Cringe is good (actually)

**1. The leaving speech everyone hates is doing the heavy lifting.**

The leaving speech is excruciating for everyone- the leaver, the speaker, the room. It's stilted, slightly too long, and contains at least one in-joke that lands badly. We all dread it.

And yet- go and ask anyone who left a job without one. They felt it. Properly. The absence of cringe at the end of seven years says something far worse than the cringe itself ever could.

The speech isn't really for the leaver. It's for everyone still in the room, watching how exits get handled. That is how they decide how they'll be sent off when their day comes.

**2. The shout-out someone "doesn't want" is the shout-out they need most.**

I have had multiple team members tell me, in 1:1s, that they really don't want to be shouted out in the team channel or called out in a meeting. It's a bit cringe.

Cool. Noted. And then, when the moment comes, I do it anyway- carefully, specifically, briefly- and I watch their face.

Nobody, in the history of feeling slightly embarrassed by recognition, has actually preferred the alternative. The alternative is silence. The alternative is doing brilliant work and watching it disappear into the ether. The alternative is grim.

The cringe of "stop, you're making me blush" lasts about 11 seconds. The cringe of no one ever notices what I do lasts years.

**3. The hearts-and-flowers update is not actually the problem.**

Yes, the all-hands deck with the pink border and the "we're SO PROUD of this team 💖" line is a little bit much. I see you. I sometimes write them.

But the manager who writes those updates is, almost always, the manager whose team feels appreciated. The aesthetic is doing the emotional labour you'd otherwise have to do in person, one Slack DM at a time. Mocking the format is fine. Killing it would cost you more than you think.

**4. Away days are supposed to be cringey.**

The icebreaker is awkward. The "two truths and a lie" round goes on too long. Someone always uses the prompt about their proudest moment to talk about their wedding for nine minutes.

This is all working as designed.

Away days work because they are slightly outside the normal register of how you talk to each other. They force you to share something a fraction more personal than a Tuesday stand-up would allow. The cringe is the small tax you pay for the bond you build. If you take the cringe out, you've just paid for an offsite to do… your normal job, in a worse meeting room.

**5. Don't outsource your sincerity.**

Somewhere along the way, most of us learned to be embarrassed of enthusiasm. Of praise. Of sincerity. Of saying "I'm really glad you're on this team" without immediately covering it with a joke, or a "haha sorry that was a bit much."

The best managers I've worked for never lost that. They would tell you, with their whole chest, that you were brilliant. They would do the slightly-too-long thank you in front of the room. They would write the email no one asked for, telling you they were proud of how you'd handled something difficult.

It was, sometimes, a tiny bit cringe.

It was also the thing I remember most about working for them.