Probably just a pat on the back :-/ but I don't know since they were employed at a different company.
Nevertheless, my feedback towards their team lead was very positive, and that might have helped them too since they both collected a bunch of negative feedback while working with some of my colleagues.
Positive feedback is great in reinforcing good behavior, for sure. I think the difference is when positive feedback about a coworker is directed towards management which, since there's an adversarial nature underlying most workplaces, you are acting as someone else's public relations spokesperson for free. I'm not saying that people should never point out the excellence of their coworkers to management; what I'm saying is that the mechanics of the workplace make this behavior rare and simply not worth the effort in most cases. The safest thought pattern for one's sanity is to give praise, but never expect that praise to be reciprocated.
Sounds like a dysfunctional workplace, or at least a very bad manager, if one has to secretly help colleagues. I'd leave that boss or job as soon as possible.
Giving praise should always be OK. Rephrasing feedback for bad work as praise also sounds like a bad idea. In my experience, negative feedback should be honest, clear, constructive, and private.
I had this team where during the retrospective we would each list good and bad points of the sprint (yes, it was agile, and that part of the whole religious process was the only one that I found useful).
After a while, we would all start the sentences with "I am happy because ..." and "I am not so happy because...", and it became customary to have some "happy" points to compensate for the complaints. And there we all started thanking colleagues of the team. "I am happy because Alexia helped me doing this", or simply "I am happy because Bernard is back from holiday". It was a post-it thing, so when coming back from holiday, you would usually get a post-it from everyone.
We were not collecting them, counting them or showing them to a manager, it was just internal to the team. We would quickly ignore them and move to the bad points (group them, vote for the 3 most important ones, and define actions to solve them). It just felt nice, and I think it was a nice (small but regular) team building moment.
I don't believe in managers: I imagine that they would probably just start counting the reviews, creating some bullshit metrics and ranking the employees. I don't want that. I thank my coworkers when I can to make them feel good, not to make them look good to the manager.
The company I'm with now uses something called 15five.com, every two weeks we have to "checkin" which involves answering a set of boiler-plate questions:
* How do you feel? (1-5)
* What are you struggling with?
etc. One of the (required) inputs is a space where you enter a colleague's name to publicly praise them.
As praising somebody is mandatory it feels a bit meaningless, but still "Thanks to @BobSmith for being great to work with" probably makes Bob feel a bit happier for a while when this gets highlighted to them.
It's not about getting a pat on the back, that kind of praise is meaningless and awkward. What is good to hear is that you're still providing value to the company and that what you're working on aligns with their goals. Knowing that can be the difference between getting promoted or getting laid off.
Many people, when done a favor, want to repay it. So when you praise a person to their boss, they're more likely to be on the lookout for opportunities to praise you in return.
Speaking from my own experience, I tend to be a quiet person who doesn't say much. However, since joining my current team, and having consistently received compliments from both managers and teammates (and seen the same getting passed around to others), it has lead me to make a point of looking for opportunities to do the same. It's become the norm to compliment others on their good work, and passing that up the chain and through official channels when the opportunity presents itself.
Interesting perspective. Personally, I would find effusive praise of that kind profoundly weird, and uncomfortable, because it doesn't fit into the framework of mostly male-male communication I'm used to(relatively traditional, tinged with some ex-military vibes). In large part, the sign of doing a good job is the absence of criticism. Since you could almost always improve on your performance, there tends to always be some level of criticism.
Maybe I'm weird, but external validation doesn't really push any of my buttons. If you think I really did a great job, give me a bonus, or an extra day or two of vacation. Otherwise, I've got work to do.
While I really like the sentiment, I think there's a reason why people naturally don't provide much positive feedback about individuals at workplaces.
What do you really get by pointing out the good work of a coworker? A warm fuzzy feeling, to be sure. Maybe greater comradeship. But wait, who's the next person to get a promotion? Maybe it'll be the person you keep praising to management. So you'll probably have to work smarter/harder to get that same praise, hence the same chances at promotion. But you don't want to work that much harder; you're already working hard enough as it is. But that 5% raise and that "senior" title look pretty shiny. <one year later> Hey, how come nobody has been recognizing you for your good work? Meanwhile that coworker you've been praising is now your boss!
Might be a bit of selection bias too. The people who had a neutral-positive reaction may not feel like they have much to add beyond "thanks" or "nice job", which sometimes feel like platitudes.
> Like others have said, effect of praise would be very specific to individuals, but some have said praise hasn't helped them much.
My understanding is that they were mostly referring to "fake" / superfluous praise, which I too respond quite badly to. But I think there's a big range between that kind of praise and no praise at all. Personally for me (and my guess is that for many people), if no matter how hard I work that's never acknowledged and I always get suggestions for improvement, that would create frustration and a feeling of unreasonable expectations from the company.
At $WORK we actually have a "kudos" column in our biweekly retrospectives specifically for shout-outs to coworkers who were particularly helpful. I think it's a good idea.
Yeah, we had a little "thanks" program at work that had similar issues. People tended to just reciprocate praise, because it didn't cause any drama, and both people made out.
Baffling on the face of it, but I think he answered that question when he said he wanted to be paid a compliment. I took that to mean he just wanted reassurance that he and his company did not come across in a negative light. Maybe they weren't the best, but at least it would be reassuring to know they didn't "suck".
In a previous company, there was a feature in the intranet to give kudos to other people. Everyone in the company could see a kudo as a post in the global intranet "chat" sidebar (not really chat, more like a communal facebook wall of sorts that would bump posts to the top any time anyone commented on them)
You could give as many kudos as you wanted, and it had zero impact on performance appraisal/raises, but it sure gave people the warm and fuzzies reading about random mini-stories of someone going above and beyond here and there.
I think it was pretty effective at fostering a culture of collaboration, and it also helped surface issues-masked-as-heroics, such as people working chronically late on some projects. It also gave greater visibility to the existence and importance of the various departments, which one might not have gotten an appreciation of otherwise.
Similarly, I got a shoutout/tag on a PR that used some of my code. It made my day, and made me assume that the org the engineer works in must be a pretty good place to work.
Nevertheless, my feedback towards their team lead was very positive, and that might have helped them too since they both collected a bunch of negative feedback while working with some of my colleagues.
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