Related, there’s far more public criticism from Google employees about their management than there is their management about their employees. This plays out on a lot of levels.
The nature of A having power over B is that A doesn’t need to coordinate with others in order to get what A wants with respect to B. It would be really bizarre for management to publicly criticize employees whom they can just fire. There is simply no benefit. This explains much more of the variance than anything to do with awkwardness or “punching down”.
I agree that management doesn’t get much benefit by giving valuable public negative feedback to people. However, I’d push back on the idea that management can “just fire” people they don’t like.
Many managers are middle managers. They likely have a lot of gripes with their teams, but they need to work with someone, and often, it would be incredibly awkward or controversial to fire a lot of people.
My critique seems resilient to this consideration. The fact that managers do not publicly criticize employees is not evidence of discomfort or awkwardness. Under the very obvious model of “how would a manager get what they want re: an employee”, public criticism is not a sensical lever to want to use.
I dunno, a fairly central example in my mind is if an employee or ex-employee says mean and (by your perspective) wrong things about you online. Seems like if it wasn’t for discomfort or awkwardness, replying to said employee would otherwise be a pretty obvious tool in the arsenal. Whereas you can’t fire ex-employees and firing current employees is a) just generally a bad move and b) will make you look worse.
The nature of A having power over B is that A doesn’t need to coordinate with others in order to get what A wants with respect to B. It would be really bizarre for management to publicly criticize employees whom they can just fire. There is simply no benefit. This explains much more of the variance than anything to do with awkwardness or “punching down”.
I agree that management doesn’t get much benefit by giving valuable public negative feedback to people. However, I’d push back on the idea that management can “just fire” people they don’t like.
Many managers are middle managers. They likely have a lot of gripes with their teams, but they need to work with someone, and often, it would be incredibly awkward or controversial to fire a lot of people.
There would still be zero benefit to publicly criticize in the case you are describing.
Standard management advice is that managers fire employees too slowly rather than too quickly.
My critique seems resilient to this consideration. The fact that managers do not publicly criticize employees is not evidence of discomfort or awkwardness. Under the very obvious model of “how would a manager get what they want re: an employee”, public criticism is not a sensical lever to want to use.
I dunno, a fairly central example in my mind is if an employee or ex-employee says mean and (by your perspective) wrong things about you online. Seems like if it wasn’t for discomfort or awkwardness, replying to said employee would otherwise be a pretty obvious tool in the arsenal. Whereas you can’t fire ex-employees and firing current employees is a) just generally a bad move and b) will make you look worse.