Incredibly Inspiring & Actionable Advice by @whereistanya & @SarahM for Staff+ & EM+ People.
Conventional wisdom for feedback is to praise in public and criticize in private, but there will times when its vital that you speak up & say something in public.
A story on this…
@whereistanya @SarahM Will not mention the company name…
Back there, we had a public “backchannel” slack channel that was used mainly by Senior Engs to make fun or complain about things that were being presented in big engineering or department meetings such as all hands, quarterly OKR plannings…
It was all bad as usual, but nobody would do anything about it. At the end of the day, “it was fun.”
It was all good up until in one of the OKR meetings the thing went out of control… While one of the female PMs was presenting, an engineer made a comment there saying…
I don’t remember exactly, but was something along the lines:
“My favorite color is pink, our OKR will be to make everything pink.”
And a bunch of other engineers started to react with all kinds of emojis on slack, and many went along and did their many +1s…
One of the Tech Leads sent that message to our VP that was actually presenting, once he saw that, he immediately pinged all the directors and without thinking twice joined the channel and wrote a huge message replying to the offensive message and the vibe of that channel..
Not only he confronted the engineers that tried to argue that was a joke with multiple replies back in forth on the public channel, next day he scheduled individual “feedback 1:1:1” with all engineers that reacted with emojis to that entire group of messages.
On all the 1:1:1s we had with all engineers that engaged on that discussion, he would start by explaining why that kind of comment was offensive and how that was against our culture and values.
After engineers realized how bad it was, they would apologize and thank him.
We even had an engineer crying once he realized how big of a problem it was.
After that day, I don’t remember ever seen another instance of that kind of behavior in any slack channel during a big department meeting.
It took a lot of our VP energy, but he definitely made a mark
Those were really tough conversations we had.
Although some more self-aware Senior Engineers quickly realized their mistake and took ownership apologizing, we had to argue back and forth with some of them a lot.
It’s super exhausting and energy draining to all involved.
After 3 rounds of individual feedback sessions with senior engineers, we mastered the message and I remember one line being almost unarguable:
- If a recently hired new grad saw this message, would we want them to be “inspired by” and to replicate this behavior?
“What is the impact of this behavior in future generations?”
Do we want more people doing this or less in the future?
After those three questions, I don’t think we got a single Senior Engineer defending on what happened.
Thiago Ghisi
@thiagoghisi
🤹♂️Director of Engineering @Nubank. Ex-Apple. Ex-TW. 🇧🇷in🗽. 🎙Co-Host @EngAdvicePod. 📚🐛. 💡Sharing Tech Career Growth Tips & Eng. Leadership Insights👇