Hacker News Reader

Comment by _adamb | 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"

View on HN

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com