Hacker News Reader

I find the pattern of "How are you feeling about X, 0-10?" followed up by "What would get you to a 10?" very useful. Almost nobody ever says 10 and when they do, when you pressure test it, "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?" it gets revised down appropriately.

"What would get you to a 10" is as very constructive way to think about it as well. It's not just complaining, it's articulating what you'd like to change.

Once teams get used to this, it comes part of the vernacular, "I'm only 6/10 on this idea". The follow up is always, "What would get you to a 10"

> Almost nobody ever says 10 [...] "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?"

But I mean, "it's not perfect" doesn't imply "I want you to change something", right? To exaggerate a bit to get my point across: I'd love our meetings more if they included pony rides in the middle, but that doesn't mean I think we should incorporate pony riding sessions into our meetings. It feels weird to take all "this isn't perfect" messages to mean "you can/should be doing better" - things might not be perfect but they might just be good enough.

I always feel there is an alterior motive when managers ask me these sorts of questions. Like the GP post, I'm rarely honest; I tell them what I think they want to hear. This has been learned over years where being honest resulted in the manager getting defensive, a lecture about "getting with the program" or at best an attempt to pursuade me to see it their way. Rarely have I ever had critical feedback accepted and used to improve anything.

I tell my team that they are my first priority and I 100% mean it. When difficult situations arise I explain to them the pressures that are on me and ask them to do their best to help, and in return I try to make their lives easier the rest of the time. Of course I play the upward game, but in my mind it's in service of the team. This has the intended effect of having a very productive and functional team that seems (to me) to be honest with their feedback.

I’m a new manager. I say this too, and I mean it. I understand that the reality is that people are naturally skeptical of it, and that part of the gig is to overcome that skepticism, deliver value regardless. Part of me trying to overcome that skepticism is…writing this very comment. I don’t operate adversarial-by-default with my boss. I’m quite often quite honest, and I’ve certainly gotten value from that.

I am a manager, but when I was an IC, I held your view. I learned that giving even softened feedback resulted in being at best ignored for a week, at worst, becoming a marked man.

I resolved to change this for my team. Ask for feedback broadly, and about projects, not me per say. Peoples end up commenting on the project/ sprint, and they feel safer. Much of what they talk about however, I have power over, so I view it as a comment on me and my execution.

Second thing, never once have I reacted negatively to negative feedback. Not in a team meeting, not in a 1:1.

Third, my boss has 1:1s with all my reports monthly. If I stop accepting negative feedback, my boss will hear about soon enough. I wish every manager had this hanging over their head. As an IC, all my code was reviewed. Managers need to have their performance reviewed frequently as well, not just bi-annually.

The one thing about my method is you have to be careful not to let the team become so free with criticism they just start ranting all the time and increase negativity where it isn’t warranted.

Sincere question. While you're sure you aren't doing what you remember managers doing back when you were an IC, do you actually know that your ICs don't think of you the same way that you used to think about managers?

In my experience the managers who are most convinced that they are doing well who are least likely to take negative feedback well, and are likewise least likely to recognize that they actually just did all the things they think they don't do. It is only the ones who have a lot of self-doubt that I've seen actually do well on this.

And skip level meetings are scary. Because if I have any positive feelings at all about my manager, their manager is the LAST place I want to tell anything negative to. (I only made that mistake once...)

Can you think of a person that gave you harshly negative feedback that you then got promoted to staff or higher? And what was the feedback?

It honestly sounds like you’ve got an axe to grind in this comment. Plus, “harshly negative” is both ambiguous and loaded. Not to open up the “radical candour” can of worms too much, but there’s a difference between being honest and being a dick.

It's a fair question to ask. It's easy to be trapped by a false sense of security.

You know you're doing well, and everyone only has small improvements to suggest. Why keep digging? There's nothing bad to find. After all, you're doing well.

I don't have any particular axe to grind. Agreed about being a dick, but there's the thing right? Shooting the messenger is a trope for a reason, and there are some people, who cannot receive some messages, no matter how wordsmithed they are, without reaching for their sixgun.

The SNAFU principle[1] is a joke, but it's one of the "haha, only serious" ones. It's entirely impossible to avoid the SNAFU effect altogether. So perhaps I should have said "when was the last time you rewarded a bearer of bad news with a highly desirable outcome like making staff?" In any event that was what I meant.

[1] https://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon/SNAFUprin...

I've been told before that I 'have a healthy disdain for authority'. I have always been honest, but not an asshole. Promoted many times.

'Harshly negative' sounds like being an asshole. My question to you would be do you want to be right or effective? It can feel good to be right and stick it to someone, but how often does that lead to effective change?

You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once.

I feel sorry for other answers to this question. I feel they mostly duck the point and put the manager in the position of "right by default" too much.

Look, in professional setting truly being a dick - especially regarding this question - is relatively infrequent. Often someone doesn't understand that his arguments - or general actions - are off by substance (i.e., he's wrong and should be able to see and correct the mistake) or form (often he's telling not enough, assuming people will understand the way he means, and the form is such that they understand it differently than intended). Harsh criticism could be a lack of form - when the person doesn't put it in a shape somehow convenient for understanding, acceptance, analysis - or substance - when the person is wrong because either he doesn't know something, forgot something he did know... Truly being a dick professionally is to be "lazy enough" to systematically make these mistakes without taking care to fix them, or "evil enough" to do them on purpose. A decent organization has ways to hire and keep professional people, improve less professional and leave those not improving; the level of dickiness is under some control.

Sheep can be skinned once, but people aren't sheep, and power imbalance requires those wielding more of it to have the ability to grow that skin. Your question is valid and rather to the point, and I would like to learn more of the answer.

> I find the pattern of "How are you feeling about X, 0-10?" followed up by "What would get you to a 10?" very useful. Almost nobody ever says 10 and when they do, when you pressure test it, "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?" it gets revised down appropriately.

I could potentially see myself responding well to this if it was from a manager I already had enough experience with to know and trust, but at that point, I wouldn't really need extra prompting to give honest feedback. If a manager who I only started working with more recently tried this on me, it would probably make me even _more_ hesitant to be candid with them. Not every manager in the world has their employees best interests at heart, and I'm not going to risk rocking the boat if I don't know whether the captain might react by throwing me overboard. Pressuring people to trust when trust hasn't been earned doesn't just magically work; at best, it might result in the appearance of trust, but it will actually just foster resentment that they'll go extra lengths to hide for fear of repercussions.

A similar idea in a group setting is the fist-to-five idea suggested by Marquet. On the count of three, everyone shows either a closed hand (lowest score) or anything up to five fingers (highest score) and then you can discuss both what would get people to a 5, but it's usually also very instructive to dig into why different people make different assessments. (As long as you don't do it in an adversarial way, of course.)

We have a similar feedback system at work, and I'm always wary of giving my true opinions, mostly because of the "beware what you ask for, you might get it" possibility.

What if other people don't give feedback, and my feedback stands out, and in turn management makes decisions based on my feedback and everything gets worse? I don't want to be responsible for management failures, even if only indirectly.

This honestly sounds exhausting. I'm okay with things not being perfect, nothing is.

This is a much better idea for sure.

One has to accept that you cannot verbally discuss everything into being a 10, and take note of some of the risks&issues that get raised. Which re-reading your response.. I think is implied, just not stated.

Another thing is you may also get interrogation fatigue and not always get real participation in this process. Kind of like the agile stuff only works when everyone is buying in, and as soon as people are going through the motions its hours of wasted meetings.

That said, not to be negative here..

This method of collecting feedback in a way that feels low risk, if participated in only sometimes, is way better than the standard methods.

Mine is: No people discussions, how do you feel about the project, if there was one thing that could change in 5 mins what would that be? If there was a very complicated thing that might need years but we could magically change instantly what would that be? Which are open risky things?

> I worked for a guy who must have read a book that told him to ask for feedback, but he was so rigid that he would vehemently defend against any feedback he was given

One of the hardest parts of getting feedback is simply listening. Everyone's nature is to defend. When I get feedback I nod, listen, and try to never sound defensive - even if the feedback feels wrong at the time.

This translates to other areas.

I am working on a new product, my idea and implementation from start to finish.

Yesterday I asked my spouse to use it and tell me what she thought. Anything she had an issue with, I was like a crab - just claw claw claw. One has to resist the impulse.

Yes it translates EVERYWHERE, and it's a strong urge to fight.

> One has to resist the impulse.

One of the best ways I have found to resist the impulse is to own all feedback. If your wife has an issue with something it's either a real issue or you failed to communicate it properly or it's a combination. My wife and I have a relationship where I explain something and she has issues forcing me to rework communication, the something, or a bit of both. Ends up being very helpful.

> The other side to this is - don't ask for feedback if you don't plan to action any of it.

It's fine to ask for feedback without planning to do anything about it. Balancing the feedback of multiple people means sometimes not every opinion can be accounted for.

Being defensive, on the other hand...

If we analyse the sentiment a bit, we discover that there was no point asking for feedback - the course was already locked in and there was nothing to change. The feedback was useless.

Providing feedback has some risk for employees (maybe they'll get blowback) and it is easy for a manager to "ask for feedback" as a power play because they just want to show they can ignore it. It isn't nice to ask unless the intent is to treat the feedback respectfully and act on it.

I can imagine getting surprising feedback that can't be acted on. But that should be genuinely unexpected.

You might not know whether the feedback is worth acting on until you get it. If I ask my friend what he thinks about a new car I'm buying and he says "I don't like the color blue" then I might ignore it. If his feedback is that the transmission on this model explodes after 10,000 miles then I'll change my decision.

You might, but if you are your friend's manager instead of just his friend then you should take the opportunity to get better at asking for feedback to do a better job of managing the relationship.

Because what a manager should take away from that is that they weren't prepared enough - they could have asked "what do you think the most important aspects of buying a car are?" first and if "color" was the answer then either not asked for feedback or asked for feedback on something that would lead to a decision being made. The question was too vague.

If you ask someone for their opinion, learn they don't like blue cars, then ignore it and buy a blue car ... you could do more to be respectful there. You don't need to do special work to respect your friend - presumably the relationship is strong and they can just walk out if they don't think the respect balance is good. But really things are better if a manager respects their reports.

I feel this response. If voicing your opinion is a risk that needs calculating, it's not worth trying. It's sad to see a small team's chat be bullied into a stream of just :eyes: :raising_hands: :party_popper:

I found it difficult when working with American companies, as they can be purified by positivity. A saving grace of software work is the retrospective, those were at least a moment of honesty.

While I do appreciate the upbeat attitude, I found it made people hide small issues to not ruin the vibe, and anyone with major concerns with approach risks getting backbenched.

I have also been really confused by this. It reminds me a bit of a clunky, modified, but also less extreme version of face saving in Eastern cultures.

I can see that, it is definitely a type of saving face I think. Almost like saving face for the team as a whole.

We have a bit of it in Australia but it isn't as hard to pierce the veil. A robust system of banter takes the edge off I guess.

I think it comes down to a 'trust thing'. Managers have to prove to their reports that they are trustworthy. Until the ICs know that the manager will actually listen, let alone do anything, without the ICs job becoming more at risk, then nothing will come out.

As for how to build trust? That's a whole other blog, not just a few posts.

> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it.

"How was school today?" vs. "How was the class discussion on that book you were reading?"

> The "strong ideas loosely held" type guys need to be careful when they become management, because while it may work with peers (if they also love arguing), it doesn't work with a power imbalance. All your "strong ideas" will become "permanently held", congrats.

As someone who loves a verbal spar and almost certainly falls into this category, this one resonates with me and I will be taking it to heart going forward. Thanks for pointing this one out!

The principle also goes hand in hand with opposite-direction feedback.

Instead of "Thanks for the help!" ...

... say "Thanks for stepping in to help diagnose my bug, without being asked. I really benefited from your timely support, and for keeping track of that suspicious Login Field credential validation concern. I lost track of that detail and you held onto it."

It's the snafu principle at work. People in positions where they can ruin other people's lives will generally get told what those other people think they want to hear.

I’ve learned the biggest trap of all is “tell me what you’re really thinking thinking “.

The "does this dress make me look fat" of management interaction.

Yup. I got reprimanded once for replying honestly to this.

I call it “weak ideas, strongly held”

I'd say possibly a plurality of who say "strongly ideas, loosely held" really do mean “weak ideas, strongly held”