Someone comes on to a new project, and makes a few suggestions.
All of those suggestions are things we/I have thought about and discussed in detail, and we have detailed reasons why we’ve made the decisions we have.
I tell the person those reasons.
The person comes away feeling like the project isn’t really open to criticism feedback, and their ideas won’t be heard.
I think a good policy is to just say yes to WHATEVER experiment someone who is new to the project proposes, and let them take their own lumps, or pleasantly surprised.
But, despite having known this for a bit, I always seem to forget to do this when it matters. I wonder if I can add this to our onboarding checklists.
I’ve rarely seen teams do this well and agree that your proposed approach is much better than the alternative in many cases. I’ve definitely seen cases where insiders thought something was impossible and then a new person went and did it. (I’ve been the insider, the new person who ignored the advice and succeeded, and the new person who ignored the advice and failed.)
That said, I think there’s a middle ground where you convey why you chose not to do something but also leave it open for the person to try anyway. The downside of just letting them do it without giving context is they may fail for a silly rather than genuine reason.
What I’m suggesting could look something like the following.
That’s an awesome idea! This is something some of us explored a bit previously and decided not to pursue at the time for X, Y, and Z reasons. However, as insiders, we are probably biased towards viewing things as hard, so it’s important for team health to have new people re-try and re-explore things we may have already thought about. You should definitely not take our reasons as final and feel free to try The Thing if you still feel like it might work or you’ll learn something by doing so.
Some concrete updates I had around this idea, based on discussion on Facebook.
One really relevant factor is the criticism coming from a person in authority, and leaders should be extra careful of critizing ideas. By steering them towards other, less authorative figures that you think will give valid critiques, you can avoid this failure.
Another potential obvious pitfall here is people feeling like they were set up to fail by not having all the relevant information. The idea here is to make people feel like they have agency, obviously not to hide information.
Even if you do the above, people can feel patronized if it seems like you’re doing this as a tactic because you think they can’t take criticism. This can be true even if giving them criticism would indeed be harmful for the team dynamic. Thus, the emphasizing ways to increase agency over avoiding criticism is key here.
This combination of failure modes seems pretty dicey.
I think I’ve encountered something similar in relationships, where my naive thought was “they’re doing something wrong/harmful and I should help them avoid it” but I eventually realized “them having an internal locus of control and not feeling like I’m out to micromanage them is way more important than any given suboptimal thing they’re doing.”
A frequent failure mode that I have as a leader:
Someone comes on to a new project, and makes a few suggestions.
All of those suggestions are things we/I have thought about and discussed in detail, and we have detailed reasons why we’ve made the decisions we have.
I tell the person those reasons.
The person comes away feeling like the project isn’t really open to criticism feedback, and their ideas won’t be heard.
I think a good policy is to just say yes to WHATEVER experiment someone who is new to the project proposes, and let them take their own lumps, or pleasantly surprised.
But, despite having known this for a bit, I always seem to forget to do this when it matters. I wonder if I can add this to our onboarding checklists.
I’ve rarely seen teams do this well and agree that your proposed approach is much better than the alternative in many cases. I’ve definitely seen cases where insiders thought something was impossible and then a new person went and did it. (I’ve been the insider, the new person who ignored the advice and succeeded, and the new person who ignored the advice and failed.)
That said, I think there’s a middle ground where you convey why you chose not to do something but also leave it open for the person to try anyway. The downside of just letting them do it without giving context is they may fail for a silly rather than genuine reason.
What I’m suggesting could look something like the following.
Some concrete updates I had around this idea, based on discussion on Facebook.
One really relevant factor is the criticism coming from a person in authority, and leaders should be extra careful of critizing ideas. By steering them towards other, less authorative figures that you think will give valid critiques, you can avoid this failure.
Another potential obvious pitfall here is people feeling like they were set up to fail by not having all the relevant information. The idea here is to make people feel like they have agency, obviously not to hide information.
Even if you do the above, people can feel patronized if it seems like you’re doing this as a tactic because you think they can’t take criticism. This can be true even if giving them criticism would indeed be harmful for the team dynamic. Thus, the emphasizing ways to increase agency over avoiding criticism is key here.
This combination of failure modes seems pretty dicey.
I think I’ve encountered something similar in relationships, where my naive thought was “they’re doing something wrong/harmful and I should help them avoid it” but I eventually realized “them having an internal locus of control and not feeling like I’m out to micromanage them is way more important than any given suboptimal thing they’re doing.”