|
|
|
|
|
|
by hitekker
3823 days ago
|
|
|
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.