it's fine, accept it and move on or try to make them better through actions. Words don't make things better.
Agree, having a colleague with a negative disposition (< 3rd percentile of general population) is in my view much, much worse than colleagues that exude the normal amount of fake positivity, even though the latter is annoying and draining and is more deceitful than the former.
thanks
Thanks.
Thanks
Thanks!
It suffers from not only being optimistic when you shouldn't be, but also being overly optimistic in situations. I pretty much only experience these behaviors in workplaces.
I think a lot of technical guys see professional interactions that way, with pats on the back being at best an empty ritual, at worst a waste of useful time.
Negative feedback is the exact same (keep it specific) though with the nuance of saving negative feedback that’s personal for 1:1 convos.
I was once talking to a colleague who was showing me some old vacation pictures. Some tropical area. I commented that they were looking amazing. He said that actually there was a pile of garbage next to them, but they only put the good looking photos on Facebook.
Everybody wants to look perfect online, so much of the appearances are faked. It makes sense, since everything is public, so we feel pressured to make ourselves look good. Repeated, I am not surprised that it can cause harmful psychological effects.
I wonder if US culture will ever revert. I think it's gone down a very dangerous path for the middle class. It will be only a matter of a few decades before we adopt the Japanese strategy of paying women to retire and have families instead of advancing their careers because of major population decline.
when your friends used a slide projector to show you their vacation photos, they left the bad slides out of the projector.
i'm on board with facebook being a problem, but it's in more subtle ways than folks not showing you their bad photos.
With this constant demonstration of happiness / positivity, it's extremely difficult to get a real, honest read on something. Not everything you ate was incredible, not everywhere you went was perfect. In fact, 50% of them were below average! I wish more people would quit performing and give the real scoop. But that tends to only happen in pretty tight circles now. I noticed this effect even in a group chat of close friends once it grew from 5 to 8.
Is smoking healthy? Philip Morris would certainly like it if people believed that. Fortunately, they do not believe it anymore.
The false dichotomy of "either you hate fat people or you feed them positive bullshit" definitely looks like toxic positivity to me. No space for "your weight will likely cause you health problems down the line, here is how you can help it" there.
It's certainly related.
Toxic positivity is something that happens in interpersonal communication. It's meaningless praise and excitement, bordering on condescension. It usually also comes from a person who isn't really qualified to distinguish accomplishments from regular work, because they aren't an expert in the field.
> Even the oppressive insistence that we should love our body, no matter what, can tip into upbeat intolerance by implying that it’s not OK to want to work on tummy folds or laugh lines.
I read the Cosmo cover as suggesting "it's OK to not want to change your body", toxic positivity would be "it's not OK to want to change your body". In that case, toxic positivity is more restricting -- it's the difference between "it's fine to not be sad" and "it's not fine to be sad".
Yes, it's "okay" in that you should not experience body or fat-shaming for being obese. No, it's not "okay" in that you are at extremely elevated risks of every health disease - and your quality of life is really terrible in comparison to people who are not obese. It's actually really terrible for the state and for society to normalize this level of disregard for out health.
I think this lesser form of "toxic positivity" inspires complacency and a general victim mentality out of people who for whom their pain is partially or entirely self-inflicted.
That's factually inaccurate.
> It's actually really terrible for the state and for society to normalize this
I don't believe there is any science to back this assertion up. It's an interesting hypothesis, but I doubt it's true.
> think this lesser form of "toxic positivity" inspires complacency and a general victim mentality
Actually, the opposite is true. Shame is linked with health care avoidance: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17401...
I'd be interested if you have seen evidence that shame increases weight loss in obese people? Am I understand you correctly that's your thesis?
GP comment doesn't claim that. You're just making this up. It's a scientific fact obesity is a health risk. What is the point in denying that?
I’m not debating what’s healthy, I’m debating what we consider “ok”.
“Obesity is a health risk” is a fact indeed. “All health risks are not ok” is not a scientific fact.
For all the fat hate, there are also the people who genuinely think that being obese is healthy. What better way to get through to those people than to trojan horse them with that controversial cover?
Feeling bad about having negative thoughts or emotions and being afraid to express them, only makes it more likely we'll engage in counterproductive coping behaviors.
being negative is almost always culturally seen as a bad thing, especially in the US, while in would argue hiding your negativity is far worse in the long run because it occludes your state of mind to your peers.
having moments when life just truly sucks is absolutely normal, but expressing it happens is not.
The original is, "Trying to Stay Optimistic Is Doing More Harm Than Good"
"Toxic positivity" makes more sense in the context of the article, which is much more about personal mental health than general workplace behavior. It is not about other peoples' positivity, it is about accepting your own negative emotions as healthy. It is not about positive feedback in meetings. Anyway, it has reasonable parting advice:
Ho, the neuropsychologist, has an unexpected suggestion to help calibrate a Pollyanna perspective: a session watching Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out, which animates and dramatizes human emotions. "One of the best antidotes to toxic positivity is reexamining your value system and understanding that some of the best moments in life, when you truly feel good, are full of mixed emotions," she says. "And that’s what we should be embracing as human beings."
Among the oldest portions of the Bible is the Book of Job.
Well worth spending some time there to remember that, short of stage 4 cancer, there is generally room for things to worsen.
It gives me a bit of anxiety and imposter syndrome when everything is going too well. It's easy to fall into the line of thinking that "I can't be doing a perfect job, so maybe they're keeping up appearances while scouting a replacement?"
Critical feedback doesn't have to be cruel to be effective. No feedback or everything being roses can be nearly as bad as angry feedback.
Personally, I think psychological safety leads to another phenomenon: groupthink. By emphasizing harmony over everything else, groups suffering from groupthink apply self-censorship, silence is seen as agreement, and the ability to make rational decisions is lost. Not only that, but the group develops a strong identity and anyone who doesn't agree is seen as disloyal.
For a software engineering team, groupthink usually means becoming a death march towards failure.
1 Fake positivity
2 Co-workers that are "happy" to work during PTOs
The first one is described in the article. The second one is somewhat related to the first one or could even be the result of fake positivity. Working during a paid time off (PTO) is terrible for culture – makes your co-workers feel guilty if they won't spend a few hours at work during their PTO. I almost feel like an employee's access to Slack/E-mail should be restricted to read-only while they are on vacation.
If you are one of those two, stop kissing your manager's ass! Enjoy your vacation–forget about work.
We all know that because housing is so scarce, having a job or not can mean you have a roof over your heads or not. It's really disgusting the way they treat workers here. So of course there is going to be a Stockholm syndrome effect here.
Won't pay the market price but want the best. From what I've heard from insiders, they all do "surveys" with each other to fix wages since the 2000 dot come bubble collapse. The Vancouver Model is essentially: underpay your workers, demand the best and increase margins.
Then they wonder why we can't be like Silicon Valley. Most startups here get acquired by pre-primary market and very few ever IPO thus rendering stock options worthless.
It's no wonder that there is a massive brain drain going on and that startups here consist mostly of immigrant workers. I'm sure in some scale the exact same thing is taking place in SV but at least Indian engineers are making far more than what they would here in the Florida of Canada.
Funny you should mention Florida though, because I recently was working with a team from there and their culture was also absolutely the "work on weekends and PTO" variety.
I wonder if it's a coastal thing.
It's a vestige from another era. The people that dont have bargaining power do not get PTO, and the ones that do get some sort mandated vacation time or economically punished otherwise by lower wages or higher taxation.
Working during PTO is bad, but it would be better for everyone to not have PTO at all, just TO.
To each their own, but I find be joyful or humourous during hard times is much better for people to be around than to be someone denying someone else's individual right to be happy.
In my experience, the best outlook is to appreciate what is actually good in life (e.g. your qualities, good things that happen), and accept that what is bad (e.g. your flaws, bad things that happen), are bad.
Unfortunately if you barely have anything, than your life objectively sucks and no outlook is going to make you happy. But the thing is, I've seen a lot of people who are depressed that don't "barely have anything", they have food and shelter and qualities and things going on in their lives which should make them happy, but they still spend their time thinking about the things they don't have.
As someone who probably is intellectualizing some latent mental illness, I find a lot more value in just adopting a pessimistic view on life. I get that I'm extreme in this regard, but honestly I'd rather have a cultural shift towards a slightly gloomier view than this sugar-coating.
A somewhat relevant TED talk that hits many of the reasons why I think it's better to be hopeless and/or pessimistic than be positive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LlWufvZLxI&fbclid=IwAR0QeEq...
Having a critical but positive look at the world is most likely very healthy, in the spirit of 'Change what you can and accept what you can not'. Constantly emitting a positive image, on the other hand, leads to the problems described in the article. But the problem is not the positivity, but the need to express it even it is not coming from within.
Don't be afraid, to share your true feelings, but try to view the world in a balanced way (now I was preachy myself...).
In a positive direction it's at least more palatable than otherwise, but it's still bad.
Orgs. that focus on emotional support and politics more than outcomes will feature this prominently.
Oddly - it may not matter. Sometimes pushing the cogs of ABC corp forward is mundane, and everything else that happens is just fluff talk, like the sign on the bathroom door, it doesn't change how many widgest were bought and sold, or like the language on the 'stop sign' in Canada: French or English it doesn't matter, it's just something irrelevant argue about instead of having an actual war about it.
I agree completely that positivity can be forced to toxic levels, but I also see folks drop a plate or get something on their shirt and it’s the worst thing ever and the idea adopting a “whoops, oh well” laughing it off outlook appears to them as forced and toxic positivity. Positivity is great and not letting things get you down is really important if not taken too far.
So what’s the measure for too far versus not far enough? I feel like I see too far and not far enough on equal measure in my peer group.
where they argue that Goths subculture manages to deal with aging very well precisely because they eschew fake positivity and eternal youth and concentrate on deeper emotions and themes instead
I’d rather be part a-hole than full of sh-t.
If you can’t say something nice apologize later.
Honestly, the times I can recall doing this, nothing bad happened as a result.
Then again, I didn't follow it up by snorting cocaine or compulsively posting on Instagram.
I'm going to rankly speculate it those kinds of follow-up behaviors that turn a natural part of life into a glaringly obvious self-destructive plot the likes of Wonder Woman 1980.
Edit: clarification
" I'm out of the tunnel of amusement [...] we live on memories, gentleman, and games sincere embraces, kisses and fires of all those moments, sad and amusing and not on moments that were sadly amusing "
The downside is real listening is incredibly time consuming - I struggle to get under 60 min per person per day (not all at once of course) without compromising its effectiveness.
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Light-Chasers-Reclaiming/dp...
So it's not about how to avoid acknowledging problems, it's about how you shape your mind to see and deal with problems...
On that topic, remember to say thank you when someone on your team gets you out of a jam, There are parts of the systems at work that I simply don't understand yet/never will because they are far outside of my team typically so if someone saves me a bunch of time because they happen to know that system, a thank you goes a long way - it's also an admission that as a lead you don't know everything.
I find "I don't know either, lets find out" opens a more productive dialogue than pretending you know everything - on top of which seniors (and good juniors) can spot a bluff anyway and you just lose credibility.
Almost any management style works if you are genuine, open and authentic.
Ecclesiastical stoicism has kept me sane this year simply because my expectations are so incredibly low.
"An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be." Oscar Wilde
Say what you want, but I enjoy feeling happy, and if I have to engage in a bit of mental convolution to achieve it I'm all for it whether it is a lie or not.