Can Honest Feedback Create Good Teamwork? - Reading Powerful

Over the past 4 days, I’ve been bedridden with a bad cold, so I stayed away from computers and read books for the first time in a while. Luckily, the company I’m joining sent me two books — “Lean Startup” and “Powerful” — which saved me time deciding what to read.

For that reason, I first read “Powerful” by Patty McCord, who led Netflix’s corporate culture. The book seemed to provide fairly clear answers to many problems I’d pondered while working at companies.

This book talks about “Freedom and Responsibility,” the corporate culture Netflix pursues, through 8 chapters total. Among them, the part that made me think the most was Chapter 3: “Be Radically Honest.”

Be Radically Honest

Patty McCord says one of Netflix’s core cultural values is “share honest truth” — whether with fellow employees or management, equally.

Netflix’s honesty includes several keywords: “speak directly to the person,” “welcome feedback,” “admit mistakes,” etc. Recently in Korea too, various companies are actively adopting this culture — disclosing company finances to employees or creating atmospheres where people can freely express opinions regardless of rank.

Among the content about honesty in Powerful, the part that made me think a lot was “honest feedback.”

Of course, I think a culture of giving and receiving honest feedback without reservation is great. When feedback given out of genuine desire for each other’s development works healthily, it can raise the quality of members’ learning to high levels.

I have good memories of exchanging such feedback with teammates at my previous job, advising each other and sharing books or articles. In fact, one of my criteria for choosing my workplace during this job change was determined through such feedback.

So is “honesty” really all that’s needed to create this healthy feedback culture?

However, I personally think applying this feedback-giving culture to reality by looking only at the keyword “honesty” is a bit ambiguous. Not impossible, but there are several obstacles to overcome before such a culture successfully settles into an organization.

People Can’t 100% Exclude Emotions When Thinking

When talking about feedback, Patty McCord mainly discusses the “feedback giver’s” perspective. She says things like “don’t think your teammate will ignore or be hurt by your feedback — trust your teammate.”

What disappointed me while reading this book was that it doesn’t really consider the current emotional state of the feedback receiver. Rather, Patty McCord mentions “how to converse without emotion.”

Sure, trying to exclude unnecessary emotions when discussing work is a professional attitude, but is it possible for people to live completely excluding emotions?

Looking at the book’s flow, the emotion Patty McCord refers to must mean negative emotion. But the book doesn’t discuss this directly, and indirectly suggests giving feedback in considerate tones through specific situation examples.

Hmm, since I consider the impact of emotions on teamwork quite important, I want to discuss this more.

As I mentioned once in the What Is a Good Developer? post I wrote last June, emotions are fundamentally the result of hormones secreted after receiving brain signals. In other words, intentionally controlling emotions is never easy for people.

No matter how much it’s a company and official organization, companies are ultimately communities where people gather to achieve something together. As long as people gather to communicate and do something, completely excluding emotions from that is impossible.

So if I had to pick one important point in mutual communication, I’d pick the keyword “respect” first. And within this word respect lies consideration for the other person’s job and emotions.

The problem is that feedback is mostly communication transmitting negative opinions.

Sure, healthy feedback comes from wanting the other person to complement weaknesses and develop further, but how the feedback receiver thinks about it — nobody knows.

No matter how much the hiring process proved someone doesn’t have negative views on feedback, people’s hearts aren’t always consistent. Depending on the day’s situation, they might be in a bad mood, right?

For example, imagine receiving feedback from about 100 people per day while working at the company. Actually, this much feedback doesn’t bother me. Normally I’m the type who produces effects like “let’s complement this weakness” when hearing feedback.

But what if my family suddenly got caught in an investment scam and the house went bankrupt overnight? Could I still accept feedback from 100 people the next day unbothered and have positive thoughts like “I should complement my weaknesses” as usual?

Sure, some people might be able to, but I don’t think I could. The phrase “adding insult to injury” would float into my head, and I’d probably have negative thoughts like “things aren’t going well these days.”

Like this, since people’s hearts aren’t independent of external environments, the same stimulus can produce different reactions depending on the situation. Also, unless I tell others about this situation, other people have difficulty knowing my current psychological state.

Actually, the most difficult problem in communication not just at companies but all organizations is that you can’t know “the other person’s heart” at all. We’re not Protoss communicating through Khala, are we?

Protoss share emotions and thoughts through Khala, but humans don't

Communication with others is difficult because it always proceeds in this uncertainty, and I think that person’s emotions greatly contribute to that uncertainty. For this reason, my previous workplace used a method called “check-in” every morning to express your current condition as a number between 1 and 10.

A healthy feedback culture isn’t created just by the keyword honesty alone. This must be accompanied by a culture that can give feedback while “honestly” and “warmly” considering and respecting others.

Just Give Feedback in a Soft Tone?

After discussing this far, many people might say “so you just need to give feedback in a soft tone?” Actually, this is also an extremely ambiguous part. The standard for “speaking softly” is also subjective per person.

I received feedback about my tone exactly once at my previous workplace. At the time, I was managing a solution called JIRA that all teams used for issue management. One day I looked and noticed boards were being created indiscriminately by team or individual units, making it hard to tell at a glance which were actually used boards and which weren’t.

So I asked each team whether they currently used these boards and backed up and deleted boards no longer in use. The problem occurred when I went to the CX (Customer Experience) team to ask my question.

- Knock knock -
Evan: Excuse me, does the CX team currently use the SCX board?
CX Team Member: Huh…? (surprised) No, we’re not using it right now.
Evan: Okay, thanks.

Since I got confirmation, I backed up and deleted that board. But after some time passed, I received a Slack message from the CX team member asking “did we do something wrong…?”

Receiving the message, I momentarily thought “why…?” But thinking about it a bit, I concluded it made sense. From the CX team’s perspective, a developer suddenly came to their department and asked “are you using this board?” without any context and left.

Plus, considering that developers usually ask other teams such questions when other teams touched something and data got messed up, asking me that question wasn’t strange. From my perspective, I had lots of other work besides that task and was busy, so I just briefly asked about business. But from the listener’s perspective, it must have been confusing. (Thinking back now, my expression was probably stiff too)

Of course, after explaining the circumstances the misunderstanding cleared up, but this incident became a catalyst making me deeply consider communication.

Actually, I knew my own tone wasn’t that soft. So when talking with people who don’t know me well, I pay somewhat attention to my tone. Even when I went to the CX team and asked that question, I’d paid attention in my own way. But the CX team said my tone was too stiff and scary.

Ultimately, “what I perceive” and “what the other person perceives” can differ. For smooth communication, you need to be aware of this fact. And in such cases, no matter how much I paid attention, if the other person felt the tone was stiff, it’s right for me to speak more softly or complement using non-verbal communication like expressions.

“Giving feedback in a soft tone” is ultimately the same. No matter how softly I speak from my perspective, probability always exists that the other person won’t perceive it that way. For a culture of honestly giving and receiving feedback to successfully settle, members’ mature consideration and development of these issues must continuously continue.

Of course, Patty McCord did briefly mention not giving feedback in a “hostile or condescending tone,” but since I personally think consideration and respect for others are equally as important as honesty, I felt disappointed that this book focused too much on just “honesty.”

Feedback Between Management and Employees

Patty McCord says feedback should be given and received regardless of rank, and this feedback mechanism should spread top-down from above. Hmm, but isn’t this realistically the most difficult part?

No matter how much decision-making is delegated to individual practitioners and horizontal communication is pursued, management positions lead the entire company, so they carry greater responsibility and authority than ordinary employees. Plus, for us who’ve lived over 20 years experiencing all kinds of vertical structures — school, part-time jobs, military — the very fact of “horizontal relationships with the CEO” still feels awkward. (This isn’t specifically Korean — it’s universal)

For that reason, from an employee’s perspective, giving feedback to management is honestly burdensome. Sure, many companies pursue horizontal culture and actually practice such culture, but treating someone with the management title comfortably like my colleague is quite difficult.

Making employees feel management are "colleagues" isn't as easy as you'd think

That’s why Patty McCord also said this feedback mechanism must spread top-down to settle. The top-down here doesn’t mean “orders” — it means management should approach first.

Naturally, CEOs of many companies pursuing horizontal culture also know this fact, so they consistently make gestures saying “please treat me comfortably.” But strangely, employees’ hearts often don’t open that easily. What’s the reason?

This is kind of like romance. If you say you love someone with words but only show indifferent behavior to them, can they really believe you love them? Rather, even without saying you love them, if you constantly show warm and considerate behavior, they’d probably believe you more. (Actually, this kind of tsundere might be more attractive)

Likewise, if management really wants horizontal communication and feedback, rather than saying “treat me comfortably,” I think management should approach employees comfortably first, talk about how we have horizontal relationships through periodic education, and practice behaviors like showing positive reactions when actually receiving feedback, steadily building trust with employees.

That trust is: trust that giving feedback to this person won’t disadvantage me, trust that my feedback can be accepted by this person, trust that this feedback can help our entire organization develop.

So looking at companies with cultures of freely giving and receiving feedback regardless of rank, you can see them continuously making efforts — periodically holding town hall meetings to publicly receive employee feedback, CEOs asking about feedback first, conducting feedback education, etc.

In other words, a culture of transparently giving and receiving feedback between employees and management requires not just “honesty” but also the process of building trust with employees by showing management directly making efforts.

Wrapping Up

Patty McCord’s Powerful is a book that entertainingly explains the overall content of “Freedom and Responsibility,” Netflix’s core corporate culture. I also naturally learned the culture of having freedom and responsibility together while working at startups, so I related in many ways.

And I also related a lot to the content about “honesty” that Patty McCord discussed. Things like speaking directly to the person involved rather than talking behind their back, honestly giving and receiving feedback for mutual development, and how everyone in the organization should be able to ask and answer anything about business.

Netflix treats employees as “adults” with professionalism to lead this corporate culture of freedom and responsibility, and makes many efforts to hire such people.

But we mustn’t forget that even adults aren’t emotionless robots.

Actually, professional adults control their own emotions and work with constructive mindsets. But as mentioned above, situations exist where hiding emotions is really difficult. In such times, wouldn’t a warm consolation given with a cup of coffee improve teamwork more than honest feedback?

We work with many people in society, gaining experience, and unconsciously learn not to cross lines that touch others’ emotions. But unconsciously not crossing lines and consciously considering and respecting colleagues are distinctly different.

Colleagues who stimulate each other while working together, colleagues who can solve difficult problems together — these are certainly good. But teamwork doesn’t grow strong just from that alone. I think creating strong teamwork requires human trust in team members to accompany the condition of being excellent colleagues.

That’s all for this post on whether honest feedback can create good teamwork.