The Compliment Sandwich

Law professors spend a lot of time assessing the work of others and giving feedback on that work.  We give feedback as part of scholarship workshops, as part of hiring and tenure reviews, and as part our interactions with students, just to name a few situations.  Some law professors are really incredible at giving feedback.  Others less so.  Perhaps because of the wide variation in styles and effectiveness, I’ve had a number of conversations with other law professors on the most successful ways to give feedback on another’s work.

One model—a model that I prefer—is what a friend of mine calls “the compliment sandwich.”  The basic idea is to situate your criticism between an opening compliment and a closing compliment.  Sometimes the compliment is nothing more than a quick aside before and after lengthy criticisms—a compliment about having chosen an important topic to begin, for example, and a compliment about how you think the paper adds to the field to end.  The “bread” in that compliment sandwich is very thin—“almost more like a cracker or a pita, than real bread,” my friend joked.  Other times the criticism is negligible next to the compliment—kind of like a finger sandwich:  mostly bread with just a tiny bit of filler.  But you get the basic idea—like a sandwich, criticism is easier to consume and digest if it is wrapped up in something that is both neat and agreeable.

I have been thinking a lot about the compliment sandwich recently because I’ve heard a few people speak negatively about those who are too quick to compliment others.  There are, for example, a handful of law schools and law professors who seem to eschew any positive comments at workshops as a point of pride.  Instead, the feedback delivered is uniformly critical, and the tone of the criticism can be extremely negative.  The decision to be only critical in feedback seems intentional—they seem to eschew compliments and focus only on the problems with a person’s work because that is what “serious” people do.

Most recently, I had an exchange with a lawyer named Scott Greenfield on Twitter about a similar topic.  I was defending the idea that people ought to take more time to praise people’s decisions—especially the decisions of those who ordinarily make decisions of which we disapprove.  One example that I gave was President Trump.  I think that Trump has made some laudable decisions to grant executive clemency.  He has also made a number of other horrible decisions with which I strongly disagree.  But I think it is important for me to express approval of the clemency decisions.

Greenfield disagrees.  He wrote—first on Twitter and then on his blog--about the drawbacks that he sees with “promiscuous praise.”  Of course, to use a pejorative word like “promiscuous” indicates that disapproves of whatever is being described.  But Scott helpfully elaborated to say that:

[T]here are many who praise too often. They praise anyone because the outcome is agreeable. They praise their friends to show support. They praise the banal. Sometimes they praise the dumb, even the flagrantly wrong, if it serves a goal they prefer.

Offering encouragement by way of praise has become a ubiquitous tool, particularly in academia, I still have flashbacks about being “instructed” when teaching cross-examination to law students that all criticism of their work had to be prefaced by praise. What if they did nothing praiseworthy? Come up with something. Make it up. But under no circumstances could there be criticism without praise preceding it.

This was taken for granted as the preferred pedagogical means to get students to accept the criticism. Without praise, they would feel they were being attacked. With praise, they were encouraged. But this had two side-effects, that it cheapened praise to the point of meaninglessness, as it was given constantly, often effusively, for the most trivial things. “It was wonderful how you didn’t drool when you began cross!” Except the words, “When you stood up to cross, your demeanor was very professional. Well done!”

As I read Scott’s argument I saw that he was criticizing the compliment sandwich.  And so I want to defend the practice.  Because I like the compliment sandwich.  For one thing, it is polite.  And call me old fashioned, but I like being polite.  And I especially like it when other people are polite to me.

Another reason that I like the compliment sandwich is because I think that people are more apt to listen if you begin and end what you are saying on a positive note.  This is separate from just being polite.  It is about beginning and ending about what is good about the project, rather than what needs to be changed.  Now Scott thinks that there are costs associated with this point of view.  As he explains using the example of what he saw at law schools when instructing students on cross examination:

The praise was, for the most part, empty and cheap. It was unilluminating. But it had two negative side effects. First, it bred students who were praise-dependent, who needed validation, even if they realized it was empty. Second, anything that wasn’t praise was seen as an attack. It became difficult, if not impossible, to explain to some students why their compound, open-ended question wasn’t good, because what they heard was “you’re stupid and a failure.”

I don’t know if Scott is correct that too much praise can lead people to (a) need more validation, or (b) be incapable of accepting criticism.  Those seem like empirical questions.  But I wonder whether his concern is really about the quality and the substance of the compliments, rather than practice of including compliments as a precursor to criticism.  Because it is true that a “thin” compliment in the compliment sandwich doesn’t add much in the way of substance.  Instead it seems like a pro forma gesture more than anything else.  But maybe the approach should be to ensure that the compliment serves a substantive purpose, rather than to scrap the idea of the sandwich all together.

Which reminds me of a conversation that I had with another friend about giving feedback on work.  She insists that it is just as important to tell people what they are doing well as what they aren’t doing well.  Especially on early drafts, when people are trying to decide what direction to take their project in, it is important for them to know what seems to be working and why.  Since she and I had that conversation several years ago, I’ve tried to follow that advice.  Personally, I’d like to do a better job focusing on why certain things work well.  Just as I also try to, when giving criticism, offer some thoughts on how to correct what I see as the problems.  Those types of comments—why something works, why it doesn’t work, and how to improve—are much harder than simply pointing out flaws.  Saying that something is bad is much, much easier than trying to explain what might make it good.

Spending at least some time talking about what makes a project good could also help to avoid giving comments that are really about what paper you would have written, rather than comments designed to help the person write a better version of their project.  I think a lot of us fall into this trap when giving feedback:  We often think about what we would have writtenor what we think is interesting.  But those sorts of comments are sometimes far less helpful.  And I think this concern applies not only to professors writing articles, but also to other situations, such as giving students feedback on a trial skill:  There are lots of different ways for lawyers to be successful in the courtroom.  Taking the time to compliment a student on what he or she did well will help the person giving feedback focus on the particular courtroom style that the student seems most comfortable with.  Then the person can give criticisms designed to help the student master that particular style, rather than the style that the person commenting happen to like best.

There is one last reason that I’m going to continue to try and focus more on praise than on criticism:  Criticism is just too easy.  Especially for law professors and lawyers—critical thinking is one of our major skills.  It is basically our job to listen to what someone says and try to identify reasons why that person is wrong.  And I think that skill has some unfortunate side effects.  I think that it is hard to turn that part of our brains off, which makes us kind of unpleasant to be around.  We love to tell people why they are wrong, inconsistent, illogical, etc.  And I think it may also cause some of us—or at least me—to take a much more negative approach in life. 

So I’m sticking with the compliment sandwich.  I’m going to focus on making the compliments less perfunctory and more meaningful.  And I’m going to try and look more closely for the positive things that people say and do.  If, for no other reason, the past couple of years have shown me that there is really no bottom when it comes to the awful things that people are willing to do and say in this world.  The bad will always be right in front of me—so I may as well seek out the good.