a16z Advisor: Top Management Requires Deliberate Positive Feedback Rather Than Instinct
Julia Fedorin interviewed Tom Hammer from a16z Speedrun, asking about his most surprising discoveries about people and management after 15 years of guiding founders. Hammer stated that his entire theory of good management has flipped twice.
Initially, he believed that most bad managers simply overthink, assuming that if they stopped trying to "be good managers" and acted like ordinary people, things would improve. This indeed works for many.
However, as he encountered more excellent managers, he found the opposite to be true at the top level. The best managers do not act on instinct; their handling of feedback is completely detached from normal social behavior.
Most people perform poorly in two-way feedback, not just with negative feedback. Hammer likens it to teaching someone to play tennis: if you only point out mistakes, they will never learn to swing the racket. You must deliberately capture and reinforce the correct actions to correct the problems, and it must be intentional rather than a casual observation.
The reason is that instinct is not optimized for this. When interacting with friends or children, immediate reactions are sufficient, as the goal is simply to feel good about the relationship. But the goal of management is to ensure that people truly do their work well, which requires a deliberate, structured focus that instinct has never targeted. That feeling of being "designed" is what optimizes goals that differ from comfort.
Most people only speak up when something goes wrong. The next time a team member does well, don’t miss the opportunity; say it specifically right away. This is not just about being friendly; it is also because this is how to teach them to continue practicing what they did right.
Do not judge good management by whether it resembles normal conversation. It is not, and it should not be.
On the market mechanism level, deliberate positive feedback and structured management enhance team execution and retention, while organizations that can systematically cultivate talent attract funding and talent; events are driven by public opinions, benefiting startups that value management engineering, while teams relying on instinctive management are relatively under pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Tom Hammer has long guided founders at a16z Speedrun, and his management theory has flipped from "acting like ordinary people" to "top management requires deliberate engineering," directly stemming from observations of the differences between ordinary and top managers.
On the capital path, Hammer directs attention to feedback system design through public sharing, motivated by helping founders enhance team output using structured methods, with specific actions including emphasizing deliberate practice of positive feedback and goal differences.
Similar cases can be seen in management practices at Google, Netflix, etc., which institutionalize feedback, as well as the evolution of early Silicon Valley's "flat culture" towards systematic management; current startups are in a phase of rapid expansion, where management has become a bottleneck.
Essentially, this is a technological substitution: instinctive social management is replaced by deliberately structured feedback, with the mechanism being to use engineering methods to transform relational goals into performance goals, thereby accelerating individual capability enhancement.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
The hallmark of top management is that it does not sound like normal conversation.
A coach who only points out mistakes will never teach someone to swing a racket.
Positive feedback is not politeness; it is a necessary number of training repetitions that must be deliberately completed.