Midweek #130 - How to Ask (a Colleague) for Feedback
My relationship with feedback
With a brusque wave of my hand off screen, I quieted my senior colleague, as I answered the client with a smile. If that was the definition of career suicide, no one had told me as marched cooly to the cliff edge.
I said earlier in the week that you’ve to be creative to get reliable and frequent feedback as a knowledge worker given that the odds are stacked against you. What I’m going to share here is more art than science. How you do it should mirror you. The challenges you will face will be yours.
All that points to this piece probably — most definitely — being my most personal piece yet for this newsletter.
Last week I met an ex-colleague and friend for a stroll. The last several times we have met we have ended up having freewheeling conversations, and I had made a mental note of asking him for feedback.
So I asked: ‘This year, across all the times we have met, what has surprised you about me the most?’
But such a conversation was unimaginable four and a half years ago.
June 2019. Experimentarium, the biggest science museum in Denmark, a few minutes outside of Copenhagen. A balmy summer evening. It was my third conference on the road, on either side of the Atlantic, leading a science communication studio whose clients included the top academic publishers of the world and the top universities in the Far East. With another two weeks and three countries to go before my travels would be over, I was already tired. Tired of the smiling, the networking, the pitching.
Perhaps that explained my offhand wave for our global sales head who had not let a word in through the length of the call. But unknown to me, my behavior had made my colleague and arguably my most important stakeholder feel sidelined for months. Months, and I had no idea.
The detonation that followed the call and the shock of it continues to have a life of its own in my memory. It carries a lesson I’ll never forget.
For the two years leading up to that moment, I was nose to the ground starting up a services business unit that repurposed published scientific research into more accessible formats such as videos, infographics, and lay summaries. The market for this was new and so as to not be hamstrung by sales bandwidth, I did as much selling as I could. I pitched to customers, I finalized contracts, and I managed accounts. I basked in the responsibility.
My evening that fateful day in Copenhagen ended with me being at the receiving end of ‘How dare you…’ I walked away from the exchange and went back to my hotel.
But no flash of insight jumped out at me. The problem, whatever it was, stayed hidden. I thought I had done everything right. I had tried my best and yet my colleague had behaved unprofessionally.
In hindsight, I should say, my colleague had behaved like a human being. I was alarmed by what he was thinking, yet unconcerned by what he was feeling. Emotion, at our most vulnerable, comes before cognition. I was ignorant.
As we took a stroll, I clarified to my friend and ex-colleague that he could point out both pleasant and not-so-pleasant surprises, but that I was particularly interested in the latter.
A couple of months ago, I switched roles at work. I sent out a Google form to four colleagues — those with whom I had worked the closest in the previous quarter. Two of them responded (= felt comfortable enough to share their thoughts about a senior) and we ended up having meaningful follow-up conversations.
About two years back, I finished up a rather challenging stint during which I led a multinational team that was building a smart writing assistant. It was a group of people who were way smarter than me and highly skilled in their respective disciplines. The stint tested me for another reason. I was answerable to some key figures in the company leadership who had chosen me to lead the project. All of this as COVID was playing out and we had gone (and stayed) fully remote. It remains the hardest position I have ever held.
At the end of that professional chapter, I sought out the Chairman, the CEO, and the CMO to help shed light on my performance.
By now, if it wasn’t clear, let me tell you that I have no formula for soliciting feedback. But I’m happy with doing it anyway because the benefits are obvious.
Each time I put word out to the world about what I was interested in, three things happened.
1️⃣I learned something new about myself. Stuff I could not have found out in any other way, or stuff I could not have discovered at such a bargain price.
2️⃣It became easier to ask for feedback with each subsequent effort. With each try, it was more of ‘I have been here, done this.’
3️⃣My colleagues opened up when they saw what it meant to me to know what they thought of me. It signaled that I respected them.
When your colleagues think you have a chip on your shoulder or you don’t give two hoots about what they think, you’re unlikely to know that in time. That’s what happened to me. I paid a steep price to learn what a colleague thought of me.
Soliciting feedback need not be contingent on an occasion–role change, end of project, etc. It need not be about Google forms or what questions to ask in such forms. You can ask to be evaluated any time, any way.
👉Call your review meetings Idea Improvement Catch-ups. Consider the meeting successful if it helps improve the quality of the ideas or decisions that emerge from the conversation, instead of being wrapped up in the idea you came up with.
👉Send work-in-progress versions of your thinking to stakeholders and ask them what they see differently.
👉Give your colleagues incentive to invest in you by acting on their feedback you find constructive and sharing the results with them as a way of showing your gratitude. I got this idea from Marshall Goldsmith and though I don’t do it as often as I should, the few times I have I have earned myself a cheerleader for nothing.
💡Feedback has a useful byproduct. It reveals what matters to the feedback giver. When you’re asking for feedback with the intention of acting on it to become a better version of yourself, you’re asking those around you, ‘What can I do for you?’ That’s a specific and a powerful question that most aren’t used to being asked. It makes them feel like a millionaire.
I’ve a much better mental model of what matters to those I work closely with. I may not agree with them but I’m less likely to be surprised by what drives them.
What has been your experience with feedback? Has it surprised you? Has it guided you? I would love to know.