Some of my workmates were part of a subcommittee working on an internal project. I wasn’t asked to be involved and was not privy to many details. After some time, I was asked for my opinion after being shown what they had come up with so far. I asked if the team wanted my honest opinion, and I got an enthusiastic yes.
I told them what I thought: essentially, that the whole idea was unimaginative and trite. This was not taken well at all. Now I seem to be persona non grata among several colleagues I used to have friendships with. Should I have just kept my mouth shut?
I have to admit, I snorted when I read your full email. After I had a moment to take a breath, I could sympathise with your colleagues, who might have felt that their hours of work were vaporised in seconds by your scalding assessment.
But that sympathy doesn’t run very deep, and on further reflection, I still think there’s something laughable about excitedly asking for someone’s true opinion and then instantly rejecting it. And the person who provided it.
If you’ve read Work Therapy before, you’ll know I often recommend erring on the side of magnanimity at work. And I would certainly never suggest a person walk around their workplace making unbidden criticisms of others’ work unless that’s their explicit job. But I don’t think you broke either of those precepts here.
First, you’re clearly a plainspoken person. That’s obvious from your email, and it sounds like you’re known for this trait among your peers. Your colleagues came to you because of, not in spite of, that.
Not everyone has the wherewithal to be truly honest at work like you do.
Second, you gave fair warning. It wasn’t like they were halfway through showing you their work as you sprayed them mercilessly with your invective. They asked. You strongly implied they might not like what you were going to say. They insisted. You told the truth.
And that’s the third part of this that makes me think you had no reason to keep your mouth shut: you were being honest. You weren’t motivated by malice. You didn’t criticise for the sake of it.
You saw that what they had come up with was tepid and clichéd, and you made that known. You didn’t take delight in giving your assessment; you simply refused to insult their intelligence with faint or fake praise.
Again, I’m not insensitive to the team’s disappointment. It can be really difficult to hear the unvarnished truth about your own work. And, yes, in other circumstances, they may have had good reason to consider your comments unnecessary or unhelpful. The strong sense I got from your longer email, however, was that when you said you respected members of the team, you meant it. You expected better from them.
Your criticism was candid, yes, but you didn’t slap them in the face and walk away. It was reasoned; you told the team exactly what you think made the current version underwhelming. You didn’t offer suggestions for improvement – you weren’t specifically asked and didn’t think that was your place – but you went well beyond “this is no good”.
Not everyone has the wherewithal to be truly honest at work like you do. For many of us – me included – little white lies, small evasions, softened language, careful omissions are the tools we use to keep social situations smooth, to avoid confrontation and conflict.
But in some cases, they’re not accommodations; they’re compromises or even capitulations. There’s a difference between magnanimity, which I mentioned earlier, and indulgence. Not every work situation is improved by holding your tongue.
I can see why you might be questioning yourself now, given that you seem to have lost friendships over this matter. But to have taken a different route would have gone against your principles. And it would mean you were suppressing a rare professional quality: the ability to give undecorated advice without descending into nastiness.
Yes, it may be true that your language was too strong. Or even that you misinterpreted what you understood to be a request for frank feedback.
I think the more likely case is that your colleagues in the subcommittee had spent too much time in an intellectual silo and convinced themselves that they had produced something far better than it really was. Because of this, they took your evaluation not as firm, fair criticism, but as an ambush.
I hope that with time they realise it was no such thing and that you can rebuild your relationships with all of them.
Jonathan Rivett is a writer based in Melbourne. He’s written about workplace culture and careers for more than a decade.