I’ve been thinking recently about anti-racism and what it looks like to support
colleagues from underrepresented groups at work. The other day someone in a
Slack group made an offhand comment that they’d sent a message to an engineer’s
manager to say that the engineer was doing exceptional work.

I think telling someone’s manager they’re doing great work is a pretty common
practice and it can be really helpful, but it’s easy to forget to do and I wish
someone had suggested it to me earlier. So let’s talk about it!

I tweeted about this to ask how people approach it and as usual I got a ton of great replies that I’m going to summarize here.

We’re going to talk about what to say, when to do this, and why you should ask first.

ask if it’s ok first

One thing that at least 6 different people brought up was the importance of
asking first. It might not be obvious why this is important at first — you’re
saying something positive! What’s the problem?

So here are some potential reasons saying something positive to someone’s
manager could backfire:

1. Giving someone a compliment that’s not in line with their current goals. For
   example, if your coworker is trying to focus on becoming a technical expert
   in their domain and you’re impressed with their project management skills,
   they might not want their project management highlighted (or vice versa!).
2. Giving someone the wrong “level” of compliment. For example, if they’re a
   very senior engineer and you say something like “PERSON did
   SIMPLE_ROUTINE_TASK really well!” — that doesn’t reflect well on them and
   feels condescending. This can happen if you don’t know the person’s position
   or don’t understand the expectations for their role.
3. If your coworker was supposed to be focusing on a specific project, and
   you’re complimenting them for helping with something totally unrelated,
   their manager might think that they’re not focusing on their “real” work.
   One person mentioned that they got reprimanded by their manager for getting
   a spot peer bonus for helping someone on another team.
4. Some people have terrible managers (for example, maybe the manager will feel
   threatened by your coworker excelling)
5. Some people just don’t like being called out in that way, and are happy with
   the level of recognition they’re getting!

Overall: a lot of people (for ve