THE LEAFLET
February 20 2025
a sign of strong feedback culture, anxiety vs management, praise and shame
ONE SIGN YOUR FEEDBACK CULTURE IS STRONG
If you can give good feedback in very few words, it’s likely that your feedback culture is strong. Concision is an indicator of strength.
I’m defining “good” feedback here as feedback that:
Improves the performance of the recipient
Reflects the values of the team / organization
Fortifies (even super incrementally) the relationship between giver and recipient
I’ve written here before about leaders and colleagues who could steer me, after lots of reps between us, with terse emails or head nods. The single word “this” or an arched eyebrow were enough to meet the three criteria above.
By contrast, I’ve been on teams where nearly any delivery of feedback takes a ton of words, arrives through a clunky, standardized process, and issues from some complicated emotional labor.
Excellent news is that you and your team can start in that slow, expensive, and rather tortured place and arrive in a cheap, concise, and rhythmic place. Getting from A to B usually requires a leader modeling both sides of the feedback exchange and insisting on others following the model. The insistence is most legible (and obeyed) when it takes the form of feedback, especially praise.
In other words: ya gotta tell people you expect them to give the feedback, then give them feedback on doing so. You can also be the one who gives permission for the feedback to be short, fast, and raw.
-eric
Read the rest here.
ANXIETY vs MANAGEMENT
When you’re contemplating a meaningful move, you might feel a whole pile of anxiety. You’re alert to the ways things could go badly, no matter what you decide. (Tim Urban illustrates this here for decisions about partnership / marriage). Emotionally, this can feel like weight on the shoulders, or chest, or gut. Postponing the decision is seductive - wouldn’t it be clearer and feel better with the benefit of more time, data, points of view, caffeine, &c &c? This doesn’t work - now you just have more weights and counter-weights cantilevered around your poor head and heart. The decision gets even heavier somehow.
Once you decide, though, things change. Now you’ve got a different sphere of concern. You’re not peering nervously into the crystal ball, trying to see things your eyes aren’t built to see. You’re handling the consequences of the decision. You’re in the relationship, or raising the child, or re-assigning the projects of the employee you let go. You’re managing.
English doesn’t have a verb for anxiety. “Worry” and “fret” don’t really do it - they’re too cute. Romance languages have reflexive verbs for this job and for me there’s a little spiritual lesson in those verbs. In French: “s’angoisser”; Spanish: “angustiarse”; Italian: "angosciarsi”. If you translate these back into English, they’re all saying something like “to anguish oneself”. They’re rooted in the Latin angustia, for narrowness or tightness.
In the fraught time before your decision, all the layers of your analysis may narrow you, despite your reach for greater perspective. Maybe the object of your anxiety isn’t the decision or its predictable consequences or the invisible catastrophes that lay beyond it. The object of your anxiety is you. You’re anguishing yourself.
On the other side, things decided, the object of your feeling and action is something beyond you, outside of you. You’ll have new worries but they’ll be more tractable. You’ll be able to lay hands on them, make plans, act. Your intellect and skills, pointed out at the work to be done, now have the power to navigate, rather than narrow.
If there’s advice hiding here, maybe the advice is
Part 1: “when you’re facing the decision and feeling its weight, remember and look forward to the worries of management that wait for you on the other side. You’re good at handling those. Management is more fun and more effective than anxiety.”
Part 2: “is there a cheap way to get to Management? Run a pilot, shrink the scope, ship the rough draft - bring this thing you’re considering out of yourself and into the world, so you can see it and revise it and ask others to do that, too.”
-eric
Read the rest here.
PRAISE AND SHAME
We could bet most reasonable people would agree that a person benefits from hearing authentic praise of their work - praise that is accurate and not exaggerated. Yet, most of those same reasonable people would not easily identify as an individual who benefits from hearing praise and wants to receive it. “People in general benefit from this, but I’m not one of them. At the least, I don’t really need it.”
In my view, this is completely shame-based. We seem to have a socialized need to de-identify with our common, even innate, responsiveness to praise. For many, to say “I'm a person who benefits from praise” is the same as saying, “I'm a person who's desperate to belong and who doesn't feel he does.” Leaders get caught up in that characterization and project this attitude onto others they lead and work with.
Leaders are often averse to giving praise because it is
complicatedly bound up with our own feelings of shame and
we feel that to suggest that somebody deserves it is to suggest that they need it, which is to suggest that they are shameful or shamed.
With this said, I think we're growing past this. Perhaps Gen Z and Alpha are doing more explicit acknowledgement of their need for and interest in praise, without shame. They can say, “I'm a person who benefits from having strengths recognized, even if I've been demonstrating them for a long time.”
A gift leaders can offer their teams is modeling the giving and receipt of praise, normalizing it and stripping it of associations with shame or questions about our fundamental worthiness. We are worthy. Enjoying praise for our strengths, needing that praise, doesn’t diminish that worthiness in any way.
-ben
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Runner and novelist Haruki Murakami on selfhood in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:
This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.
Historian Alan Taylor on disillusionment amid revolution in American Revolutions:
Attacking the colonial order as artificial and corrupt, Patriots promised an equal and open competition for property and office. Merit rather than connections would reap wealth and leadership. But like the paternalism favored by Loyalists, Patriots described an elusive ideal that they often compromised in practice. Interests and connections persisted in the new order, as in the old empire, but in a more egalitarian guise. Those contradictions disgusted some common people, who preferred the elitism of leading Loyalists as more honest and transparent. Common men could despise those who suddenly waxed powerful as committeemen or grew rich as contractors by so busily embracing the revolt.
Novelist William Faulkner on failing to see people in Absalom, Absalom!:
We see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric