Feedback is a Gift - No, Really!
Looking back at the last two issues, I realized that they were both about feedback. Feedback is a juicy topic. In fact I’ve got a whole folder full of ideas about feedback, so I’m going to turn this into a little mini series. You can find all the articles about feedback here.
You’ve probably heard the saying “feedback is a gift” and rolled your eyes at least once. “Yeah, I just love being told what’s wrong with me and how to fix it,” you think. And you’ve probably had at least one experience where feedback honestly wasn’t a gift. It was an attack, or a political maneuver, or just flat out wrong. I want you to set aside those bad memories and think about the times feedback really helped you get better. I’m going to share two examples from my own career to show how feedback has helped me. One is small but had a great knock-on effect, and one was flat out life-changing.
When I was a senior engineer I was blindsided when my mid-year review said that I wasn’t a very strong writer. I mean, if there was one thing I knew I could do, it was write! So I asked my boss about it and she gave me examples of draft documents I’d sent her. Those documents were very casual, basically rough drafts of ideas I wanted to bounce off her before spending more time on, to be sure we were on the same page. My boss hadn’t realized that, she thought that I considered them “deliverable” quality documents. We both had an ah-ha moment and going forward I was really clear with her when something was just testing an idea vs a thought-out proposal or document.
Because she told me what her impression was, even though it was just a misunderstanding, I was able to correct it and improve how we communicated. Yeah, it would have been better if she’d told me before she wrote my review, but as someone who’s written hundreds of reviews I know that sometime you don’t twig to those small improvements until you sit down to actually write the review. It was just a manager bug. If my manager hadn’t told me what her perception was I would have muddled along continuing to disappoint her and not taking advantage of one of my core skills, writing.
The knock-on effect was this: I’d learned not to take for granted that people understood the state of a work product. Going forward, I was much more explicit about what the state of a deliverable and what types of feedback it was ready for.
Now let me tell you about a time feedback caused a major change in my behavior, one I’m still grateful for more than twenty years later.
Several years into my management career, I was working as an engineering director and was managing managers for the first time. The vice-president I worked for arranged for all the leaders in her department to provide 360 degree feedback on each other. This included not just my team, but also all the other engineering managers and directors in my department. Then we had a meeting to debrief on the feedback and talk about next steps.
I received one piece of feedback that seriously puzzled me: it said that I was disrespectful to people. I had, and have, a strong personal value that all people should be treated with respect. How could I get feedback like this that so clearly contradicted a deeply held belief? I had no idea how to correct this because I didn’t understand what was behind the feedback.
In our meeting, I asked the other leaders to help me understand this. One of the managers (who, tellingly, did not work for me) took a deep breath and cautiously told me that when I thought people were wrong I could be pretty snarky and sarcastic about it. I couldn’t think of a time I’d done that but I knew there must be something there I needed to pay more attention to. I was thanked him sincerely but was still puzzled.
Not ten minutes later a manager who worked for me said something I thought was wrong and I instantly disagreed with him with a cutting remark. Then, I stopped, looked around the table and said “Oh! Like that?” And, of course, everyone nodded. Now at least I could see what it was I was doing that caused the problem.
That feedback was a tremendous gift because it let me start fixing that failure. I hadn’t realized it but I had not been living my values and my own direct reports didn’t feel safe enough to tell me. I’m sure I’d picked up the behavior working with other leaders who did the same thing, but that didn’t mean it was the way I wanted to behave.
It was not something that happened overnight. I told the people who worked for that I was very sorry, I hadn’t realized I was doing this, that I was determined to get better, and I’d welcome them pointing it out when I’d behaved poorly. At first I wouldn’t catch myself in this behavior until I heard the words come out of my mouth but I would stop, apologize, and try again. Over time I got better at catching a disrespectful response before I said it. It took me awhile to retrain myself to respond with curiosity and kindness and not disdain when someone said something I thought was stupid.
When I tell people this story now, they’re often surprised, which is a tremendous relief to me. Hey I’m way less of a jerk than I used to be, yay! And, full disclosure, people say things I think are stupid all the time. But it turns out a lot of the time I just don’t understand them and they’re not stupid at all. Or they had a brain fart which is no cause to be mean. Or I still want a productive relationship with them even though we disagree. And yeah, if you know me well, you’ve definitely heard me lose it. I’m still working on this one, to be honest.
If the idea of feedback being a gift makes you cynical, or the idea of feedback only triggers feelings of anger, shame, or fear, I hope these examples help you see the gift underneath the scary wrapping. We’ll keep talking about how to do this in future articles.
Your Dot Release: Think about a time feedback really helped you either in the moment or long term. Now think about a time you gave someone feedback that really helped them. Now think about one skill or domain where you’d like to improve and what kind of feedback would help with that. That’s it!
This article is part of a series about feedback.
Welcome to the Dot Release, my newsletter for focused and actionable career, leadership, and product advice. You don't need a full upgrade, just implement a dot release! If this has been helpful for you, please forward and share with a friend. All articles are available for free and you can subscribe on my website.