I do understand what you mean, and it makes much more sense than advocating for venting.
But I still feel that putting emotions into a discussion about work performance isn’t the right way, especially when done in public.
In a situation like that where something caused a lot of negative emotions (that go beyond your work performance is bad), I think you should have two separate talks. One about the factual things where one is boss and the other is employee, and one about the hurt/emotions the behaviour caused and in this talk, both are just people resolving their personal problems.
Something like the issue in the OP really shouldn’t cause anger on Linus’ side, since it’s a totally factual issue. A propper response would have been to decline/revert the change while publically saying “This change validates that rule of the project” and then privately contacting the maintainer in question and tell him, “We talked about this repeatedly, if you don’t stop, we need to take consequences.”
Emotions should really only enter the picture when personal offenses where comitted before or maybe if the employee did something with the intent to hurt the project/company/manager.
But if you get really angry because your employee did something wrong, then that’s a problem on the side of the manager and not on the side of the employee.
That said, I think it’s totally ok to tell the employee about the consequences of their actions (“We lost X amount of money” or “It took Y amount of time to correct it” or something like that).
I do understand what you mean, and it makes much more sense than advocating for venting.
But I still feel that putting emotions into a discussion about work performance isn’t the right way, especially when done in public.
In a situation like that where something caused a lot of negative emotions (that go beyond your work performance is bad), I think you should have two separate talks. One about the factual things where one is boss and the other is employee, and one about the hurt/emotions the behaviour caused and in this talk, both are just people resolving their personal problems.
Something like the issue in the OP really shouldn’t cause anger on Linus’ side, since it’s a totally factual issue. A propper response would have been to decline/revert the change while publically saying “This change validates that rule of the project” and then privately contacting the maintainer in question and tell him, “We talked about this repeatedly, if you don’t stop, we need to take consequences.”
Emotions should really only enter the picture when personal offenses where comitted before or maybe if the employee did something with the intent to hurt the project/company/manager.
But if you get really angry because your employee did something wrong, then that’s a problem on the side of the manager and not on the side of the employee.
That said, I think it’s totally ok to tell the employee about the consequences of their actions (“We lost X amount of money” or “It took Y amount of time to correct it” or something like that).