How to ask for professional feedback and what to do with the results
Once a year, I ask my work colleagues for feedback on how I’ve been doing in the past months. This is an opportunity for me to reflect upon how myself and my work are being perceived by those I collaborate with. My objective is to get an idea on how others see me, tempering my self-image with a reality check. I am especially interested in the strengths that others admire, as I want to focus on enhancing my superpowers while being aware of where I need to delegate or learn something new. I tend to overdeliver on at criticising myself, so that’s not part of the goal.
I choose open-ended questions to allow everyone to be as specific or as general as they choose to. Leaving the name/role was totally optional (since sometimes it helps to put the situation into context).
These were the questions included in this year’s request:
Where/how do I add value for you and/or for Klaus? Or, in other words - what practices, ideas, processes, attitudes, ways to communicate etc have made a positive impact on you and you would really want me to keep doing them.
What areas should I be vigilant about? Where do you see my weaknesses that I need to either work on, or get people on board that can offset these blind spots?
If this was my last week, what would you remember? / How would you remember me (if at all)? Just to be clear, this is a thought experiment. I promise to be back after my vacation.
Feedback is not advice. Recommendations are not mandatory.
I chose to ask for feedback and recommendations for a reason. I am using the original idea of feedback here, trying to figure out how my actions and words are received by those who work with me. It is my choice to then define whether and how I am going to act on this feedback. Feedback can be a great catalyst for change, under the right circumstances. It is also totally fine to decide not to act on feedback you received - as long as you are conscious about your position.
As I tend to be my own biggest critic, I have learned to pass any feedback received through these two following filters:
Does the feedback giver know what they are talking about? I’ll take my CTOs feedback on work-related situations very seriously, while they are probably not my go-to person to get feedback on my creative writing.
Is this a topic I want to do something about? For some, my communication seems to be a bit too direct, so I’ve been told to tone it down more than once. While I am indeed more direct than most, this is also feedback that’s mostly directed at women. So I have consciously chosen to stick to my German roots and keep working on clear and direct communication.
As a side note, if you are talking with your team about how to improve things, be clear whether you are giving feedback or directions. If you are offering an insight about how something came across, that’s great. If you expect someone to change on behalf of your request, it’s a different story.
So here’s what I learned from this year’s feedback round: yay for the structure, beware the structure
All answers were open questions, so I extracted the topics to then group similar answers togethers. At this points, several themes emerged - some spanning both the “value” and “vigilant” bucket. I’ve decided to comment on each of these topics, reflecting both on the positive feedback as well as on the things I can improve.
[Practical side note: If you conduct this type of feedback sessions yourself, keep in mind that the comments will reflect the part of your work that is visible to others. This means that sometimes the feedback isn’t about the work itself. Instead, it indicates how you’ve been communicating this work. So if something isn’t adequately recognized, don’t dismiss what you’ve done - see how you can be more visible both in what you do and the results you get.]
Structure, templates, processes
We’ve come a long way in the past year. When I started at Klaus, there was little structure in place, as you’d expect from a startup at that point. The organization was still small enough (and mostly sitting in the same room) that communication between individuals was enough to keep the ball rolling.
Coming from a much bigger organization, I was used to many more defined processes. So I set out to choose a Product Management tool, to improve how we use GitLab (and now GitHub), streamline the communication between CX and engineering, documenting procedures, creating an onboarding guide, working out a road map, and in general trying to amplify what works and improve upon what stopped working. The feedback shows that these changes were overall well received. Structure can generate security and open up creativity (and even time) to work on things that matter, knowing that those indeed are the things that matter.
On the flipside, I had to learn that a team of 20 people might not (yet) need detailed playbooks for every single situation. My enthusiasm for codifying knowledge can get a wee bit overboard. Being the forceful communicator I am, this can come across as intimidating. I appreciate the reminder that I still need to learn living with a little bit of unstructured chaos (and 2020 seems to have plenty of opportunities for that).
Remote expertise / productivity
Klaus has been hybrid (remote with an office in Tallinn) from day one. Being remote myself, I helped us to fully embrace the remote first philosophy. This included small changes (e.g. the people in the office also join zoom meetings from their desk), as well as ongoing training sessions for everyone! This is especially important for hybrid companies: for your remote employees to succeed, everybody needs to “think” remote. Their challenges should be treated as everybody’s challenge. And it looks like people love that we are rallying around this part of our identity, while also warning me to get help when it gets too much for me. At some point I will (probably grudgingly) hand over this responsibility to People Ops.
As a side effect, I am apparently also sharing lots of productivity tips (something I wasn’t really aware of). At the end of the day, productivity is a by-product of remote work-habits. Or maybe it’s a prerequisite to be successful within a remote team. Either way, I am happy that I am able to help people use their time productively, so they can escape the accidental 24/7 work mindset that so often seems to come with remote.
Communication, visibility and team building
Without any direct reports, I currently have relatively few real 1:1s. Hence, I’ve made a point of checking in with everyone in regular intervals (at least quarterly). I am aware this is not scalable, and that’s not even my goal. My goal is to help create a company culture based on trust and approachability. That means I want everyone to have the opportunity to see me outside of the all-hands, even if we don’t work together on a day-to-day basis. It helps me to assess how to communicate with them, and it hopefully lowers the bar to speak up in my presence.
Of course, I sometimes end up being a bit too direct, especially when I am stressed. Pandemics are not helpful in that regard, so it’s something I want to be more mindful about. On the flipside, sharing personal tidbits seem to have been very well received. Yes, I am a feminist (albeit not a perfect one), I date women, I wear a tiara at random moments, I have a complicated relationship with motherhood, I love playfights (a pre-pandemic thing, I guess). It turns out that these details have helped others feeling secure in their own life choices. Being a diverse company starts with recognizing and celebrating the diversity that’s already there.
Awareness, control, delegation
And then there’s my tendency to be a total control freak. The positive effect is that I am able to call out inefficiencies when I see them. And I am more than happy to help fix them. The team has the impression that I am aware/involved in close to about everything. This is mostly due to the fact that I am subscribed to EVERYTHING that happens in GitHub - and that’s also the problem.
It’s very difficult to continuously pivot between strategic thinking and hands-on issue facilitation. By being too hands-on I’ve inadvertently created a situation where everyone can relax because if something goes wrong, I will very likely catch it. This sounds good, but it also creates a situation where the system depends on me, and that’s never a good thing.
In this regard some of the recommendations from the team were very obvious: “Lead more, manage less.” - “You need to delegate more.” - “We need to either clone you or hire an Assistant PM so you won’t drown when we hire more developers/designers.” - “Be more directive when something needs to be done.” - “Focus on strategy, don’t sweat the small stuff.”
These comments are super interesting, because they highlight a mismatch between what I believe to be true, and how I act. Our team is made of some of the most skillful and brilliant people I know. They know their stuff! I was involved in the hiring process for half of them. And yet, I am reluctant to lean into that strength. So why the heck does it feel so hard to let go of control?
The answer, as usual, is easy: It’s fear of flying. Being on top of GitHub issues is an easy way to prove to myself that I am in control (kind of) and aware of the outcome. Delegation requires trust in your team, and it also means that you trust your own decisions. In an uncertain world, that’s a high expectation to have of yourself. So here are some things I like to remind myself of:
No one expects you to be perfect. Being human and well prepared is usually enough.
Most decisions can be rectified, improved upon, or even reversed. Making no decision is the real risk.
You will never know everything. But you need to make sure to know enough.
If you doubt yourself, write down the specifics. Then find examples to counter your own bullshit (only applies to those with imposter syndrome).
Long story short, my goal is to be more intentional about my modes of communication. If I am passionate about something, I aim to inspire, not enforce. On the flipside, if something needs to be done, inspiration doesn’t always cut it. In that case, I’ll have to own the task of assigning who’s in charge, and then step back.
Finally, and related, I am going to put aside specific times for higher level thinking, even if there won’t be a clear-cut number-based outcome for each minute invested. Until now, this has often happened after-hours, as an afterthought, or during unexpected free time on the schedule. As someone who lives by her calendar, I want to make this a documented habit - allowing serendipity to get me to move from “super pragmatic” to “still quite pragmatic but also visionary”.
Happy 2020/2021 ;)
PS: I did the same exercise for my personal life, gathering feedback from close friends and family. Maybe that post will come sometime in the future.