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by b9a2cab5 1688 days ago
Unfortunately people are very conflict averse and will avoid giving that sort of feedback if it means an uncomfortable conversation (particularly if whoever came up with the process is still employed). Even anonymous surveys are not really that useful because the most useful criticism stays exclusively inside peoples' heads.

As a manager you have to have really good EQ to be able to read this sort of stuff implicitly from your employees because it's usually not coming out explicitly.
1 comments
commandlinefan 1688 days ago
> people are very conflict averse and will avoid giving that sort of feedback

I'm not (that) conflict averse - I'm perfectly happy to suggest, when asked, that we could deliver better results faster if we could spend some time fixing some non-customer facing problems, had better tools, and had a testing environment that was closer to the production environment. I have no trouble saying those things, but I've never seen any action taken on any of them.

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justin_oaks 1688 days ago
Indeed. The learned helplessness comes in after you try make improvements over and over again, and still no action is taken. You assume, usually correctly, that you're helpless to effect change so you give up.

The main driver of learned helplessness is those who refuse to listen to feedback or act on feedback.

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