Do we really have such poor social skills that candor and niceness are at odds? Really? I get that it can be a difficult goal to achieve both, but goddammit we're all adults here. We should all have developed those skills! Just because you're going to be frank doesn't mean you have to be an asshole about it. This whole idea seems to justify people taking the easy way and putting nice and candid at opposite ends of a spectrum.
While I agree with everything you said, have you (speaking with candor) not been paying attention the past decade or so? A lawsuit-trigger-happy populace coupled with millienials entering the workplace has caused such collective scarring that institutions like academia and workplaces are reacting. We're now equating emotional distress with material injury, and it's having vile reverberations that won't be fully felt for decades. It's censorship wrapped in hip new packaging. It's nightmarish to witness.
This is what happens when children are raised in frictionless environments. The real world doesn't care about your feelings.
We're now equating emotional distress with material injury
This is not the problem; while we can't measure emotional or psychic distress directly we can infer the severity of it by observing the instance of suicide, which is motivated by emotional rather than physical pain. Rather the problem is that reminders of emotional trauma are often carelessly equated with the initial imposition of trauma. It is of course absurd for students in a class about sexual assault and the law to object to the very existence of the subject matter; on the other hand, to dismiss emotional injuries as immaterial is equivalent to saying that it's OK to terrorize someone as long as you don't harm them physically. If someone broke into your bedroom tonight and hold a knife to your throat but them left without any further assault, you woouldn't have suffered any material injury but I am pretty sure you'd have trouble sleeping.
This is what happens when children are raised in frictionless environments. The real world doesn't care about your feelings.
I hear this sort of thing a lot from people who have been through a little bit of friction and now think they're immunized against it. Having grown up in a very high friction environment, I find your argument weak.
(Can't wait for the downvotes)
Don't do this, it's only a step away from trolling and debases the discussion by unilaterally putting it on a confrontational footing.
Well, yes... downvoted because it's the kind of copy-pasted drama mongering you find on r/news, where people pile on millennials and wax about the 'state of the world' because of a small, vocal minority, mainly on college campuses. It's not serious analysis...
There is a huge difference between racism, and telling someone that their idea isn't fully thought out. The social justice movement doesn't care about the latter in the slightest. Discouraging racism and sexism in a workplace isn't censorship any more than discouraging swearing is.
The problem people have with Social Justice is that they are perceived as "going overboard"; they attach the same importance to staring at someone's chest that they would attach to grabbing said chest, which is equated to straight-up rape.
This is, of course, a vocal minority speaking--a group of people who attach their entire self-worth to the idea that they're fighting evil. They can't bear to think that the fight is over, because then their life becomes devoid of meaning, so they insist that the fight must be taken even further.
The issue is further complicated by what I call the Villain Effect. Because the other side is opposed to you, they are evil; therefore, any compromise is immoral. This happens on both sides, leading to a destructive stalemate in which everyone fights for an increasingly extreme version of their original vision, with no end in sight.
In reality managers do stuff like hide their opinions so people will stick around so they can burn them at review time. If someone quits too soon, the manager may have to burn someone they like. How did working get to be so dumb?
Work battles are kinda dumb, but in a way, they aren't dumb-- they're a much smarter and less-deadly form of primitive warfare. We're not perfect today, but ideas like enforcing openness+honesty in a safe environment will drive us even further away from the stone age mentality of physically harming someone who displeases you.
Michael Jensen has been doing some research on the benefits of honesty-- you should check out his controversial research on integrity [0]. I think he'd support the idea of calling out managers who hide their opinions from you. Further, Google has done some HR research[1] that has called "psychological safety" the #1 driver of team effectiveness.
> I think he'd support the idea of calling out managers who hide their opinions from you.
I suspect even the managers would support that... until it's their turn in the barrel.
One of the problems with "treat others how you wish to be treated" is that a lot of people have very funny notions of both how they are treating people and how they would wish to be treated.
Having read (almost all of) Atlas Shrugged, I'd say most of the uproar surrounding it occurs because people don't think about what she means when she preaches that making money is a good thing. The problem is a translation error of sorts; when she talks of "making money", she's referring specifically to creating value, not to (say) abusing patents or trimming an extra 5% off your workforce's wages.
Believing that "making money is a good thing" can be OK.
It's all the other things she said, wrote, and even more so, practiced -- in other word her ethics and ideology -- that make her appalling as an author and as someone people aspire to be like.
Care to explain? As mentioned above, I've only read most of Atlas Shrugged, not all. For instance, I don't know what John Galt's final speech is like.
From what I've seen of AS, she believes that the creation of value is good, and that trying to create a system where effort isn't rewarded will lead to people not putting in effort.
There's also all the discussion of sex in AS, which, assuming it's actually relevant to the story, leads me to believe that Rand thought of emotional and physical pleasure as being two sides of the same coin--that is, there's no shame in either. However, sometimes sex is just sex, to paraphrase Freud.
Not surprised people step up to bat with the strawmen.
Speaking with candor != being a dick. People can supply direct and honest feedback without making it personal. Someone can criticize someone else's code until the cows come home, while also being excellent friends with them outside the workplace.
Of course people can. The question is whether they will.
The idea that people will use trend de jure to justify whatever bad behaviors they already exhibit while not putting any actual effort into self-improvement is, I feel, fairly uncontroversial.
Of course, there's the flip side to this; you can offer constructive criticism to someone without being a dick and they can still take it personally. Some people just can't take any criticism.
Bingo. People need to be able to both offer and receive criticism without involving their ego. Both of these are hard, but i think the latter is considerably harder.
The other interesting aspect is that Dalio is an adherent of Transcendental Meditation and IIRC the principles really sprang his study of TM and Buddhism.
Meditation has also transformed the corporate culture at Bridgewater. Dalio pays for half of the fees for any employee who's interested in learning TM, and the office features meditation rooms and group sessions. The company is also known for its "brutally honest" meetings, and Dalio says meditation helps his employees to adopt an attitude of calm equanimity that helps them to engage in a productive dialogue without reacting emotionally.
Aren't trigger warnings a bit daft? How on earth are you supposed to reasonably account for a universe of possible scenarios that might "trigger" someone.
By the way I say this fully aware that I am privileged to not suffer from, well, whatever triggers actually do to people... ("Feel bad" is all I can figure)
In theory trigger warnings are used rarely, to protect people currently suffering from PTSD. The aim is not to let those people avoid unpleasant situations, but to give them time to prepare and to get support for afterward.
In practice they're used far too often and at unsuitable times, and are used to avoid all discussion of difficult topics, so yes, they've now become a bit daft.
That's a shame, because it means that people who need them don't get them (and are mocked for asking for them); people who don't need them ask for them all the time on anything; and a bunch of vile hateful idiots spew their ignorant bile any time trigger warnings are mentioned.
I do suffer from PTSD and I find trigger warnings deeply unhelpful. If anything, they raise my blood pressure and short circuit the process of reading context for potential stressors, which is IMHO very necessary for managing and eventually recovering from stress.
I see three problems with trigger warnings. One is that some people have developed a habit of writing 'trigger warning for blah' at the beginning of something and then just going on to vent or throw the literary equivalent of a pity party, which readers are implicitly forbidden to criticize in any way. Another is that the worthy purpose of warning others about the potential for offence can easily degenerate into social engineering in the hands of an unscrupulous person. One form of this is to demand special treatment, while another form is to deliberately trigger anxiety in others while evading responsibility for it by pointing to existence of the trigger warning.
The biggest problem by far though is that anything could be triggering to someone - like a perverse version of rule 34, if it exists there is a traumatic version of it. This is the entire basis of the horror movie genre: you take something that looks innocuous and make it into something scary by juxtaposing it with something awful, in order to create suspenseful dread the next time you see the innocuous thing. This is why creature features aren't really horror movies; while it's horrific to depict someone eaten by a shark or a giant bear or whatever, you already know those things are dangerous and if they show up you are in trouble. So while you might feel scared watching Jaws, you knew from the outset that you were (vicariously) going into a hazardous situation, and conversely that you can avoid scary encounters with hungry sharks by not swimming in the ocean or visiting aquariums. But if I show you a movie where, I dunno, playing certain chords on an old piano can summon an evil spirit* and the movie is convincingly scary, then you'll get a little shudder every time you see a piano lurking in the corner of the room.
* this seems like a pretty stupid premise, but in medieval times certain dissonant note combinations were avoided in western church music because the harmonic instability was considered too evil-sounding. A modern parallel is to sing a well-known children's song in a minor key, which invariably sounds creepy.
The original definition of a "trigger" was for PTSD. However, people have begun to use it for anything upsetting, which makes the term less meaningful. It's now used satirically about as often as it is seriously.
(Note: I did not read the article so I can't speak to the GP's point, but this comment isn't really about the article.)
I don't think so. I don't think people are asking for all possible triggering scenarios to be covered. They're asking for people to take some time and consider how others (less privilege || victims of abuse ||etc.) might be affected. A trigger warning is essentially a heads up.
I don't think that there.is any evidence that "the more obvious things" are actually common triggers (on the PTSD sense); there common sources of offense to that works on a more conscious level, but AFAIK that's almost completely unrelated to the mechanisms involved in triggering, even when the subjects involved relate to the source of trauma; it seems more hijacking the very real idea of triggering related to traumatic experience as a means of asserting a privilege against offense.
Now, personalized trigger warnings in a context where particular individuals are known to be sensitive to particular things as triggers make a lot of sense, but AFAICT generalized trigger warnings have no valid basis in anything that has to do with actual triggering, and those pushing them trivialize real trauma-related conditions.
Heh, Randstad advocating candor, who could have guessed. It's a Dutch company, and straight-to-the-point, no-BS candor is one of those Dutch culture things.
Of course you need to strike a careful balance, as Kim Scott aptly defines according to the article: candor = "giving criticism while showing genuine concern".
I don't think the skill is that rare, but I think the application of the skill is rare. There tends to be external factors which might lead a person to be angry which seeps into the criticism as rudeness. I think a lot of people can deliver blunt and direct criticism to a stranger in a cool, calm manner. It's dealing with the familiar people that makes it difficult.
I've watched my Dad do it and it also tends to shock the recipient when they expect some anger, etc.
I think that being able to effectively deliver blunt and direct criticism is rare. There are a lot of moving parts that make up the delivery. (attitude, context, tone, language, relationship, setting) I see people screw it up all the time.
There are two comments in the article, copy-pasted below which roughly summarize why this is a terrible idea.
----
Gene Consbruck:
You had better not front-stab your boss.
Mike Tian:
"niceness", "politeness", or "etiquette" were invented to allow strangers to co-exist with less friction. They are a code of conduct to prevent violence when people lived in clans and tribes. It was a good invention.
Within a trusted circle, you can strip away some of these things and be "brutally honest", and not rupture your relationship.
But in a larger organization, where people are not necessarily your most trusted confidants, such a strategy is likely to massively backfire.
You cannot have "brutal honesty" (e.g. strip away all the social lubricants of politeness) without a deep and abiding trust. Doing so will result in warfare, either open or subtle.
Something my current employer does, which with hindsight is incredibly obvious, is to separate the roles of leader and manager. Leaders guide the day-to-day work, managers guide the careers of employees. I'm the leader of a development team, and while i do spend a lot of time guiding my team as to what to do and how to do it, i don't carry the can for their happiness, professional development, etc. Rather, that's in the hands of various other people in the company [1], who have monthly one-to-ones, collect feedback, give performance reviews, etc.
As a result, one of the people on my team could absolutely front-stab me without fear of the consequences. They could simply say to their manager that i was a shitty team lead. It would then be up to the manager to act on that information, by giving me or my manager that feedback. That's not hypothetical; it's happened (i actually am a shitty team lead).
[1] That's not to say i don't contribute towards that; if the manager of one of the people on my team comes and tells me that that person is keen to learn more about some topic, i'll try to carve out work related to that topic and let that person work on it. But i'm not the prime mover.
> Kim Scott, an executive coach and former Google Inc. executive in online sales and operations, is writing a book about radical candor, which she defines as giving criticism while showing genuine concern.
A key point in the article, radical candor feedback may be blunt but should also be well intentioned, not merely derogatory.
One thing I have wondered is how much cost there is in maintaining a conflict free environment where nobody is ever told the truth? It must be pretty large.
I don't think this is a good idea. The point of a company is to execute the business plan and create revenue and profit by doing so. Requiring brutal honesty of employees doesnt help this. As an employee, you're supposed to play into your role as a cog in the machine. Your honest opinions don't matter very much.