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scott_w 3 days ago

> Punishing in public

Honestly, the "praise public, reprimand privately" truism that people learn is, along with the shit sandwich, one of the most harmful maxims in management.

There are situations where, as the leader, the team needs to see you act. Let's take an example of someone speaking to another team member in an inappropriate way. If you reprimand privately, nobody knows you did that. Now, you have a team that thinks it's ok (or is raging that you think it's ok) to talk to each other in that way. If you call it out publicly, now everyone knows it's not.

It is a double-edged sword, though. I'd not put a junior on full blast for introducing a bug, or a team member for missing an issue in a code review. That would send completely the wrong message.

mvkel 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's not one or the other, but should align with the culture. Like the old board chair of Starbucks said: if you're going to be an asshole, be a really good one.

scott_w 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It's not one or the other

I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or not, given that was the gist of my comment.

mvkel 3 days ago | parent [-]

Not disagreeing, but adding a cultural context. So if your culture is a trading floor like boiler room, sure, shame publicly, all day long. Maybe not at a cancer nonprofit

scott_w 3 days ago | parent [-]

I think there's more nuance to what I'm saying: it's not just based on your company culture but on the situation you're faced with. Let's make my example more concrete. Let's say a member of your team calls another team member stupid for an honest mistake, in a public setting (so was witnessed by the rest of your team). Telling that person there and then "that's a disrespectful way to speak to a colleague and is against our values" will:

a) Demonstrate to all witnesses that the behaviour is not in line with your values

b) Make the victim of the behaviour feel seen and know they aren't alone

c) Make clear to the person receiving the feedback that you're unhappy

To achieve this same result in private conversations is monumentally more effort, if not impossible. If you pull them into a private conversation, you're still publicly reprimanding them, just without giving clear communication to everyone. Do you wait until later to reprimand in private? Then you need to speak to everyone about what was said and repair the damage that the delay in speaking up caused.

However, there are plenty of situations where calling out something so publicly would be the wrong thing to do, like pushing bugs to production, as you'd likely be seen to be overreacting. You still want to give the feedback if, say, the team member was ignoring processes. It's just usually better done in private.

3 days ago | parent | prev [-]
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