If you want to quit messing around with fog and "hit it" right, directly, and fundamentally, then buy two books:
- Human Element: https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
- Total Quality Management the Japanese Way: https://www.amazon.com/What-Total-Quality-Control-Management...
That's what? Not even $10 total for used copies. Can't beat that! Here's why these are good books:
The Human Element book cuts through all the crap on teams, on why they work, why they don't. The central thesis: Teams are broken by individuals. Individuals are broken when they engage in defensive, fixed, unchanging behavior. And that modality happens when the context in which the individual works hits their self esteem negatively. If the individual lacks self-awareness their coping behaviors and ability to learn, change is significantly reduced. Then what behavior you'll see will make things worse. This ought to strike you as real: a manager's worse assignee is a person with whom they've had "the talk" but things don't change. Human Element is also extremely operational in nature: it provides a toolset to do, to engage, to measure, to check, and to move on beyond stuck. Once you get this, you'll be far better able to place the OP's piece in context to greater effect.
On the Ishikawa book (TQM the Japanese way) don't get too focused on "Japan", although during the 80s/90s Japan was kicking butt. In Japan the highest award for organizational and quality excellence is the Deming Award. Deming was an American who was well received in Japan. So what's at work here really are universal truths for all human organizations. It deals with teams in the larger context of human organizations. In software company culture is all the more important. TQM's focus is what quality means. Quality like "international relations" or "global economy" immediately comes with notions on what it means. But when you drill in to it, the certainty turns into its own kind of fog. This book helps you press your understanding to getting down to fundamentals that companies will never outgrow.
Both books are short reads. And very information packed. The TQM book was extremely well translated from Japanese; I applaud the translator. Ishikawa would be considered an industry leader, and an excellent example of a manager with Drucker know-how but real, on the job experience in manufacturing.
First, assume that all I can do is observe behavior: what I see, hear, read. I cannot figure out why a person is exhibiting a behavior; guess sure. But know? No way. What's between the ears is between their ears and inaccessible to me.
Second, assume the PCA (principle component analysis) of behavior is control, inclusion, openness. Read "Human Element" or get an old copy of FIRO from him or his son Ethan Schutz --- excellent stuff and perfect for the office: it's like healthcare on the battle field: pointed, focused, can-do, common sense, but not so simplistic and removed for the bigger world of medicine that it's silly or merely palliative. With that setup in mind:
1) you cannot resolve significance issues through control. More generally you cannot fix a problem along PCA axis 1 by doing something along another orthogonal axis 2. Often makes it worse. Giving advice is control behavior, which the writer says, was really about significance. Yep, that's me sometimes. It's helpful to know when I misuse one skill to badly fix something else.
2) Behaviors are goal seeking and directly connect right into feelings which hits right into self-esteem. See the book or smarter people here. This is feature rich location of being human.
3) I've worked 30+ years and spent the last 14 years working for large companies. As posters here have said, behavior comes with a zillion motivations. But from time to time I have dealt with programmers, managers, young, and, old who strongly point out they should --- more: it'd be dumb not to try! --- to manage perception on the other side because perception is reality.
Now in some artificially distorted way, it does capture a truth but at the expense of omitting a lot of relevant context. But:
-- As Schutz says, we know we ought to be open but in the fact that's the last thing we'll ever do because it's not safe. Openness requires safety. If I start being open I might say something to get myself fired. If my boss talks openly I might get yelled at. That's anxiety making. If a co-worker talks openly about me I might get fired. Better to keep quiet about that co-worker so he'll be quiet about me. Fear is a lot of what prevents openness.
-- While words are pouring out one should not assume the speaker is open in two facets. First, the speaker may have low self awareness. If so, trying to make sense of that is doubly impossible. Two, the implied success of getting one over me by having the counterparty play to my perception requires low self-awareness my side. And among other things implies lack of choice/agency my side which is along the control axis to respond appropriately. So ... really where does the cause start and effect end. It's more nuanced.
-- The insistence on perception as reality is seated, I feel, either in trauma or in that shadow of maladaptive behavior some people come with. But it's the insistence that to me, indicates the perpetrator is the most insecure of all: they don't believe they have control, or are significant, or would want to be included ... and so in the absence of choice through control ... lie to themselves and the world to get by. They're fragile and they cast the world in a fragile light too.
https://thehumanelement.com/pages/firo-theory/ https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
to nail the fundamentals. There's too many HN posts on human dynamics that float above the fundamentals leaving the whole issue in a fog. It will make clear there are three interrelated issues in sharing feedback:
- behavior of openness
- self-esteem on TL and mentee's parts, which depends on self-awareness
- both of which run on concurrent with potential conflicts around control, openness, and inclusion.
As the book explains openness in the context of human organizations is one of the last things to be well-resolved. Why that's the case is very important to understand. Seen in the context of the book, the OP's write-up makes some good points, however, without the deep principles advanced in the book the solution space will remain in a fog. And to the extent it's foggy, no real progress can take place.