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Where does our obsession with feedback come from? “Please give me feedback!” “Here’s a feedback form, please fill it in!” “The first 10 feedback submissions get a sticker!” And as we wait for feedback to trickle in, we read books on receiving books well, such as “Thanks for the
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“I think what you’re attempting to do here is really great...” “But…?” “Right… but I think it’s not going to work.” This is one of those classic aha moments when people first learn about it during some communication training: if there’s a “but” in your communication, people
Writing about the detrimental effects of rewards in No More Rewards [https://zef.plus/no-more-rewards/], one thing kept nagging at me. A few weeks earlier we had held a virtual conference for our company and community called MatterCon [https://handbook.mattermost.com/contributors/mattercon]. One of the highlights for me
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In 2008 the world went through a severe financial crisis. A large part of our economy collapsed, in large part because financial institutions had created a pretty unsustainable system of mortgage-backed securities. It was pretty bad. Fingers were pointed; new rules put in place; people yelled at. “Oh them financial
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> “It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” ― Steve Jobs Any book that covers management at some point has to mention Frederick Taylor’s Scientific management [https://en.
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Think of the three people in your organization that you consider your top performers. The three people that if they’d tell you they’d quit, they would leave a significant hole in your organization. Got them in mind? Alright, now pick one of them, and compare them to their
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There are all sorts of reasons for managers to dread performance reviews. For one, it’s a lot of work. In preparation you need to request people to send peer feedback, write peer feedback for others, and write your own self reflection. Then comes the real fun part: the judgment,
Feedback
One of the key ideas of Nonviolent Communication [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication] is to remove judgment from our language when we want to communicate constructively. I gave an example of this in Judgment is a Silent Killer [https://zef.me/musing/judgment-is-a-silent-killer/]: > I shared feedback with
A year or two ago I read “Creative Selection,” [https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Process-ebook/dp/B079DVT6VP/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=] a book that gives some insight into how Apple operated internally during the “golden age” of Steve Jobs. It’s a worthwhile read
About a decade ago, a friend of mine, Nina (not her actual name), disappeared into a religious cult. Nina broke with her family in a pretty destructive way. After a few years, we heard she had had a child with a cult leader. Her parents never met their grandchild. Until
I needed a distraction, so a while ago I decided to spend a few hours learning React Native [https://reactnative.dev/]. React Native is an environment to build native mobile applications for multiple platforms at once, based on the popular React.js library [https://reactjs.org/]. One thing really blew
> If you would have to make a hiring decision for an engineer based on just one attribute, what would it be? This is a question that was asked to me by a candidate during our recruitment process. That was a first. I’m involved, generally, in two steps in