When you say nothing, the team might think the worst

Why staying quiet on what's working leaves room for self-criticism

During a 1:1, one of my team members confided that they felt a step behind, almost as if they needed to anticipate upcoming work just to keep up. They told me this because they were worried they weren’t doing well enough, that they might be responsible for any delays in delivery.

The point, however, is that from my perspective, this problem didn’t even exist. It was a period when we had introduced new changes to our processes and, like any change, it required some time to settle before the team could become fully comfortable. Despite this, the project the team member was working on was actually going very well. Even better than I had expected.

There was a clear gap between his perception and mine. That’s when I realized that, once again, without even noticing, I had kept repeating something I still haven’t managed to improve: I had never actually told them they were doing well.

Yes, after the first release of the project I congratulated the whole team and shared my satisfaction with the success, but I never took a moment to give them specific feedback on how they had managed the project and coordinated the others. Or rather, I did, but only on certain aspects that I thought they needed to improve. As usual, I focused only on those.

A leader’s silence is not neutral

A few months ago I wrote an article about the opposite problem:

Stop asking for feedback. Start asking for action

Me, as a leader, asking the team for feedback and not receiving it. One of the conclusions I had reached was: “read the team’s silence as neutral.” In other words, if they don’t respond, it doesn’t mean they don’t care. That works, from that side.

What I want to share today is that, on the other side, the rule doesn’t apply. The consequence of this lack of feedback was that they drew the most obvious conclusion: “if I don’t comment on the good things, maybe I don’t see them”. Maybe there aren’t enough of them. This also made me reflect on when I used to draw the same conclusions when I didn’t receive feedback on my work, only to later discover that the fact that no one said anything was actually a positive sign.

When, as a leader, you stay silent about what is going well, you create a void that the team fills with its own assumptions and interpretations. Often, that void gets filled with self-criticism, even when it’s not needed.

It’s a problem of information asymmetry: the leader has data that the team doesn’t. The leader knows what’s working, but if not shared, others are left guessing and, when in doubt, they usually guess wrong, often undervaluing themselves.

There’s no positive or negative feedback

Before continuing with the article, I want to share a concept that has changed the way I look at feedback for a few years now.

For me, feedback is not inherently positive or negative. The meaning comes from the person receiving it. In itself, feedback is nothing more than an analysis of something that happened in the past, meant to guide the future: to repeat what worked and avoid what didn’t. That’s it. The “positive” or “negative” label is something we assign based on how it makes us feel.

This concept works, at least for me, but with one caveat: this reframing helps the person giving the feedback, it does not guarantee that the person receiving it will take it in a neutral way. They apply their own filter, and that filter is not something you control. The hard part is getting this message across to the people you work with, because it helps shake off that instinct we all have to take feedback as a personal judgment.

Why I do this (at least in my case)

This article is not about how to solve the problem, but I did ask myself why I tend to notice the negative first. Two honest answers came to mind, and I recognize myself in both without much effort.

Negativity bias
The human brain is wired to give more weight to what isn’t working. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense: predators and threats mattered more than sunsets. But when applied to a team, this bias creates managers who are constantly triaging problems while systematically ignoring everything else. I see myself a lot in this description.

Professional (de)formation
Many of us come from engineering, where a big part of our job for years was finding bugs. A code review doesn’t end with “great code, well done”, it ends with a list of things to fix. When you move into managing people, you apply the same pattern: the “review” of a person becomes a list of gaps. Everything else is implicitly “ok, this is fine.”

The problem is that people are not code. A function that passes all tests is fine even without comments. A person is not.

What I’m trying to do now

As mentioned earlier, there’s no magic solution in this article, especially since I still struggle myself to “do it right”. What I’ve started doing, though, is writing down the positive things I notice alongside the ones that need to be adjusted. I’ve always noticed them, but I never documented them.

The goal is to share them in the same way I share everything else. No motivational phrases, no rewards or praise, just adding them to the same list.

Nothing groundbreaking, nothing that hasn’t already been said in countless books. But until you make it concrete, it remains just something you’ve read.

TL;DR

When, as a leader, I stay silent about what is working in the team, I am not being neutral: I create a void that people fill with self-criticism. For this reason, it is important to give voice to what is working as well, not only to what needs to be improved.

Credits: Illustration 1