Oh how I wish I had a downvote ability on this post. The first thing wrong with this is the fact that the post is nothing more than the author's 2 cents. The author doesn't know what they hey they're talking about and is just pontificating.
As someone who does a lot of creative work, I hate it when people just give useless positive encouragement and withhold actual constructive feedback, small or large. Only hypersensitive people feel worried about their loss of ownership because they accepted someone's suggestion.
A situation where a boss having a color preference means that a designer feels unable to reject the suggestion is a dysfunctional workplace. When the manager has that type of feedback, they are not being a manager. A good manager makes it clear that if they have color feedback, that's just their suggestions and not them acting in capacity as a manager.
I have to agree with a lot of what you say, but just as the article I think you haven't completely thought through what you are writing.
For instance, let's add two points that in real life can't be circumvented: a) most places that pay you will be dysfunctional work places, and b) you don't always have a choice of work since you need to pay bills.
And what are your standards for downvoting? I downvote when I think a comment/link is hurtful for the discussion or people involved. And yes, while it is not a very well finished article from Derek, it leads to a healthy discussion and in itself is not a bad/hurtful opinion to have.
>most places that pay you will be dysfunctional work places
This article is aimed at managers. It is advice on how to create a functioning work place. To the extent it fails to do so, it is entirely appropriate to say "Hey, this is bad advice for reason X."
It is not interesting to rebut this by saying "Yeah, but reason X isn't valid if the manager is terrible." The whole point is that the manager shouldn't be terrible. This isn't advice for non managers and it isn't advice for managers who aren't trying to be good managers. Managers who don't care about creating a functioning work environment aren't reading and discussing this anyway.
But once again, this isn't about constructive feedback. This is about nitpicky, subjective things. The article does not say to hold back constructive feedback. It says to stop nitpicking your employees to death.
The post doesn't say "don't micromanage", it says that if you provide your 2 cents when shown something and ASKED SPECIFICALLY "What do you think?" (!) that if you answer what you think, it will damage your employee's sense of personal ownership over their work, which is utter bullshit.
You can give the author credit for all sorts of careful nuanced views while excusing all the lousiness in the actual words they wrote, but I'm not going to do that. If the author can't take the time to think more critically and carefully about how to express their advice, they shouldn't be publishing, even on their own little blog.
"it says that if you provide your 2 cents when shown something and ASKED SPECIFICALLY "What do you think?" (!) that if you answer what you think, it will damage your employee's sense of personal ownership over their work, which is utter bullshit."
It says that if you give petty, subjective, not really constructive criticism, that you will damage your employee's sense of personal ownership of the work, which is true.
"You can give the author credit for all sorts of careful nuanced views while excusing all the lousiness in the actual words they wrote, but I'm not going to do that. If the author can't take the time to think more critically and carefully about how to express their advice, they shouldn't be publishing, even on their own little blog."
I'm sorry, but the article did do that. You just don't want to see it.
As someone who does a lot of creative work, I hate it when people just give useless positive encouragement and withhold actual constructive feedback, small or large. Only hypersensitive people feel worried about their loss of ownership because they accepted someone's suggestion.
A situation where a boss having a color preference means that a designer feels unable to reject the suggestion is a dysfunctional workplace. When the manager has that type of feedback, they are not being a manager. A good manager makes it clear that if they have color feedback, that's just their suggestions and not them acting in capacity as a manager.