[0xfffafaCrash]

> At PostHog, our approach is to have feedback dinners with the entire team. It gives everyone a chance to share feedback with each other in front of the rest of the team.

Yeah, this can’t generally be sound advice. Feedback that can be interpreted as critical is best delivered in private. There may be the rare constellation of individuals who take it very well in a team setting, but that is not a norm. If you have intense amounts of history, trust, emotional intelligence, and communication skills and extremely low ego and office politics this might work — more likely the guy who pushes for this and thinks this works thinks of themselves as emotionally intelligent but actually aren’t and is extremely oblivious to how much damage they are causing to morale and team dynamics.

I have heard of similar approaches being used at e.g. Nvidia and elsewhere for top leadership to allow everyone to learn from each others mistakes but there are cultural requirements here, as well as factors including the degree of personal stakes in successful outcomes at the group level, and the nature of the hierarchy and selection/exclusion process for members.

What you often do want to encourage (typically through example) is people choosing to celebrate the sharing of individual learnings from failure in group settings. The ability to be vulnerable and take accountability for mistakes while sharing those mistakes in a way others can learn from them can be highly valuable and build trust.

[mistercow]

I think this is also a property of relationships rather than just individuals, and for that reason, it's not something that will scale. It's especially fraught when you add someone new to a team that's already very high trust about feedback, particularly if that person is especially insecure and/or has had bad experiences where they felt humiliated by public feedback in the past.

That exact same person might have done fine with public feedback had they been there from the beginning, but you can't just toss someone into an established dynamic and expect them to have the same level of trust as the founding members.

Also -- and this is a thing that a lot of companies/teams who strive for ultra high emotional trust seem to neglect -- some people do act in bad faith. When you lean too hard into the "bring your authentic self" school of thought, you strip your team of crucial emotional protections that corporate environments are designed to provide, and all it takes is one high-functioning person with deep seated personality issues (and that describes a large portion of the general population) to cause serious emotional damage in that kind of environment. Even if you have leadership with the abnormally high emotional intelligence and agility to navigate and repair that damage when it happens, it's going to be an enormous drain on them.

[SilasX]

Yeah that was my reaction as well. The post goes on to insist that, despite this intuition, it still generates good feedback, but … for the same reasons you give, I have to doubt that self report too.

All the other points seem solid, though.