Suppressing Negative Feedback Basically Requires Shit-Talking
Accept direct criticism, or face a world that has learned to avoid you
Effective teamwork requires communication norms that empower the delivery of well-constructed, actionable feedback directly to the people who need to hear it.
As I’ve become a more experienced recipient and author of feedback, I’ve learned to re-frame situations where co-workers complain about the behavior of someone else on their team as “feedback workshopping” interactions that have gone on too long and are beginning to fester. Sometimes people delay delivering negative feedback directly to an individual who needs to hear it because that individual has broadcast an explicit desire not to receive negative feedback from their peers.
I want to offer an argument for why explicit requests of this kind — to not be subjected to direct negative feedback — are bad, because I think understanding this extreme ask helps highlight why strong feedback norms in general are so important.
Say you’re building a cool data visualization project with your friend Oscar. Oscar works hard, has lots of relevant domain knowledge, but often unaccountably drops entire categories of work that he has committed to taking on for your team. Imagine that Oscar has also explicitly told you that he believes in his ability to learn quickly, improve on his mistakes, and finds that being given direct negative feedback often just makes him de-motivated and disengaged from his work. Oscar confides in you that he doesn’t want advice on how he can improve his work even after the team has finished building its visualization site, because he thinks that it will only mutually strain his relationship with your co-workers.
Oscar’s ask might seem reasonable on its face: You don’t want to demotivate him, and although he does sometimes leave you hanging on important parts of your project together, he’s hard-working and you can work around his failures when collaborating with him. Oscar might be conscious that he is unusually self-critical, or he might be used to receiving poorly-structured negative feedback.
However, I think requests of this kind should always be declined, as they are almost guaranteed to be against the requestor’s true self-interest. There’s a key reason why: the absence of feedback norms, and the presence of honesty (in the “no lies of commission” sense), requires the existence of blacklists.
Say that, long in the future, after your project with Oscar has finished and you’ve all moved on to other work, someone comes to you and asks “Should I co-found this new organization with Oscar?” You’re now in a tough position. You’d be lying to this person if you said “Yes!” unequivocally, without mentioning Oscar’s tendency to constantly miss deadlines and ignore plans. However, if you did tell the person asking what you honestly think, you’d be giving the asker criticism of Oscar that you haven’t given to Oscar himself, because of Oscar’s stated preference to not receive direct feedback. The blanket term I’d offer for this latter situation is a “blacklist”: negative feedback that becomes common knowledge about an individual that they are not aware has become common knowledge.
Unwanted negative feedback is bad, but I think blacklists are almost unimaginably worse. They come in gradations, and can start slowly: people might start out by joking about how unreliable Oscar is when he isn’t around, they might themselves avoid working with him again, they might hesitate to recommend him when someone asks for a connection with precisely Oscar’s skillset. If things get bad enough, a blacklist becomes a generic “bad reputation.” Oscar becomes widely known for being difficult to work with and flakey when he makes commitments. This shared common knowledge is a way for the community around Oscar to adapt to his flaws without him even being given an explicit opportunity to improve, as is his stated preference.
Shielding himself from direct feedback also, counterintuitively, makes Oscar personally responsible for minor flaws that might otherwise have been easily forgiven. This is because the absence of information that one’s own behavior is considered “bad” by others removes the possibility of having been bad intentionally, with malign intent. To me, if a person hasn’t been told that they’re doing something wrong, they’re not yet entirely responsible for their actions, in a moral sense.
Thus, explicitly asking to never receive direct feedback is equivalent to explicitly asking to never be held to account for your actions. It’s saying, “If I’m doing something wrong that is harming others, I want to always be kept in the state where that harm cannot be my fault.” It short circuits the entire process of assigning and claiming responsibility, both for past harms and future improvement. By implication, declining to receive direct negative feedback makes even those mistakes that an individual is oblivious to also their fault.
Thus, asking collaborators to commit lies of omission when interacting with you is requiring them to either: 1. Commit lies of commission when interacting with others or 2. Asking to be placed on a blacklist.
Thanks to Emily Liu for reading and editing this post