I don’t have research management experience in particular, but I have a lot of knowledge work (in particular software engineering) management experience.
IMO, giving insufficient positive feedback is a common, and damaging, blind spot for managers, especially those (like you and me) who expect their reports to derive most of their motivation from being intrinsically excited about their end goal. If unaddressed, it can easily lead to your reports feeling demotivated and like their work is pointless/terrible even when it’s mostly good.
People use feedback not just to determine what to improve at, but also as an overall assessment of whether they’re doing a good job. If you only give negative feedback, you’re effectively biasing this process towards people inferring that they’re doing a bad job. You can try to fight it by explicitly saying “you’re doing a good job” or something, but in my experience this doesn’t really land on an emotional level.
Positive feedback in the form “you are good at X, do more of it” can also be an extremely useful type of feedback! Helping people lean into their strengths more often yields as much or more improvement as helping them shore up their weaknesses.
I’m not particularly good at this myself, but every time I’ve improved at it I’ve had multiple reports say things to the effect of “hey, I noticed you improved at this and it’s awesome and very helpful.”
That said, I agree with you that shit sandwiches are silly and make it obvious that the positive feedback isn’t organic, so they usually backfire. The correct way to give positive feedback is to resist your default to be negatively biased by calling out specific things that are good when you see them.
I don’t have research management experience in particular, but I have a lot of knowledge work (in particular software engineering) management experience.
IMO, giving insufficient positive feedback is a common, and damaging, blind spot for managers, especially those (like you and me) who expect their reports to derive most of their motivation from being intrinsically excited about their end goal. If unaddressed, it can easily lead to your reports feeling demotivated and like their work is pointless/terrible even when it’s mostly good.
People use feedback not just to determine what to improve at, but also as an overall assessment of whether they’re doing a good job. If you only give negative feedback, you’re effectively biasing this process towards people inferring that they’re doing a bad job. You can try to fight it by explicitly saying “you’re doing a good job” or something, but in my experience this doesn’t really land on an emotional level.
Positive feedback in the form “you are good at X, do more of it” can also be an extremely useful type of feedback! Helping people lean into their strengths more often yields as much or more improvement as helping them shore up their weaknesses.
I’m not particularly good at this myself, but every time I’ve improved at it I’ve had multiple reports say things to the effect of “hey, I noticed you improved at this and it’s awesome and very helpful.”
That said, I agree with you that shit sandwiches are silly and make it obvious that the positive feedback isn’t organic, so they usually backfire. The correct way to give positive feedback is to resist your default to be negatively biased by calling out specific things that are good when you see them.
Good point, thanks.