Photo by Robert So.
Last week, we were on the road. In a city not our own. On wifi far from home.
We used to be professional business travellers. The kind at the front of boarding group one. With status tags on neatly packed carry-ons. The ones offering a polite nod to seat-mates just before pulling on noise-cancelling headphones. Acknowledge their presence, do not invite unending small talk for the next six hours. See? Professionals.
We once had suitcases perpetually open in the hallway, for either unpacking or repacking. But these days, we’re on the road a lot less. The suitcases go back in the closet between trips. We board in group two. And perhaps because it’s now intermittent, we find ourselves savouring the opportunities to dip back into the business-meets-wanderlust-life.
Travel can be a beautiful reset. A deliberate decision to shove oneself out of routine. To find discomfort. To seek it out. To mishear. To misunderstand. To be misunderstood. To order a meal and not know exactly what will arrive. To get on the metro going in the wrong direction and have to double-back. To change one thing and have it change everything. And from that unsettled spot, to notice the small differences and the big ones. The places where your assumptions about the world have calcified. Where you can’t coast on what you’ve always done. You’ve never been here before. There is no always.
Well, maybe there’s one always
We’re in a gorgeous office kitchen. And on the wall, above the sink, we notice a sign in a large font. A reminder to scrape plates before loading the dishwasher. This is good advice. A universal truth for all kitchen-users. But particularly true in shared space with colleagues or roommates. It manages to be both a handy note about dishwasher best practices. But also a handy note about collective spaces. There are other people here! Behave accordingly!
It’s worth noting that this kitchen sign is clearer and more direct than most feedback happening in most workplaces in most of the world. It pulls no punches, in part, because it’s not anticipating debate. Scrape the food before you stack the plate isn’t a stylistic difference. It’s not about what you thought you were doing or whether your last job had that expectation. Or even whether your family had a dishwasher growing up. It doesn’t spend any of its limited word count on the myriad opportunities for misinterpretation. You can be in a rush or distracted or just having an off-day, and still, the sign is there. Lest you forget. Not because you’re a terrible human. But because you’re busy, we’re all busy, and still, this is a collective space.
Not every piece of workplace feedback lends itself to 100pt font. We get that. We are not suggesting you put up signs around the office every time you need to clarify expectations. But there’s something so clear and so refreshing and so downright wholesome about that sign. Particularly when you contrast it with what passes for feedback in a lot of organizations today.
A few years ago, bosses started asking us if it was ok if they used GPT to write feedback for their teams. They knew what they wanted to say but they didn’t want to hurt the person’s feelings. And besides, wouldn’t it be better if the person got something that was easier to absorb? Wouldn’t that make it more likely that they would adjust their behaviour without the ego hit? And, importantly, without getting mad at the person tasked with delivering said feedback?
This was early enough in the AI-at-work adoption curve that both the point and the counterpoint were hunches. A hunch that if it were easier to give and receive feedback, that would lead to more feedback flowing in more orgs. Or, conversely, a hunch that something important would get lost when bosses removed the friction of giving feedback to their teams and teams removed the friction of receiving it.
Whatever the hunches, the reality of the last few years has been that many people are tagging in the LLMs. LLMs to write the feedback so it sounds better. LLMs as a sounding board to talk through why they disagree with the feedback they got. LLMs to write a polished reply. Em-dash use is way up. Spelling errors have gone down. Vulnerability has gone down, too. What’s not to like?
One minor downside
There is a gotcha with this approach. A sort of implied trade-off you make when you have Chat do this work for you. The upside is that you avoid some vulnerability, both on the receiving and the giving end of feedback. The downside is that you stunt your professional and personal growth, lock yourself into a junior mindset, and maybe harm those relationships in the process. Maybe that’s a few minor downsides?
Look we’re not saying that grappling with hard feedback doesn’t suck. Blerg. Getting feedback about a place you screwed up is tolerable discomfort when you already know you screwed up. When your boss walks over after the meeting and you’re like, “I know. I know, and you don’t even have to say it, but I also know that you do have to say it, but whatever you say I promise I am already all over that shit.”
That’s bad enough. But when it’s feedback you didn’t see coming? When someone is messaging you about an email from last week, or something appears on a 1:1 agenda that you weren’t expecting? And that thing is bad? God, the way your skin flushes and your ears start to ring and it takes every ounce of self-control to let them finish their sentence before you blurt out that you didn’t mean it that way at all, or didn’t know that was the expectation, or what about the other thing that they did, any deflection just to push back and buy yourself a second to recover. Wretched.
And preparing to give someone hard feedback is the same, except now you play out all those scenarios in your mind and try to end-run them. Try to find a way to phrase the feedback that will short-circuit that, and have them hear it without getting defensive. And so you walk into the conversation jacked on cortisol, and either blurt it out clumsily or lose your nerve in the moment and deliver a weaker version of it, and then have to double back later and do the whole thing again.
This is all so unpleasant. And didn’t someone say that AI was supposed to save us from the unpleasant stuff?
The grappling is the point
The unpleasant stuff is also where the growth happens. Early in your career you learn knowledge and skills and they go into a space where nothing previously was — you didn’t have an opinion about accelerated-depreciation rules, or plenum-rated ethernet cables, or whatever until you learned about them — and that knowledge made you more employable. As you get more senior, though, judgement becomes a greater part of your value to the org than raw skill. That judgement, that expertise, comes from learning what works and what doesn’t in practice. From trying things and having them succeed, sure, but also from trying things that you expect to succeed, having them fail, wincing, rebuilding the shit you broke, and learning not to fail that specific way again. Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgement.
I didn’t expect them to take it that way. That’s not what I meant. I didn’t think I had to follow up on that piece. I thought someone else had the ball. How was I supposed to know that would happen?
These all feel so awful, don’t they? They feel defensive, they feel shields-up. And none of them sound like learning. If you ask an LLM what to do, it’ll answer. It will see your side. It’ll offer phrasing to sound less defensive. It will sound “polished.” Is that the goal, though?
Reddit’s r/AmITheAsshole is obviously a dumpster fire happening on a rolling train wreck at the best of times, and some of the scenarios seem constructed to be maximally theatrical. But for all of that, it is a cornucopia of poor judgement, a rich text from which the participants might draw some useful experience. So, earlier this year, Stanford researchers pulled the worst of the worst, the posts where there was unanimous human consensus that the poster was, indeed, the Asshole, and fed those as first-person scenarios to leading LLMs. The bots took the poster’s side and assured them that they were in the right more than half of the time. When they ran a second experiment having people describe a conflict from their own lives, things got worse.
“In our human experiments, even a single interaction with sycophantic AI reduced participants’ willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts, while increasing their own conviction that they were right. Yet despite distorting judgment, sycophantic models were trusted and preferred.”
You can’t grow professionally or personally without learning. You can’t learn without sometimes coming face to face with the fact that your impacts didn’t match your intentions. The friction of feeling that feedback land isn’t a side effect to be mitigated away — that’s the whole damned thing. You can get better at receiving it — you can learn to take a deep breath before replying, for instance — but you can’t outsource it without giving up something crucial.
This is just as true for giving feedback. We get that it’s daunting — we have been daunted by it many times. And we get the desire to sound polished. The bot might give you something that sounds more capital-M Managerial. But if interacting with the bot screws with your willingness to take accountability for your pieces of it, it’s making you worse at your job, not better.
We’re past hunches now. We’re years into this experiment and the results are clear. This isn’t about polishing language, or having a sounding board, or writing with a more professional tone. Sometimes you have to do the dishes. If you take your job seriously as a manager, if you want your people to grow and your team to thrive, you need to write the feedback yourself. And if you take your career seriously, if you want to grow and thrive and do incredible things and stay on the happy side of r/AmITheAsshole, you need to be receiving and reflecting on it. Yourself.
— Melissa & Johnathan
