Tag: Feedback

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Being Nice vs. Professional

Providing employees and coworkers with feedback can be difficult to balance.

You don’t want to discourage people, but you also want them to improve and grow.

I have been struggling with giving feedback the last year and have been researching radical candor techniques. I share some of those tools and concepts in this video.

Six Steps of Radical Candor:
Radical Candor is a leadership principle that involves being direct, honest, and respectful with your feedback to others. Here are some ways you can apply Radical Candor feedback:

  1. Be direct and clear: Communicate your expectations clearly and give specific feedback on what they’re doing well and where they need to improve.
  2. Show you care personally: Show that you care about the people you work with as individuals, not just as employees. Take an interest in their lives and well-being.
  3. Encourage open communication: Create an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas, and actively listen to what they have to say.
  4. Provide regular feedback: Provide regular, timely feedback, both positive and negative. This will help people understand how they’re doing and where they need to improve.
  5. Lead by example: Practice what you preach. Model the behavior you expect from others and be open and transparent in your own communication.
  6. Be respectful: Always communicate with respect, regardless of the situation or the person. Avoid personal attacks or criticism and focus on the behavior or action that needs improvement.
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News You Can Use: 1/22/2020


Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

  • ‘Culture of venting’: How agencies manage gossip in the workplace

    This culture of venting is also driven by another, more difficult to pin down, force: the very ways people are working today. People are spending more time at work. For individuals who are just entering the workforce, the lines between “work” and “not work” are blurred. Work friends are also regular friends. That means that work-life discussions are also discussions between friends. This can be good for workplace bonding but potentially problematic if it leads to the rapid spread of misinformation.

    Agencies have been doing more to detect and respond to problematic “gossip.” TBWA/Chiat/Day has purchased IBM’s Social Pulse software so as to monitor public channels and posts for potential red flags or specific sentiments. The Martin Agency uses a feedback survey tool called TinyPoll to ask employees quick anonymous questions to identify what exactly workers are concerned about. At another agency, its communications and PR teams peruse the app Fishbowl, as part of the morning routine.

    https://digiday.com/marketing/culture-venting-agencies-manage-gossip-workplace/

  • ‘Techlash’ Hits College Campuses

    At this year’s Golden Globes, Sacha Baron Cohen compared Mark Zuckerberg to the main character in “JoJo Rabbit”: a “naïve, misguided child who spreads Nazi propaganda and only has imaginary friends.”

    That these attitudes are shared by undergraduates and graduate students — who are supposed to be imbued with high-minded idealism — is no surprise. In August, the reporter April Glaser wrote about campus techlash for Slate. She found that at Stanford, known for its competitive computer science program, some students said they had no interest in working for a major tech company, while others sought “to push for change from within.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/style/college-tech-recruiting.html

  • How to criticize, from a critic
  • The Humble Office ID Badge Is About to Be Unrecognizable

    Researchers are developing a technology called gait recognition, which uses cameras to identify people based on their body shape and how they move, and say it could one day be implemented in U.S. offices. In places with especially tight security, such as workplaces that handle hazardous materials or heavy machinery, several different ID technologies could be linked to repeatedly identify workers as they move around, says Vir Phoha, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Syracuse University. Video cameras might recognize people’s faces as they enter a building, and later analyze how they walk to identify them again. Software could assess an employee’s typing to verify whether it’s the same person identified earlier in the day.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-humble-office-id-badge-is-about-to-be-unrecognizable-11578333651

  • Sloped Toilet Aims to Curb Employee Bathroom Time

    In a recent Wired article (via BBC News), Mahabir Gill, the founder of the England-based company, StandardToilet, said that his company has created a toilet with a seat that slopes at a 13-degree angle, making it just uncomfortable enough to encourage sitters to vacate after about five minutes of use. Gill told Wired that there are many reasons a time-limiting toilet could be beneficial for people, but ultimately made no bones about it: The reason he and his team made this toilet is to cut down on the amount of time employees spend in the bathroom, and therefore improve a given company’s bottom line. (Insert “bottom line” pun here for all of you who can’t resist the urge.)

    The sloping toilet works exactly as one would expect it to, essentially forcing its occupant into a mild crouch position, which puts a low-level strain on a series of their muscles, including those in their thighs, hips, and calves. As time moves on, the position becomes less and less comfortable, thusly compelling a user to finish their business and stand. Gill told Wired that the mildly uncomfortable position encourages workers “to get off the seat quickly,” although he also said that it’s not steep enough “to cause health issues.” He did note, however, that any seat sloped more than 13 degrees “would cause wider problems.”

    https://nerdist.com/article/sloped-toilet-curb-bathroom-time/

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News You Can Use: 12/18/2019


Photo by Antonino Visalli on Unsplash

  • Administrative assistant jobs helped propel many women into the middle class. Now they’re disappearing.

    The United States has shed more than 2.1 million administrative and office support jobs since 2000, Labor Department data shows, eroding what for decades had been a reliable path to the middle class for women without college degrees.

    The job losses affecting administrative assistants, bookkeepers, clerks, data entry specialists, executive assistants and secretaries have largely continued even as the economy recovered from the Great Recession, suggesting these jobs aren’t coming back.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/administrative-assistant-jobs-helped-propel-many-women-into-the-middle-class-now-theyre-disappearing/2019/12/04/75686efe-f6a0-11e9-a285-882a8e386a96_story.html

  • Tech recruiters were once welcomed on campus. Now they face protests

    At universities across the country, including Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Duke, Carnegie Mellon and Brown, students have staged protests at recruiting events and demonstrated against tech companies that do business with ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection, including Microsoft, Palantir and Salesforce. They have called out Amazon for marketing its facial-recognition technology to immigration authorities and hosting Palantir on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

    Some 3,000 students from 30 schools signed a document pledging they would not work at Palantir until it severs its contracts with ICE; roughly 800 people signed a petition calling on the dean of UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department to drop its partnership with Palantir.

    It’s not clear whether these tactics are having a significant impact on recruitment.

    https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-12-07/students-protest-tech-companies-ice-contracts

  • What skills will set you apart in the age of automation?
  • 6 lies you probably tell yourself about giving feedback at work

    You only need to begin documenting notes for legal purposes if you’ve given the person much face-to-face feedback for several months, and they show no sign of improvement. In my research as a performance coach, I’ve learned 95% of employees can (and will) improve any skill with your honest, frequent coaching. Just talk to people! Be open, be honest, and give them helpful examples and ideas. When they realize you’re on their side, they’ll ask for more feedback. Have confidence in yourself. If you provide feedback to everyone all the time, it will be much easier to prepare written documentation that you might need later.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90436990/6-lies-about-feedback-that-you-need-to-stop-believing

  • How to Insult Your Enemies More Effectively

    The more creative you’re getting, the easier you can slip up. Years ago, I wrote a bad blog post, and commenters were roasting it. I retorted that they were misreading it. I didn’t want to tell them “learn to read” because it didn’t quite fit. So I came up with “Learn to parse.” That, of course, is lame as hell, something that kid from the “you frickin fricks!” video would say.

    I’d just made things much worse for myself. If your insults become illegible, overwrought, or sloppy, you’ll lose. And that’s not the only way you can self-own here.

    https://lifehacker.com/how-to-insult-your-enemies-more-effectively-1839501124